Biblical Paradoxes #9

God’s thoughts are not our thoughts. His ways are often beyond our comprehension. Yet God has communicated His thoughts and ways through His Word, written in the Bible. God’s ways are so different from ours, they often appear as logical paradoxes to our finite minds. True paradoxes are two statements that appear to be logically contradictory, and yet both are nevertheless true. It is important to our study of the Bible to be aware of these paradoxes and to confess them according to God’s revelation.
Believers are to Love Others, Yet Avoid Sinners
In Psalm 1 we are told, “Blessed is the man who walks not in the counsel of the ungodly, nor stands in the path of sinners, nor sits in the seat of the scornful.” When I was pastor of an inner-city parish, I saw this verse illustrated at drug houses in our own neighborhood. Young people would walk by those houses day after day. The pushers who sat out on the porch would call out after them. Eventually, one day a youth would stop and talk to them from the sidewalk. In time, he might wind up sitting with them on the porch. After that, all was lost. He’d been sucked in. It would have been far better to take the long way home, if possible, and avoid even walking past such a place.
We certainly hoped and prayed that those young drug dealers might one day be saved. We would even canvass those neighborhoods during the daylight hours, in the hopes of sharing Jesus with the broken souls who lived there.
No doubt Lot thought he could remain a faithful child of God when he greedily chose to move his flocks to the more fertile land near Sodom and Gomorrah. Eventually he moved into town and even became a councilman. While he retained his own faith, he put his family in a spiritually precarious situation. Before Sodom was destroyed, his daughters were engaged to unbelieving young men, who refused the offer to flee with Lot and his wife and daughters before the coming destruction. Mrs. Lot’s longing was clearly back toward the worldly town with which she’d grown comfortable. That’s why, despite the angels’ orders, she turned back and became a pillar of salt. Later, Lot’s daughters showed how they had become morally corrupted by the company they’d kept.
Earlier, when Sodom and Gomorrah had been invaded and the people had been carried off with their belongings as plunder, Abraham didn’t hesitate to pursue the invaders and rescue Lot and his fellow citizens. He showed love for them in doing so, but at the same time he refused to accept any of the plunder or associate too closely with the kings of those two cities.
Jesus, of course, was criticized for having anything to do with people of ill repute. He spoke to tax collectors, known for their cheating ways. He even ate at their homes. Yet He never condoned what they did or left the impression with any of them that they were fine just the way they were. Jesus did the work of a preacher of righteousness, sharing with them the truth that they were in fact sinners in need of repentance and forgiveness, which He freely offered to them through faith.
In Galatians 6:1, we followers of Jesus are urged to try to win back fellow Christians who fall into some soul-destroying sin. Yet we are urged to watch out for our own souls, lest we be led to minimize the sin, compromise our faith, and fall into the same temptation ourselves.
In order to bring the Gospel to the lost, we have to speak with them—not only by sending missionaries to dark jungles—but by talking to our own relatives, friends, coworkers, and neighbors who don’t know Jesus as their Savior. Many times, as in the case of the woman caught in adultery in John 8, that involves speaking to people who are “sinners,” even in the eyes of the world. When Jesus spoke with her, He did not give her the impression that her lifestyle was acceptable. Rather, seeing repentance and faith in her heart, brought about by her close brush with death and His gracious words of the Gospel, Jesus pronounced His forgiveness on her and told her, “Go and sin no more.”
As Christians, we never want to “stand in the path of sinners or sit in the seat of the scornful.” Nor are we to hate those who do. Rather, we show Christian love to them by speaking the whole truth to them in love (Ephesians 4:15); always watching out lest we lose our own grasp of clear lessons in Scripture of sin and grace.
Timothy H. Buelow is pastor of Faith Lutheran Church in Carthage, Missouri.