~ Foolish Thinking ~
Can We Measure God’s Hatred?
The
following is an excerpt from a book.
God’s hatred for sin is measured by His punishment of His
Son. The Scripture says He made Him, that is He made Christ, to be sin for us.
He made Him to become sin for us. God treated Christ as though He were sin. As
God treats sin, as God acts toward sin, He acted toward Christ at Calvary. That’s what God did, He put Christ away from
Him. He forsook Him.
Christ Himself also told us that God hates sin, so much
that if it so much as comes near to Him—even though it be in the person of His
Son—He takes and puts it away from Him. He’ll have nothing to do with it. God
detests sin. He’s all pure in His being, and that’s the reason that the people
in Isaiah’s day couldn’t get next to God, because they had sin in their lives.
As a result, sin did something to them. Now, their sin was not necessarily
open, immoral sin that could be judged in a law court. More evidently, it was
those things that are subtle and underhanded.
You know, Solomon says that the very thought of
foolishness is sin. Just the thought of
foolishness. Proverbs twenty-four comes right out flat and says that the
thought of foolishness is sin. Did you ever have a foolish thought? Well, my
days are full of them. Foolish thoughts. My heart is continually meditating
foolishness. The Scripture says that foolishness is bound in the heart of a
child, but the rod of correction will drive it far from him. Well, the rod of correction hasn’t been laid
on me enough so that all foolishness is gone from my heart. Even the thought of
foolishness in God’s eyes is sin.
We don’t usually consider foolishness as sin. We rather
enjoy foolishness, don’t we? God says it is sin, and remember this: God is of
holier eyes than to behold evil, and God cannot look upon iniquity. It’s
humiliating for God to have to look down upon the stars. Scripture says of God
that He “humbleth Himself to behold the things that are in heaven, and the
things in earth!” That’s how high and holy God’s thoughts are. He humbled
Himself. He humiliated Himself, as it were, to look down. That’s how great God
is!
Now we don’t consider sin to be a terrible thing today
because we don’t consider God as a very holy God. We aren’t concerned with the
awfulness of sin because we are not concerned with the awfulness of God’s
holiness. God is a holy God, and He cannot for one minute put up with sin. He will
punish sin wherever it rears its head, anywhere. God has decreed that He will
punish sin. It’s as much in His nature to punish sin as it is to love the
sinner. God will punish sin, and He will punish it in you.
Now, God has some very high standards as to what sin is.
James says this: “To him that knoweth to do good, and doeth it not, to him it
is sin.” Get that. What James is saying is this: If you know that there is some
good to do and you don’t do it, you’re sinning in God’s sight. Has there been
anything to do in your life that you didn’t do? You say, well, there’s a chance
to do good, and you don’t do it? Well, we commonly call these the sins of
omission, things we ought to do and don’t do. God reckons them just as much sin
as those things that we oughtn’t to do and yet we do. “To him that knows to do
good and doeth it not, to him it is sin.”
~
from “JIM ELLIOT: A Christian Martyr
Speaks to You, pgs 40-42 (ISBN: 9781615797646)
Learn more about this important book at Amazon, the
Publisher,
or the Author’s
website.
~ Robert Lloyd Russell, ABUNDANT LIFE NOW
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