God Does Not Become What God Hates

Last updated on: April 2, 2015 at 4:01 pm by Kenneth Tanner

God Does Not Become What God Hates 2015-04-02T16:01:38-04:00 Kenneth Tanner

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What is man that God is mindful of him? It’s a good question. Watch televised newscasts and you will find yourself asking it often.

No one is more inhumane to man than man. Yet God seems almost preoccupied with man. When we have all but given up on humanity, God becomes human.

Nowhere is God’s surprising disposition toward humanity made clearer than in his becoming one of us. The incarnation binds man to God and God to man, forever. Now wherever God is man will also always be.

He did this for our sake; to take death out of the equation, for what is bound to God cannot die. He did this in order to stand among us as one of us; one of us who heals, delivers, restores, forgives, exhorts; as one who raises from the dead.

He also shows us that far from a disposition of anger, God loves humanity. For God does not become what God hates when he dwells among us.

God made us good and knows how to make us good again. God does not unite himself to what he despises when he becomes flesh. God became what we are so that we might become what he is, and he did so because he so loved the world.

At the end of our long journey home to him from a far country he becomes man in order to stand at the end of that desert road with open arms—divine and human arms—ready to embrace us; to give us a bath and a meal that grant us life eternal.

This is of course grace. It is the activity of God. He who made all things and to whom all created things belong, makes himself of no account, humbles himself, divests himself of all things, becomes poor, to show us that all things are created and sustained not by might as man supposes but by all the energies that flow from the triune God’s heart of willing ministry towards all that exists, visible and invisible.

This Humility that holds all things together finds its highest expression on the cross, where God and man together in the person of Jesus Christ, seal forever God’s identity with humanity and humanity’s identity with God.

He who became poor makes many rich and nothing can any longer separate us from the love of God. This is the gospel. The fields of the world are white to hear it.

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March 25, 2015

Incarnate Love and the Wrath of God