By Mark W. Christy, PhD
In the ever-growing theological vacuum that continues to engulf the present era, many herald God’s omnibenevolence in such a way that God is proclaimed to be unibenevolent. In other words, they perceive of God’s love as the overarching characteristic which subsumes any other aspects of His being. For them, the love of God is so completely indiscriminate that even hardened sinners have little need to fear. So common is their view of God’s love that many affirmatively repeat the following saying that adheres to the unibenevolent view of God: “God hates the sin but loves the sinner.” In this article, God’s omnibenevolence will be considered in light of Scripture that discusses His wrath to determine whether or not this saying and its underlying theology are correct.
The Apostle John emphatically asserts God’s omnibenevolence by simply saying, “God is love” (1 John 4:8).[i] In his gospel account, he even affirms that “God so loved the world, that He gave His only begotten Son, that whoever believes in Him shall not perish, but have eternal life” (John 3:16). God’s love for the world is certainly not of the self-centered and self-serving kind that is forbidden by John (cf. 1 John 2:15-17); rather, it is a love that is self-less to the extreme, so much so that God sent His Only Son as a substitutionary sacrifice. Without such love, the church, and for that matter Israel itself, would have never been born.
Given God’s amazing love for the world, one wonders how He could command Joshua to utterly destroy all who breathed in his conquest of the Promised Land (Josh 10:40). Added to this, other passages openly speak of God performing seemingly loveless vengeance upon the world. Speaking through Moses, the Lord says, “If I sharpen My flashing sword, And My hand takes hold on justice, I will render vengeance on My adversaries, And I will repay those who hate Me” (Deut 32:41). God’s vengeance, Moses adds, will most certainly be rendered “on His adversaries” apparently irrespective of His being a loving God, for in God’s view, vengeance is His sole possession (32:35, 43; Rom 12:19; cf. Is 13:4, 6, 9; Ezek 5:11-17).
While Scripture acknowledges God’s sole right to execute judgement, it never teaches that ‘God is wrath.’ Wrath, therefore and unlike love, “is not one of the intrinsic perfections of God. Rather, it is a function of God’s holiness against sin.”[ii] In His eternal state of holy perfection, no sin exists, and so no wrath exists either. As a non-eternal response to sinful activity that is wholly disconnected from His perfect eternal holiness, the wrath of God is a temporal aspect that expresses itself only when sin is present.
With the abiding disconnect between God’s wrath and sin due to the constraints of God’s Holy Person, it is impossible to speak of God’s omnibenevolent love in relation to sinners apart from a proper satisfaction of His holiness, i.e., Christ’s substitutionary atonement. As one returns to John 3:16, one will note that the Apostle shows the necessary connection between any affirmation of God’s love for the world and the redemptive work of His Son. Based upon this verse, many have taken John to mean that God’s love was somehow redemptively poured out upon all humanity thanks to Christ’s work. In this way, they feel themselves on solid biblical ground when they employ the common evangelical cliché: ‘God hates the sin but loves the sinner.’
Despite its pithiness, this saying falls on deaf ears among those who are more deeply aware of God’s revelation of Himself. As the Psalmist certifies, God “hate[s] all who do iniquity” (Ps 5:5; cf. 11:5; Jer 12:8; Hos 9:15). God, in His righteous holiness, so hates the sinner and their sin that He “can not look on wickedness with favor” (Hab 1:13). Instead of favor, God, according to Paul as he begins His theology of the gospel, has wrath “against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men who suppress the truth in unrighteousness” (Rom 1:18ff.). In Ephesians, Paul even refers to all people in their uncoverted state as “children of wrath” (2:3).
After this brief look at passages heralding God’s wrath against sin and sinners, one must nevertheless continue to affirm that God’s omnibenevolence must somehow still be associated even with those he hates, for none of His divine characteristics can be divorced from His Person. While it is true that God brings condemnation and judgment against sinners to satisfy the constraints of His holiness; nevertheless, He takes no “pleasure in the death of the wicked” (Ezek 18:23). In His dealings with Moab, God announces through the Prophet Jeremiah their impending doom which will come upon them due to His divine judgement (48:35). Despite the horror that God has spoken over them, He declares, “My heart wails for Moab like flutes; My heart also wails like flutes for the men of Kir-heres” (48:31).
Unlike the Moabites, those who escape God’s wrath against them are separated from the children of the devil to become children of God when God, at His behest, bestows His love upon them (1 John 3:1, 10). This separation, according to Paul, occurred by the will of God when He made His sovereign choice in eternity past to redeem a people for Himself by personally choosing them in Christ: “He chose us in Him before the foundation of the world” (Eph 1:3).
God’s people, though born in the flesh and under God’s wrath as sinners, were not only loving redeemed in eternity past when God made His sovereign choice, they were also loving redeemed in the eternal present when God poured out His redemptive love upon them even while they had been under His wrath: “But God, being rich in mercy, because of His great love with which He loved us, even when we were dead in our transgressions, made us alive together with Christ (by grace you have been saved), and raised us up with Him, and seated us with Him in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus” (Eph 2:4-6; cf. Rom 8:29; 9:11; 1 thess 1:3-4; 1 Pet 1:2). In John’s Gospel, Jesus communicates Paul’s point this way, “All that the Father gives Me will come to Me, and the one who comes to Me I will certainly not cast out” (6:37). Similarly, He also says, “No one can come to Me unless the Father who sent Me draws him; and I will raise him up on the last day” (John 6:44).
To explain the tension between God’s love for the Elect and His love that abides eternally in His Person, James White explains that one should not equate God’s love with His choice in regard to an “extension of grace.”[iii] God’s love, he explains, is discriminatory just like that of those created in His image. As Samuel states, “the Lord has been pleased to make you a people for Himself” (1 Sam 12:22). In a similar vein, Luke writes, “God first concerned Himself about taking from among the Gentiles a people for His name” (Acts 15:14).
This revelation of God’s discriminatory love is all but obliterated by the saying, ‘God hates the sin but loves the sinner.’ By holding to this, God ends up being a failure because He would have poured out His redemptive love upon all people, and yet not all would have received His love. Should one spurn the idea of God’s being a failure even while continuing to uphold the saying’s validity, then one would be affirming universalism because only in this could God’s love being redemptively poured out upon all humanity end in success by all going to heaven and none going to hell.
In conclusion, God is not unibenevolent but rather omnibenevolent. In His love, God sent Christ as the substitutionary sacrifice. The death of His Son was meant to be a means by which the people He had chosen before the creation of the world could be saved from their bondage in sin as children born under wrath. While all people bear witness to this display of God’s love because all receive His temporal, common grace as they partake of His, His love should never be understood to be redemptive apart from His exercise of His divine will.
[i]All Scripture references are taken from NASB1995.
[ii]D. A. Carson, The Difficult Doctrine of the Love of God (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2000), 67.
[iii]James White, “Does Omnibenevolence Mean Unibenevolence?” (May 1, 2006), available at: https://www.aomin.org/aoblog/mail-bag/does-omnibenevolence-mean-unibenevolence.