In the last BLOG the effort was to show that human beings are distinguished into two and only two sorts of people. There are only those that hate God and then those that love God. The Pharisees and James 4:1-4 were used to show that even very religious people hate God in truth. Though the hatred of God may not be at the level of conscious thought, it will come out when it is presented with the character of the true and living God. The very hearts of human beings are governed by a hatred of the true God or a love for the true God. As long as religious people teach others and themselves things about God that is acceptable to their heart that is governed by self-love, the hatred will not come out. So many are willing to love a God that will feed them and love them as they stumble along in life, but once they see that this God demands that they repent of their sins and look to Him alone, the hatred they have for Him will come out.
The commands of God as given in Exodus 20:5-6 point to this as well: “You shall not worship them or serve them; for I, the LORD your God, am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers on the children, on the third and the fourth generations of those who hate Me, 6 but showing lovingkindness to thousands, to those who love Me and keep My commandments.” In this text we only see one division and two kinds of human beings. It is not a division between those that have some form of belief in God and those who disbelieve. It is not the division between those who have religious rituals and those who do not. It is not the division between those that attend church or belong to church and those who do not. The only kinds of human beings that this text mentions are those that love God and those that hate Him. We see that the iniquity is visited on those that hate Him and yet lovingkindness to those that love Him and keep His commandments. We should not miss the connection between sin and the hatred of God and yet love and keeping His commandments. The Gospel of John and I John set out for us as well that true love for God is to keep His commandments. At the very least this shows us that an external obedience is not true obedience at all. We must have love for God in order to obey His commandments.
Those who live in sin live in hatred of God. Those who keep the commandments in truth live in love of God. The Greatest Commandments have to do with love and Jesus taught us that love is what is needed to fulfill the Ten Commandments (Mat 22:36-40). Paul also taught the same thing in I Corinthians 13:1-3 and then in Romans 13: “Love does no wrong to a neighbor; therefore love is the fulfillment of the law” (v. 10). However, what we must see is that keeping the Law is beyond the power of the creature. Love can only come from God and so as John 15:4-5 teaches us we can do nothing apart from Christ. The Pharisees are set before us in Scripture as those that tried to keep the Law in their own strength. Here is just one example: 27 “Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you are like whitewashed tombs which on the outside appear beautiful, but inside they are full of dead men’s bones and all uncleanness. 28 “So you, too, outwardly appear righteous to men, but inwardly you are full of hypocrisy and lawlessness” (Matthew 23).
The problem with the Pharisees is that they did not understand that they loved themselves and hated God. They thought they could keep the Law of God in their own strength and so they set out to delineate the laws and to know them so they could keep them. But what they deceived themselves about was their own hearts. All of their stringent external obedience was nothing but hatred for God because all of those things came from a heart that loved self and hated God. We cannot have more than one master at a time and will love one and hate the other. If we are mastered by our love for self we will hate God in truth. A whitewashed tomb has a beautiful and clean appearance though the inside is ceremonially unclean and full of death. The Pharisees had the outward appearance of righteousness and cleanness to others and yet on the inside they were full of lawlessness. In their very zeal to keep the law they were full of and expressed lawlessness. The Law of God cannot be kept apart from true love. So those who do not have hearts that have been changed by God and so the love of God dwells in them, those people hate God even in their most religious duties. There are people today who are zealous for holiness, preaching, evangelism, and perhaps even missions. But in all of what they are doing they hate God because they are doing it for their master which is self-love. Even the most religious people and the most Reformed person can hate God if the true love of the true God does not reside in them. We must all beware.
God Loves... Himself 
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