Perhaps the most subtle verbal sleights of hand are acts of equivocation. We commit equivocation when we use one word, but with two different meanings. We make the change so quickly we miss the palmed meaning, and are made fools. Consider this classic illustration— God is love. Love is blind. Ray Charles is blind. Therefore Ray Charles is God. Something isn’t right there, and what it is, is shifting meanings.
When dealing with pronouns we face the toughest temptation. Antecedents get lost in a sea of pronouns, and soon enough we not only don’t know what he said but don’t know who he is. And where confusion abounds, there you will find the devil. It is one of his favorite weapons.
Consider for a moment the wisdom in the Bible about loving one another. Love is indeed a dominant theme in the Bible. The Bible is so full of injunctions to love that we in turn have great difficulty reconciling that teaching with this: “Oh Lord, dash their heads against the rocks.” The Bible contains sundry summons to love. It includes also what we call imprecatory psalms, wherein the psalmist calls down God’s judgment on His enemies.
Read through Moses’ celebration of the deliverance of the people and the destruction of Pharaoh’s army, and you probably won’t feel the love. How do these things cohere? Lest you think the solution is a division between the old and new covenants, give a read to Paul in thundering against the Judaizers in Galatians.
God commands of us a love toward those outside the kingdom, (that is, we are called to love our enemy). That matches a kind of love God Himself has for His enemies (the love of benevolence). By the same token, we are called to love discriminatingly. We have different kinds of loves for different kinds of people. I love my wife one way, and I love my neighbor an entirely different way. We miss this, because our enemy has confused us on the pronouns. The Bible’s call that “we” love “one another” isn’t ultimately about man’s call to love man. The “we” isn’t human beings, but the redeemed.
Wolves in the church began this sleight of hand when they first spoke of the “universal fatherhood of God and the universal brotherhood of man.” The evangelical church, as with so many from this particular pit of hell, eventually accepted this “wisdom.”
It operates under the assumption that God has a duty to treat all people exactly the same way, an assumption that the Bible explicitly denies: “I will have mercy on whom I will have mercy” (Rom. 9:15). There is no getting around the fact that God did not treat Esau as He treated Jacob, and this before either had been born. And He does not treat the seed of the serpent the same way He treats us, the seed of the woman.
Why not? What accounts for the difference? The answer is simple enough — our union with Christ. Pardon the confusing pronouns, but while we love Him because He first loved us, He first loved us because He first loved Him. We are in ourselves, just like the seed of the serpent, merely dust and rebellion. But in Christ we are altogether lovely. It is not for mere pity that He loves us, but for His Son.
But what of His love for the lost? If they are not in union with Christ, why would they be loved at all? How do we account for what the theologians call this “love of benevolence”? Why He brings the rains upon the fields of the unjust isn’t union with Christ, but the image of God. There is, in short, something lovely about the lost, the very remnants of the image of pure loveliness. What God loves in the reprobate isn’t the reprobate, isn’t the Son, but is Himself, something indeed worthy of His love.
And we who are in union with Christ not only bear that same image, but are called to polish it, to improve upon it, to labor with the Holy Spirit that we might more and more reflect His glory. Which in turn means that we too ought to love the lost, for the very same reason.
We love one another with a holy love, because we are together in union with Christ. But we love outside the circle of the kingdom because they yet maintain the fragments of the image of God. In their depravity, they do everything they can to smash that mirror to ever tinier pieces. Their degeneration is nothing more than leaving that image behind. At their death, they reach the opposite of glorification, utter horror. They become nothing but dust and rebellion, enveloped in eternal flame.
But not here and not now. Ironically, He shows them kindness due to His love for us. If He released the restraints, we would find ourselves living in a living hell. But by His grace toward us, He restrains them, and He kindly showers them with His beneficent love. In His grace toward us, He teaches us our pronouns. Like Him we too must love His sheep as His sheep, and love the goats for the image of the Shepherd.
What a great word RC! I couldn’t agree with you more. I think if we’re really honest with ourselves, deep down we all know that God doesn’t treat everyone the same. There is no answer for the sin problem, and the sovereignty of God, if we truly believe that God has to be “fair” as we see it (humanly speaking). The problem for me is seeing sheep that really struggle loving other sheep. And at the same time, seeing some goats that seem to be more loving than the sheep. Who God shows saving grace to, and those that he chooses not to, is a mystery to me.