The Divine Surgeon
God can't love sin but he can't
cease loving sinners, they're his children, wayward and sinful though
they are. See the Prodigal Son story in Luke 15 and compare Acts
17:28-29.
Fullness of life with God isn't possible if we are estranged from him
by our sin. Life is a two-way experience so it isn't enough that God
ceaselessly wants us to have life we must want it also. You can't have
“friendship” when one of the two wants and enjoys wanting to be the
other one's enemy. In loving our sin we don't want life with God so he
moves in Christ to deal with what stands between him and us.
The sin that keeps us apart from him is not an abstraction; it is sin
that is an actual part of the sinners and their history with God, so
that when God moves against that sin it involves moving against sinners.
Sort of, like a surgeon who moves against a tumor or infection. It
isn't the patient he's mad at; it's the cancer or infection. But the
infection doesn't exist outside the body of the patient so instead of
doing surgery on the operating table on which the patient is lying the
surgeon puts the knife to the sick patient. While the surgeon would be
against “disease” in principle there's more to him and his work than
that.
God's "invasive surgery" is no act of spite or foaming rage against
sinners, on the contrary, he is ruthlessly dealing with the sin that
keeps sinners from him. The Holy Father must do that or there is no life
for us. He isn't afraid of sin any more than the surgeon is afraid of
the cancer. It isn't that God can't look at sin (we sometimes say silly
things like, God can't even look on sin, as if that's what Habakkuk 1:13
meant). It's precisely because he and he alone does look at it and see
it for what it is that he is unchangeably opposed to it and works to
destroy it.
Only when we're one with God in holy love can we enjoy life to the
full (John 10:10) and experience the health that “sound” (health-full)
teaching brings. He gives us food, gladness, life and “everything else”
(Acts 14:17 and 17:25) but fullness of life is much more than that. Life
with God means more than being on the receiving end of his gifts--it
means being related to him in oneness of heart. A relationship like that
results in blessings beyond imagination but the relationship is not to
be reduced to the blessings that flow from it. To reject the Christ is
to live before God as a recipient of blessings until we meet him, having
said our final no to him. To receive God in Jesus Christ is to
experience eternal life, life that will never end and life that is of
such a quality that it cannot end. Life like that is found only in a
dynamic and ongoing relationship with God in Jesus Christ by the Spirit.