“Herein is love, not that we loved God, but that He loved us, and sent His Son to be the propitiation for our sins.”  I John 4:10

People aren’t born loving God.  People are born as sinful, selfish creatures whose main object of life is satisfying the ego, desires, and living in pride.  God didn’t make man that way and didn’t desire for him to be that way, but God gave man free will, enabling him to make choices.  God could have made man without free will, programmed to worship and serve Him, but then man would be nothing more than a robot or puppet.  God desired that His creation love Him for who He is, thus He loved us first (4:19), even though we can be very unlovable.  He also made the way back to Him because our sin had separated all people from God.  He desires a relationship with His creation, and since man’s sin keeps that relationship from manifesting with Him, God took the initiative to make the way that our sin could be covered over and no longer an impenetrable barrier to our Creator God.  Who else would do that?  If someone you knew did something horrible to you or one of your family members, would you go out of your way to shower that person with blessings?  I doubt it.

Jesus, God’s Son, was the One who destroyed this sin barrier, sent by God, to be the propitiation for our sins.  Many folks substitute the word “sacrifice” for propitiation, and Christ was the sacrifice which “propitiated”, that is, caused His Father to “become favorably inclined” (Webster’s Dictionary) to accept Christ’s sacrifice as full payment for man’s sins.  This propitiation regained the goodwill of God toward His creation.  Therefore, all who repent of sin and place their faith in Christ and His sacrifice on the cross, gain acceptance with God, the Father, becoming His children, forgiven and cleansed from the sin which had separated them from God. Who else would suffer and sacrifice His life for sinners like us?

Considering the extreme generosity of how much God loves us by sending His Son to redeem us, we should love one another with fervor as believers who are eternally grateful for God’s love and sacrifice.  None of us have ever physically seen God.  The people who lived from the time of Jesus’ birth until His death and 40 days after His resurrection have seen God in human form, but no one other than Christ and the angels of heaven have seen God for He is a Spirit.  John saw the Spirit of God in a vision and described Him like precious jewels of jasper and a sardine stone, a deep, orange-red stone, and a rainbow encircled God’s throne, the color of an emerald (Revelation 4:3).  However, we don’t have to physically see God to know what He is like because He reveals Himself to us in our hearts.  He dwells in us through His Holy Spirit, giving us the capacity to love Him and one another.  When we love others the way that God loves, then His love is perfected, or made complete, in us.  In other words, our unconditional love for others meets the goal which God sets for His children.

This genuine, unselfish love can only be had by the power of the Holy Spirit which God gives to everyone who is born again by grace through saving faith.  We know that we dwell in the Lord, and He in us when we have and demonstrate godly love for every soul, for every soul was created by God.  I will admit that some folks are not very easy to love.  Perhaps they have very different ideas about things than us, they may have completely different personalities with which our personalities clash, or they may be what we call toxic, that is, their actions give us a bad taste in our mouths.  I get upset at some of our leaders because they promote some of the most ungodly policies that most of us have never even thought of.  But here’s the thing–God tells us to love them.  When I see folks like that, my first thought is that they do not know the Lord, and unless they repent and trust Christ, they will spend eternity in hell.  While there is life, there is hope, but the chances that some of them will repent is likely very small.  So, while they irritate us with such vile ideas and policies, our obligation is to pray that conviction will come upon them, and they will repent and become a believer.  If they truly become born again, they will abandon those ungodly ways.  That is their only hope.

I have often wondered why God allows folks who do evil to keep on doing evil.  He does put a halt to some, but it seems that most ungodly folks get away with their wicked works at least in this lifetime.  One day, when I was studying the book of Job, he wondered the same thing.  He asked, “Wherefore do the wicked live, become old, yea, are mighty in power?” (Job 21:7).  As I consulted the Matthew Henry Commentary, Mr. Henry gave the answer to that question.  His answer wasn’t exactly what I thought that it would be, but it made sense.  He wrote that it was not because God did not see their sin, but “because the measure of their iniquities is not full”.  By this he means that God is patient and is using them to serve His own purposes, “while it ripens them for ruin”.  In other words, God is allowing their sins to expand against them, that is, to pile up against them, because there is another “world of retribution” which awaits them.

Could it be that the sins of the wicked are so great that there is no punishment on earth that would satisfy God’s justice other than the death of the wicked, and that would mean eternal damnation in hell?  That certainly sheds a whole new light on the future of those who continually commit sin without any remorse.  What a dangerous path they walk.  Perhaps that’s why God tells us to love them, because our prayers for them just might be the only thing that could bring them to see the light.