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Pastor Jay's Blog

An Orlando Shooting Surprise: When Your Love Is Called Hate

 

Sometimes I think redefining words is the Devil’s favorite pastime. It is like rolling a snowball and seeing how big it gets. Since words and truth go hand in hand, if you can mess with words you can create time bombs out of vocabulary. Faith, love, grace, gospel all sound like good biblical words, and they are. But when they are covertly redefined, as done by the Jehovah Witnesses and the Mormons, these time bombs go off only after you have relationships that hold you in place.

We have recently seen another startling outcome of redefined words; those words being “tolerance” and “love.” After the Orlando shooting that killed 49 LGBT patrons at a gay club, much public anger was directed towards Christians holding traditional values. Specifically, it was directed at those who expressed sorrow and outrage at such a tragic event. This is like emotional whiplash. Why are Christians and politicians spurned and accosted for expressing their horror at what happened?

It turns out love isn’t what we thought it was. At least that is what we are being told. Article after article soon came out reprimanding Christians for so-called hateful stances that made their messages of sorrow empty and false. In fact, we were told that Christians and other conservatives were actually the cause of such events. In a Huffington Post article, C.J. Prince writes,

“By failing to speak up against discrimination and hate, you have made the world unsafe for LGBTQ people, fueling their own self-loathing and inciting homophobic rage in others.”

In fact, in bold type she says, “If you do not advocate for full equality for LGBTQ people, you are the problem.”

Additionally, Mark Baer wrote here that

“disapproving of a person or an entire group of people for something that is a part of their self is hateful, judgmental, disrespectful, insulting, offensive and sometimes illegal, among other things.”

So can you see it? Hate is made equivalent to “disapproving” a part of a person’s self, and not being an “advocate” of full equality. Hence, love is turning these around and now approving and advocating for these things.

A lot of this got its traction years ago when tolerance was utterly redefined into the exact opposite of what it meant. Tolerance used to be the enduring of differing ideas, but it was turned on its head to now mean the acceptance and approval of differing ideas.

So that is our new cultural situation. Love is advocating, tolerance is accepting, and hate is anything short of advocating and accepting.

So how do we answer this? I think one approach is to speak to the utter impossibility of consistent application of such reasoning. For example, there are a thousand different ways that love means not being an advocate and not accepting. Take a normal person with normal, self-preserving love. The very work of that person’s own conscience is to not advocate when something is wrong. Additionally, if you love your children, you do not advocate for their propensity for laziness. If you love your friend, you do not advocate for his propensity to do drugs. If you love your parents, you do not advocate for their gambling addiction. If you love your spouse, you do not advocate for his adultery. Every one of those actions arises out of something that could be considered an identity. Laziness, addictions, and sexual pursuits are things that spring from who they are as an individual. Yet we know that all of them are deadly and we know that from the Word of God. And dealing with those cannot just be at a behavioral level. It has to be a fundamental change at the heart level. There is only one thing that goes that deep; the new birth wrought by the Holy Spirit when He creates faith in the gospel of Jesus Christ.

Notice above that I said we know from the Word of God certain things are harmful. That exposes our presupposition. We all operate by our presuppositions. The secular world is also operating by their own presuppositions, fundamentally being human autonomy. From those presuppositions they have concluded that when certain identities are suppressed, harm will come. Christians disagree with them at the level of presuppositions. That is where conversation has to be conducted. But if you have no tolerance, no endurance for the other person, you can’t have the discussion. That is what is now happening. When tolerance was redefined into acceptance, it creates a place for unlimited intolerance. Unless we accept their presuppositions and their conclusions about human sexuality, then we are not even given a place at the table. If you don’t think our situation is ripe for persecution I don’t know what other reasoning will convince you. Our message and outstretched arms are being demonized at a societal level.

Regardless of this, true love as God defines it remains the same. Love is doing what is best for people. We are grieved that people were murdered, and we grieve that marriage is undermined by faulty visions of what marriage is to be and what sexuality is to be. These things are not incompatible from a Christian worldview. Even though our grieving and loving pleas are spurned and rejected by the world, we cannot forsake pursuing them in love and calling them to repentance and to a new identity found in Christ. The time bombs of these redefined words, love and tolerance, are going off all around us. Jesus told us that they would “falsely say all kinds of evil against you because of Me.” (Matt 5:11) Let us brace for impact and remain steadfast in the biblical call of love; “By this we know that we love the children of God, when we love God and observe His commandments.” (1 John 5:2)