Does God "hate the sin, love the sinner?"

One of the most classic summaries of the Christian belief and ethos is to "hate the sin, (but) love the sinner." It is this belief that most expresses that it is the sin itself that is hateful, not the individual human being, and that therefore all have a chance to repent and experience conversion.

Now, this is true and it is a good belief. However, I need to caution people about a common error that I detect. You need to ask yourself, "While good Christians hate the sin, but love the sinner, does God hate the sin but love the sinner?" The answer is "Yes, until it becomes no."

God's persistent stance is to love every human being as his own child, through good times and bad times, when they are noble and when they are not so admirable. God also continues to love people and offer them chances even when they are sinning. God knows the human condition more than humans understand themselves. And so God continues to love even when people sin, and so God "hates the sin, but loves the sinner."

The Bible teaches very clearly, however, that there are limits to God's patience. This is what the Bible calls "the hardening of heart." What you need to understand is that it's not when the sins become "really bad" or "very frequent" that the human is in the most danger of losing God's love completely. It is when the sinner starts to identify with his sin.

This society today is in deep crisis; I have pointed this out repeatedly and urgently to anyone who will read or listen. One crisis that you must become aware of is that humans, like no time ever in their past, in growing numbers lose their personalities into their sins, actually merging them. Sinners have started to identify with their sins.

This is not a backhanded poke at being gay, by the way. Not at all.

What I mean is that people increasingly make up their own God replacing reality and identify with it. It's not a matter of "freedom of religion." It's a matter of sinning (lying to people, taking their money, being cruel to them, sexually harming them) in the name of bizarre beliefs. Increasingly people match their "belief system" to the type of sinning that they desire to do. They sin, whether it be in a moral or a financial area, and then modify their "belief system" in order to accommodate the sin as being "necessary" or even "noble" and "humanity saving." That is when people start to identify with the sin and God, who hates sin, must now also hate the person. I know many people in the most dire danger of doing this exact thing. Of their own choices they ignore the Christian demarcation between human and his or her deed (the sin), and deliberately identify with the sin, making the sin part of their self-perceived human condition and even self justification.

So yes, God "hates the sin but loves the sinner" until the point when the person starts to identify with their condition of sinning. It's not the degree of sinning, but the identification with the sinning. Suppose a person steals only $10 a month from someone, but they do the stealing because they believe that they are "fighting aliens" by doing that stealing and that they therefore "have to do this stealing." Worse, they infect others by teaching them that intelligent life forms from an asteroid demand that $10 be stolen every month from a little old lady or they will death ray the earth. Let's assume this person is not actually mentally disordered and hallucinating, which is obviously a whole other matter. But the person wants the money, but more importantly, the power to take something from someone else because of his or her "calling." This is an example of a person who risks being hated by God.

A God fearing and believing person who gives into temptation and steals say a million dollars from his or her workplace actually would still be "eligible" for "hating the sin, loving the sinner," even though the financial damage is greater in dollar numbers than the stealer from the little old lady. This is because the million dollar person still understands the difference between his being a human, with flaws, and his actions, a sin. The stealer from the little old lady "becomes" his or her sin deliberately, choosing that identity rather than the identity of a human who might or might not sin.

This is not far fetched. I am in the most dire worry and anger over the many people I know of over the past several decades who willfully identify with their sin life.