The Love God Hates B

Down in the depths of my being, the truest and purest expression of my redeemed soul, is that I hate what opposes my Lord.

Is that not true? I hate it. Thanks for tuning in to Grace To You with John MacArthur, Chancellor of the Masters University and Seminary, and on today's broadcast, John will continue his study titled, The Love God Hates.

Maybe you find that title shocking. Perhaps you're wondering how God, who is love, could possibly hate. What provokes a gracious, merciful God to hatred, and how can you be sure that you're loving the things God loves and hating the things he hates?

Those are crucial questions, and the answers have major implications for your life right now and through eternity. To find out what Scripture teaches about God's hate and how you should respond, stay tuned as John begins today's lesson. First John chapter 2, verses 15 through 17, and we've titled this particular study, The Love God Hates...The Love God Hates. Here is the love God hates, the love of the world. If you love something, you hate whatever threatens that something. If you love someone, you hate whoever threatens that someone. And the greater your love, the greater your hatred, the more your affection for what is right, the more your disaffection for what is wrong. God is a God of perfect love. But because God loves perfectly, He also hates perfectly. The two are actually inseparable.

To love perfectly is to hate perfectly. Now when we talk about the world, what are we talking about? This is the compelling question here. If you say we don't love the world, what are you saying? How are we to understand that?

Well we're going to find that out before we get too far into this. But there's a very clear indication in the Bible of what Scripture means when it talks about the world. First of all, we could be talking about the created order. We could be looking around and saying, well there is the physical world. Is that what this is talking about? Or what about the human world?

Is that what we're talking about? No, neither of those are in view here. There's something much more invisible in one sense than that.

But let me give you a little outline and we'll work our way into this. As true Christians, we cannot, we do not, we will not love the world, first of all, because of what it is...because of what it is. We're not talking about the physical world. We're not talking about nature. We're not talking about the wonder of a sunset or flowers or mountains or streams and seas and the beauty of God's creation.

And secondly, we're not talking about people. God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son. What is that world that God so loved? It is not the inanimate world, it is the human world.

God loved people. Well then, if it's not the created world and it's not the human world, what is it? It's the invisible spiritual system of evil. We use the word world in that way. We talk about the world of sports, wide world of sports. We talk about the world of politics. We talk about the world of science.

What do we mean by that? The order, the system, the structure. They're not separate planets, they're not separate people.

They're systems made up of ideas and made up of activities and made up of purposes. And the world in the language of Scripture, this definition of the world, is Satan's system that opposes Christ, Satan's system that opposes God. It's the very opposite of everything that comes from God. That's why verse 16 says, it is not from the Father, it is from the world. And it is a part of a system that is passing away, verse 17 says. It's that evil system that is anti-God. Go over to chapter 5 verse 19, John gives us a further definition of it when he says, we know that we are of God.

Again, this is the confidence because we've passed the test. We know that we are of God and the whole world, the whole evil order lies in the evil one. The Greek literally says, lies in the evil one. It belongs to Him. He holds it.

He controls it. Go back to chapter 4 and there's even further instruction about this. Beloved, do not believe every spirit. Test the spirits to see whether they're from God. For many false prophets have gone out into the world, the system of evil is just loaded with false prophets, the purveyors of anti-God teaching. By this you know the Spirit of God.

You can tell who the true teachers are and the false teachers. Every spirit that confesses that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is from God. When they get their Christology right, they're from God. And every spirit that doesn't confess Jesus is not from God, this is the Spirit of the Antichrist of which you have heard that it is coming and now it is already in the world. There is in the world a pervasive spirit that we can call Antichrist. So when you define the world, what you're saying is a system that is against Christ, anti, against. Jesus then calls Satan the prince of the power of the air.

He also calls him, John 12, 31, the prince of this world. Ephesians 6, 11 and 12 says that Satan has his demons, his evil spirits, principalities and powers working in this evil system. And Satan involves all the unregenerate as children of disobedience in the system. We could say this, we're talking about all of the thinking processes of the unconverted.

Jesus calls the unconverted, Luke 16, 8, children of the world, offspring of the world. But that's not us. That is not us.

Our citizenship, Philippians 3, 20, is in heaven, is in heaven. We're not of this world. Let me tell you what this means. This does not mean that you don't get tempted sometimes by things in the world, material things, lustful things. It doesn't mean that you're not allured by your own pride and self-interest. That's why the command is here, do not love the world.

While it is true that we have literally died to the world, it is also true that we can find it still alluring and find ourselves being tempted to draw back into it. Now to further understand this, you became a Christian, this is what you affirmed. You affirmed that the gospel of Jesus Christ was true.

Is that not right? You couldn't become a Christian if you didn't affirm that. The only way you can be saved is to affirm the gospel of Christ. And when you affirmed that the gospel of Christ in its fullness was true and you believed it and you embraced it and you confessed Jesus as Lord, at that moment you were dead to the world because the world is a system that opposes that reality. That's why we can say as Christians that we do not love that system.

We hate that system. It doesn't mean I hate the creation. It doesn't mean I hate people. It doesn't mean that my fallenness is not sometimes allured toward the things that make up the world. But down in the depths of my being, the truest and purest expression of my redeemed soul is that I hate what opposes my Lord.

Is that not true? I hate it. And sometimes I want to make a whip and clean out the places, and so do you. And sometimes you want to take the books that deny the deity of Christ and throw them against the wall because they anger your soul, because you hate that it misrepresents God and misrepresents the Lord Jesus Christ. If you're a true Christian, that's how you feel. And if you don't feel that way, then you love the world and the love of the Father is not in you. What is the dominant spirit of the world? I don't care what religious form it comes in, or what irreligious form it comes in.

I don't care whether it's agnosticism, atheism, or whether it's the most sophisticated kind of religion. The common denominator in the entire system is Antichrist. That's why in chapter 4 verse 3, the spirit of Antichrist is already operative in the system. This prevailing Antichrist mentality, whether it's Islam or Buddhism or atheism or whatever it is, cults, isms, schisms, whatever, Eastern religions, any other kind of religion, aberrant forms of Christianity, you name it, whatever it is, the common denominator is that it contains a misrepresentation of Jesus Christ and the glories of salvation and it is purveyed by an endless line of false prophets.

And it hates us. The line was drawn when you became a believer. The world and the family of God are opposites. I'm not saying that you shouldn't enjoy everything that God has provided for you in the wonders of the world.

You should. We're not talking about that. I'm not saying that you should disdain the people of the world. You should love them the way God loves them. In fact, in Matthew, the Lord Himself said, you are to love your enemies, you are to do good to those that hate you and persecute you and thereby demonstrate that you are the children of your Father, for even God loves the world of people, but you don't love the system of Antichrist, anti-God evil.

People say to me, well, can you be a Christian and stay in a false religious system? Not very long. Why? Because you're going to hate everything about it. I mean, how much can you endure? How much of the reproach that falls on Christ can you endure? If you love Christ, if you love the Lord Jesus Christ, then you hate whatever it is that brings dishonor to Him. Pardon us if we're a little fired up about protecting the glories of our God and our Christ against the horrific Antichrist spirit that operates in the entire world system. You know, these people who say you can go to heaven without the gospel, you can go to heaven if you're just a good person in whatever religion you're in, they don't understand it. In every false belief system on the planet, there is operating the spirit of Antichrist. And God does not reward people for functioning in an Antichrist system.

That was settled when you became a believer. Verse 13 of chapter 3, so don't marvel, brethren, if the world hates you. Don't be surprised.

Expect it. If they hated Jesus, they're going to hate those who hold His name high. The world will not listen to us, it will listen to false prophets. They are of the world, so they speak of the world and the world hears them.

There is an affinity, there is an identity. We on the other hand are of God. The whole system is just damning people. The whole cosmos, the whole ideological system is damning people. Jesus said, I'm going to send the Holy Spirit, John 14, 17, but the world can't receive Him. He said, I came to the world and the world rejected Me. He said in John 17, 9 to His Father, I do not pray for the world. Jesus gave Himself that He might deliver us from this present evil world, Galatians 1, 4.

Second Peter 2, 20 talks about the pollution of the world. So what you're talking about is not just sin. Look, we could sin without a system. Understand that?

You do understand that, don't you? You don't need Satan and you don't need an evil system to sin. Scripture doesn't say that. Scripture says this, the deeds of the flesh are evident, immorality, impurity, sensuality, idolatry, sorcery, enmity, strife, jealousy, outbursts of anger, disputes, dissensions, factions, envying, drunkenness, carousing, and things like these, Galatians 5. You don't need the system and you don't need Satan to sin. So when we say we've been crucified to the world and we're dead to the world and we no longer love the world, that is not to say we don't sin.

What it is to say is that we hate the anti-God, anti-Christ, anti-Scripture systems that are infected with the lies of Satan. Love is a supreme affection and as a supreme affection, love allows no rivals. I mean, I think that's true in a human realm. You know, when you find the person that you quote-unquote fall in love with, there isn't anybody else. I mean, you don't go to somebody and say, I love you with all my heart and soul and being and him and him and him.

No. It's one of those kinds of supreme affections that eliminates all rivals. That's just how it is. That's just how it is. That's just its nature.

And when you determined by the wonderful working of God in your heart that you were going to love the Lord Jesus Christ, you therefore hate all anti-Christ spirits. You still stumble. Carnal ambition will get in your way. Personal pride will get in your way.

Greed will get in your way. There will be self-pleasure. There will be a certain satisfaction with vengeful attitudes. There will be sins of all varying kinds that will occur in the lives of believers.

You will be unkind and unloving and unfair and all of those things are part of flesh. But as a Christian, that's different than embracing the ordered system of anti-Christ evil. You don't love that. You hate that. And that is part of being a believer. Turn to 2 Corinthians 10. I go to this passage so often, so often, but it is...it is an overlooked passage. I think I'm the only person who ever talks about it.

But it's just...it's just one of those...it's one of those watermark things that just should show up on every page. Now we're engaged in a war. Paul says in the tenth chapter, doing a little play on words in verse 2, he says, some regard us as if we walked according to the flesh. Obviously he had critics who said that he was carnal, fleshly, sinful. Playing off of that, he says, though we walk in the flesh, not in the sense of carnality, but we are human.

He says, I'll agree to that. We are human, but we do not make war according to the flesh. We're engaged in a spiritual war. It's the kingdom of God against the kingdom of darkness. It's Christ against anti-Christ. It's the truth against the lie. We're engaged in this war and the weapons of our warfare are not human.

We know we can't fight this battle with human weapons. It's a battle between truth and error. It's a battle between Christ and anti-Christ. It's a battle between the Word of God and the Word of Satan.

This is a...this is a massive battle. And the weapons to fight the battle are not human, but divinely powerful, mighty unto God in the Greek, divinely powerful for the destruction of fortresses. The anti-Christ system, the world system is here pictured as fortresses, many different fortresses because the world system of thinking, the anti-Christ, anti-God, satanic system of thinking comes in different forms. There are different kinds of fortresses. And if we are going to go against these fortresses and destroy them, we have to have some very powerful weapons. What are these fortresses, verse 5? Verse 4 talks about destroying fortresses. Verse 5 says we're destroying logismos is the Greek word. Speculations, imaginations, it really means ideas...ideas, ideologies, systems of belief, belief systems, any kind of belief system, anything from a primitive animistic belief system to a complex kind of world religion like Hinduism with its millions of deities and everything in between.

Any kind of system, any kind of philosophy, psychology, any theories, we are destroying all these systems. Further defined in verse 5, the word and, chi can mean even, which is a further description of what was just said, these speculations, these logismos, these ideologies are then identified as every lofty thing, that is every proud expression of thought raised up against the knowledge of God. Any anti-God idea constitutes the world, the system. And our task is to destroy those anti-God fortresses. And at the end of verse 5, take every thought and bring it captive to the obedience of Christ.

So there's our mandate for battle. We go out into the world, we confront the lies, we confront the anti-God, anti-Christ, speculations, theories, ideologies, systems and we smash them to the ground. Any idea raised up against the knowledge of God and we bring all thoughts captive to Christ, this is the great spiritual war.

The world then is defined here for us as ideologies, lofty ideologies that are in opposition to God. And when you became a Christian, all of that opposition ended, right? And you became a believer in the true God and in Christ. You became a child of God and you are now in God's family, either as we learned in verses 12 to 14, as a spiritual child, as a spiritual young man, or having matured to becoming a spiritual father.

Any system that's against God and Christ is the world. I want to close with a conversion story, Philippians 3...Philippians 3. This is the conversion story of the Apostle Paul. You talk about a man in the world, you talk about a man caught up in an anti-Christ system. If you were to read Acts 9, we won't take the time to do it, you will read there that Paul was breathing out fury earlier in the book of Acts. He was breathing out fury against believers in Acts chapter 9. He's on his way to Damascus. He's got papers from the Jewish leadership to go there and persecute and imprison Christians. He's going to continue to do everything he can to stamp out the work of Christ, to stamp out the church, to rid the world of the gospel. He is an anti-Christ.

He is one of those false prophets who purvey the system of the world, the satanic system that's against God and against Christ. But on the Damascus road, he is confronted by Christ and he is converted. The history of that takes place in Acts 9. The internal working is described in Philippians 3.

The story of what happened on the outside is in Acts 9, what happened on the inside is in Philippians 3. Listen to the system that he was in. He says he had confidence in his flesh, verse 4 of Philippians 3. He had confidence in his own human strength. He had his own achievements religiously. He was circumcised the eighth day. He was of the nation of Israel. He was of the tribe of Benjamin.

He was a Hebrew of Hebrews, as to the law of Pharisee, as to zeal, a persecutor of the church, as to the righteousness which is in the law, he was found blameless. That was his system. That was his fortress. He was okay.

He was secure. That was his Antichrist posture and position. And from that position of being a devout, zealous, Pharisaical, law-abiding Jew, he was fighting Christ. And then Christ smashed him into the dirt, confronted him.

He was amazingly transformed. And in that moment, he died to the world, his world, his system of ideology because in verse 7 he says, whatever things were gained to me, all those things were in the gain column, those things I've counted as loss for the sake of Christ. That's when he died to the world. More than that, I count all things to be loss in view of the surpassing value of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord, for whom I have suffered the loss of all things and count them but scubalon, waste, garbage, filth in order that I may gain Christ.

Once I saw Christ, everything else was trash. That's when he stopped loving his world, his ideological world, his theological world, his philosophical world, his own personal world of religious accomplishment. So if you still love that world, then the love of God is not in you. If you're holding onto any other ideology, any other religion, any antichrist ideas, the love of God is not in you. You can't love the world.

You can't because of what it is. By definition, it is antichrist and you confess confess Christ as Lord. This is Grace to You with John MacArthur.

Thanks for being with us. John's current study from 1 John 2 is calling you to examine your love for the world and your love for God. It's titled The Love God Hates. John, you made it clear today that believers are to reject the world system, to break free of sin's grasp, and I'm wondering what that looks like practically. What are some ways a believer can shield himself from the influence of this world and maintain a clear conscience while living in a sinful culture?

Simple. Protect your mind. Guard your thoughts. You know, the Old Testament says in Proverbs, guard your heart, for out of it come the issues of life. You're going to live what occupies your heart, your mind, your consciousness. David said, the positive side, I place your law in my heart so that I might not sin against you. It's about your thinking. It's about what's going on in your mind. The only way you'll ever protect yourself against sin is to control the inside. James says, sin conceives in the mind and brings forth death.

Wow. Let me tell you about a book, really important book. In fact, a few years ago, we sent a copy of this book to every congressman and senator in the American government. The title, The Vanishing Conscience. The Vanishing Conscience.

This book is designed to show you how seriously the Bible takes sin. This arms you with specifics of how to control the battle inside of you, the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life. This helps you to get in connection with your conscience. That's why it's titled The Vanishing Conscience. Many people don't even understand the conscience and how it functions, and it's an amazing gift from God. The Vanishing Conscience. It's a full book, 250 pages.

It's affordably priced. And if you are struggling with sin as a believer or even as a non-believer, and I know you are because everyone is, you need to read this. Not because I wrote this. It's not the part that I wrote that is important.

It's the part that God wrote that I point you to that is important. Again, The Vanishing Conscience. You can order it today.

Shipping is free. That's right, and friend, your conscience is an essential weapon in the fight against sin. This book will help you sharpen your conscience and win the battle with temptation, and it's a particularly great tool for anyone struggling with habitual sin. Pick up a copy of John's book called The Vanishing Conscience when you contact us today.

You can order by calling us toll-free at 800-55-GRACE, or you can visit our website gty.org, and you can order there. Again, to get a copy of The Vanishing Conscience for yourself or a few to give away, call 800-55-GRACE or visit gty.org. And if you're looking to strengthen your conscience with further Bible study, let me recommend the MacArthur Study Bible. With detailed introductions to each book of the Bible and 25,000 study notes by John, the MacArthur Study Bible helps you understand Scripture in its proper historical context and also how to apply it to your life. It's available in the New American Standard, New King James, and English Standard versions, and there are also many non-English translations to choose from. To see all of the options, go to gty.org.

That's gty.org, or you can call us at 800-55-GRACE. Now for John MacArthur and the entire staff, I'm Phil Johnson. Thanks for listening today, and invite a friend to join you tomorrow when John shows you how to love what God loves and how to hate what He hates. That's John's Focus when another 30 minutes of unleashing God's truth, one verse at a time, comes your way on Grace To You.