Month: May 2025

Hate Evil

Scripture defines fearing God as hating evil (Pr 8:13), and exhorts all who love God to hate evil. (Ps 97:10) What is evil, and what does hating it feel like? How can we know if we hate evil, or measure how much we hate it? How can we grow in hating evil, and in loving and fearing God?

We should define evil (the way God does) as any tendency to want to sin, or to violate God’s law. (1Jn 3:4) Hating evil is detesting our tendency to want to break God’s law (Ro 7:24), any reluctance or hesitancy to obey God’s law with delight and joy, or any tendency to excuse or make light of any motive or attitude which deviates from perfect holiness. This is the way of the wicked, an abomination to Jehovah. (Pr 15:9)

We should be asking God to search our hearts, to try us and expose our thoughts to uncover our wicked ways (Ps 139:23-24a), any place where we’re not hating evil, where darkness still has a foothold (Pr 4:19), where the enemy can take us captive whenever he likes. (2Ti 2:26)

Our goal is to cooperate with God as He leads us in the everlasting way (Ps 139:24b), as He gives us repentance to acknowledge the truth (2Ti 2:25), the truth that sets us free. (Jn 8:32)

It is insufficient to merely stop desiring sin, to stop being tempted and drawn away by our lust (Ja 1:14), to be neutral or complacent about sin; sin must become utterly disgusting, repulsive, grotesque, abominable, dreadful.

We must begin to recognize what sin does to us and to God, what it costs God and us, and to identify it in all of its ugliness and horror. We cannot toy with sin safely. If we don’t hate sin, we don’t yet see it clearly: we need God to open our eyes and help our hearts understand. (Jn 12:40)

In hungering and thirsting after righteousness, God will fill us (Mt 5:6); in perfecting holiness (He 12:14) in the fear of God we will find it (Mt 7:7-8); in adding to our faith virtue, moral excellence, we build on the rock and find true freedom.

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With One Accord

In the Sola Scriptura debate, since the Bible is interpreted so many different ways, we might reason that leaving everyone to themselves inevitably leads to chaos — a thousand different denominations and sects spring up, all claiming to have the truth. (1Pe 2:1-2) Is this a good thing? One might argue a final authority is needful to settle doctrinal concerns and provide a common standard.

God provides teachers to try and help us understand Scripture (Ep 4:11) but He never indicates anyone has the right to claim divine authority in a theological dispute.

The church, the local, spiritual brotherhood, is the pillar and ground of the truth. (1Ti 3:15) In other words, a single person, or even a small group, is not what God has ordained to uphold the truth: it is the brothers, working together in community, who are to pursue a common understanding of Scripture together through prayer, study and challenging one another. (1Co 1:11) When we do this in humility, seeking truth together, God will admonish, teach, lead and guide us into all truth. (Jn 16:13)

When there are disagreements, as there should be in most any complex context, it’s tempting to wish for immediate closure to set everyone straight. Instead, the protocol is to take the time to pursue unity through humble consensus. (Ac 15:25) God is evidently pleased to sanctify believers through this collaborative process; imposing authority in the absence of consensus circumvents this healthy dynamic and cuts it short.

If it turns out that a body of believers must make a time-sensitive decision (i.e. a temporal one) and can’t come to consensus, such that they need to appoint someone to resolve the issue, the biblical protocol is that they identify the least esteemed (least qualified / respected, i.e. the most despised) men in the brotherhood and let them make the call. (1Co 6:4) If this is counter-intuitive it’s because we don’t see what God does: God doesn’t want anyone dominating the brotherhood; consensus is His ideal.

God designed His Word the way He did for a reason; He could have written it much more clearly and concisely so things wouldn’t be so messy, but He didn’t. God is evidently more interested in maturing and edifying believers through this difficult, time-intensive, humbling process than having us all blindly subscribe to a common theological statement. Engaging in such discussions to learn and grow helps us understand each other, and ourselves, much more clearly. This reveals what we value and how we think and reason so we can more easily identify those among us who are approved of God, and those who need more time to grow. (1Co 11:19) Bypassing this for a superficial unity is unwise at best.

Divine authority in the church lies inconspicuously within the spiritual, organic consensus of the brotherhood, and nowhere else. This keeps us humble and interdependent on Christ in each other, so that no flesh glories in His presence. (1Co 1:29)
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