God's love is a personal force. It is a reality of spirit, and persons can only love and hate other persons. To say that God hates sin is to misunderstand the very nature of both God and sin. Sin is not a person; it has no being, no reality in the spiritual sense. It is a shadow cast by the turning away from light. It is a void of spiritual potential, a lack of harmony with the universal purpose. Therefore, towards sin, God strikes no personal attitude. You cannot hate a thing that is not, a void, a mere nothingness of being.
The truth is this: God loves the sinner because he is a personality reality, a spirit-filled soul with the potential for eternity. He loves you because you are. Towards sin, however, God does not love, nor does he hate. He simply holds a posture of justice. The love of God saves the sinner, reaching out with a powerful and healing embrace to lift the soul from its self-imposed darkness. In this same universe, the law of God destroys the sin. The law is not punitive in its essence; it is a cleansing fire that consumes the unreality of imperfection.
This attitude of the divine nature would only appear to change in one terrible circumstance: if a sinner were to finally, completely, and irrevocably identify himself with sin. This would be a soul's ultimate rejection of reality, a full embrace of unreality. Such a mortal mind would sever itself from the indwelling Spirit of the Father and become entirely unspiritual in nature, ceasing to be a personality reality. In a universe of progressingly real and increasingly spiritual things, that which is wholly unreal and incomplete cannot exist forever. It would experience the eventual extinction of being, not as an act of divine wrath, but as the natural dissipation of a shadow that has refused to accept the light.
When we face the world of personality, the living, breathing souls that inhabit the realms of time and space, we discover God to be a loving person. He meets you where you are, with a heart of perfect understanding and an embrace of unconditional love. He is not a distant, unfeeling force, but a conscious, caring Parent. This is the God of our personal relationship, the one we can know and trust.
And yet, when we turn to face the spiritual world, the very essence of the divine nature itself, we understand a deeper truth: that God is not just a loving person, but he is personal love itself. His being is not merely defined by his love; his being is love. He is the very font from which all love flows, a sea of perfect affection that encompasses all existence. In your deepest and most profound religious experience, you come to know that he is both—a loving person in relation to you, and the very living essence of personal love that pervades all reality.
It is this love that identifies the volitional will of God. His will is not an arbitrary set of commands, but the active expression of his loving nature. His goodness rests at the very bottom of this divine free-willness. It is the universal tendency of the universe to choose love, to show mercy, to manifest patience, and to minister forgiveness. This is the gravity of spirit, the irresistible pull towards wholeness and light. It is the supreme tendency of the Paradise Father—to be good, to do good, and to extend that goodness to every being who will receive it.
Michael of Nebadon
