The Evil of Pitying Sin
“But if you do not drive out the inhabitants of the land from before you, then those of them whom you let remain shall be as barbs in your eyes and thorns in your sides, and they shall trouble you in the land where you dwell. And I will do to you as I thought to do to them.”
NUM 33:55-56
We misunderstand mercy if we believe mercy is to ever be applied to sin, whether in ourselves or in others.
God doesn’t pity our sin; He aims to kill it, to put it to death. We should be of the same mind as God. We should be very careful to separate from sin all ways, both in ourselves and also with those who continue on in their sin, specifically in the church (1 Cor 5:11-12). And be careful to not join in friendship or any other bond with a worldly person (2 Cor 6:14). Often we go against the Bible, imagining friendship as a type of ministry, rather than sin and enmity against God (James 4:4). We have to be very careful with this type of thinking and truly weigh our hearts, for we cannot go out of the world (1 Cor 5:11), but we are certainly not to be joined with it (2 Cor 6:17, Rev 18:4).
The problem today is that we think too much of our own ideas of love and mercy. And we permit our ideas to go past the boundaries that God has set for them. We are called to love, and we certainly must, but we must never imagine to love more than God does.
The other problem with this and within this is that we see God as the problem rather than man. We are busy feeling sorry for man and seeing God as some villain, when God’s Word makes it very clear that man is the one who is evil. Our trouble is that we do not see the evil of sin and how just God is to hate it and judge it.
Because we back down from the truth of this, we too easily favor the wicked and have contempt for the righteous.
Our goal must always be to follow God clearly and exactly as He lays out for us in His Word. Never to make too little or even too much of mercy, so that we are either cruel or we begin pitying the wrong things. We see today the danger of making too little of mercy, but we do not see the danger of making too much of it (Prov 25:16). We should never pity sin, but hate it (Rom 12:9). It is just as much our duty to hate evil as it is to love what is good. And it is in the name of switching these things that so much evil is happening in the church today.
August 31, 2020