When “God Loves You” is a Lie
I confess I cringe every time I hear it. I have heard it a lot. Even before I understood what was being said, I heard it. It is common. At first, I did not think about it, when I heard it. Most people do not think about it. They make an assumption. I just accepted what I heard. Part of the reason I accepted it was because of those who said it. I could never imagine they were wrong for saying it. They are supposed to tell the truth. Truth is their responsibility. The Bible claims they are held to a higher standard, but I do not think they can even hear it. It comes out of their mouths when they speak it. I believe they would not say it, if they heard it, and if they understood it. When I finally understood it, I stopped saying it. What is it?
“God loves you” or “Jesus loves you” is so innocent sounding. It is such a simple statement. We are only looking at three words. Everybody says it. In the proper context, it is a perfectly fine thing to say to someone for whom the statement is actually true.
My contention here is that it is utterly inappropriate to say it just to anybody. Even in the context of a church worship service, it is imperative to restrain oneself from making this blanket statement. Why? If you make this statement to a group of people, and it is not true for everyone, then you are a liar.
Satan is the father of lies (Jn 8:44). The world is filled with lies because the world is filled with liars. Satan is the god of this world (2 Cor 4:4), and father of liars, so it makes sense that people who are deceived will practice lying even if they are not aware they are doing so. We might call these, “blind lies” or “the party line.” Satan encourages them, “Go on. Say it. Everybody is saying it.” The devil likes it is because of the untruth involved with it.
Christians are to be set apart from the world and the evil practices therein (Eph 5:11; 1 Jn 2:15–17). What sets a Christian apart is the Spirit of truth (Jn 14:17; 16:13), who has imparted the Word of truth, by giving us the mind of Christ (1 Cor 2:16), who is Himself the truth (Jn 14:6).
If it is the truth that sets people free from the lie, then we must determine whether it is a lie to say, “God loves you,” to a random gathering of people. My premise is that “God loves you,” spoken to the wrong people is a lie. Whether the person who says it is conscious or not, he becomes a liar by speaking it to someone for whom it is not true.
In order to accomplish our task, we must tackle a few problems: first, we must define terms, and fortunately, we only have three of them; second, we must look at the subject — in this case, “God”; third, we must look at the object, by asking who is “you”; fourth, we must provide evidence rendering the statement, “God loves you” untrue for some people. Let me start with an analogy.
We once lived in a city with a house down the street from us that was one day vacated. I do not know where the tenants went. There was no “for sale” sign, and there was no car in the driveway. When they left, it became obvious because no one was caring for their lawn.
At first, when winter turns to spring, the snow disappears, and the brown grass is exposed. The sun provides a few warm days, and the grass begins to turn green. Next, the green grass is accented by beautiful, little, yellow flowers. Well, they are beautiful from a distance. When you get a little closer, you discover they are actually nasty weeds: dandelions.
I have lived on streets with some pretty diligent yard keepers. One thing I notice about houses with owner-occupants is that dandelions are unacceptable in their lawns. If we were to interview all of the owners: “Sir, do you love dandelions?” All would reply, “No, I hate them.” This is important because dandelions do not seek permission to take up residence. They are usurpers of lawn space, and they are imposters of both planted grass and flowers. The cupidity of the dandelion is insatiable if left to themselves and their kind.
Consider the beautiful flowers in the garden. They are chosen by the gardener. They are strategically placed to enhance the beauty of the garden. They are purposefully fertilized and watered to help them thrive. See the contrast. Dandelions are not chosen; they just decide to show up in the garden. They are hated enemies of the gardener, and unwelcome guests at his landscape montage. Consider the wedding feast guest dressed inappropriately in Matthew 22.
We need to look at the root of the problem. Why is sin, of every persuasion, suddenly invading every aspect of our culture? We kill our children in the womb. We marry people who do not belong together, and who should not be doing what they are doing. We permit mentally ill people to enter the bathrooms of the opposite sex, resulting in film productions of victims, or worse, sexual molestation, whether victims are adults or children. The authorities claim these perverts have “rights,” like the dandelions, to be there. It is all very twisted. The biblical word for twisted is “wicked.”
Society’s problem is ignorance of God’s Law, which reveals the holiness of God. God’s Law is good (Rom 7:12, 16), but instead, people call good, “evil,” and evil “good.” Why do people do this? It is because they do not know God, nor do they read His revealed Word to us.
In society’s negligence of the truth of God, it recreates and redefines Him, in whatever fashion it desires. The desire of sinful people is sin, so we employ the law of sin and death to govern us. We serve idols and the demonic spirits behind them.
This is what is happening in American society and culture at present. If we continue on this path, it will not go well for us. What does not help is when Christians are telling other people, “God loves you” and by implied extension, “God loves you, just as you are, without any expectation of change.”
“God” as in “God loves you” is not really “God.” He is a figment of sinful man’s imagination. He is “god.” This imagined god loves everybody. In this way, he approves every form of sin. People enjoy sin (Jn 3:19), and when the true God of the Bible gives us His Law (Ex 20; Dt 5), we actually increase our sinning because we are sinful rebels against Him (Rom 5:20).
The Bible says man hates God, even though we say we love Him. What we really love is the god we have crafted in our own likeness. This is proved by the fact that we replace God with god, and then we empower god to accept people however they wish to identify themselves. God has holy distinctions, but our god is all over the place. “No rules, anything goes” is god’s motto, and “Don’t be hating” if you do not agree.
The results are always the same when humanity ventures into this familiar territory: anarchy and chaos. Civilizations crumble because they are cursed by their imaginative philosophy that impersonates true theology. “God loves you,” is not actually, Yahweh, the God of the Bible. So, the next time, when you hear someone say, “God loves you,” your first response to them is, “Which god?”
Next up: “love,” as in, “God loves you.” What is this love? The gods of this age love anyone, anything, anytime, anyplace, under any condition, and defined by their own terms. This is the demonic spirit of licentious antinomianism, and it sounds a bit like, “Hey, man, anything goes…you gotta love it!”
If “god” can be defined, as being just about anything; so then “love” is just as elusive when people say something about it. Ask someone to define love, and you are sure to get gibberish. A Christian might chime in, “God is love (1 Jn 4:8).” The problem: you define love by actions taken. As we have seen, different gods love differently.
The God of the Bible pinned His only begotten Son to a tree (Is 53), poured out His wrath on Him, which killed Him, and called it “love” (Rom 5:8), so who and what are we talking about again? The truth is, “God loves you” is a lazy statement, which uses terms that do not mean anything. Do not misunderstand me. “God loves you,” communicates something, but it also communicates anything, which happens to be the problem.
The recipient of, “God loves you,” has every right to respond, “Well, of course, God loves me. She made me, just as I am…a dandelion.” We tend to avoid saying the obvious, “Dandelions are vessels of wrath prepared for destruction.”
God, like a gardener, is going to pour out His poisonous wrath upon these creations, which are perversions of the fall of the world into sin. Sadly, few people believe us anymore. This is especially true when we speak of judgment, punishment, eternal hell, and the lake of fire. People have heard, “God loves you,” so many times, they actually believe it, without believing anything else.
Third, there is “you,” as in “God loves you.” “You” is a pronoun. Where is the object noun in, “God loves you”? There is none. Hence, we have no idea who “you” is in this blanket statement. “You” could mean everyone, anyone, someone, or some group of ones. “You,” like “God,” and like “love” must be carefully defined to have any meaning at all. The first step would be turning “you” into a noun.
In partial summary, “God loves you,” is as meaningless as someone saying, “That’s interesting.” This, too, is a meaningless statement. The reason this is true is because “interesting” does not actually communicate anything in particular. These are simply thoughtless filler statements.
“God” is “Yahweh” of the Bible. He hates people who do iniquity (Ps 5:5; 11:5). Most people who flippantly say, “God loves you,” deny that God hates sinners. The Bible says He does (Ps 5:5; 11:5; Rom 9:13) and that He is angry with the wicked every day (Ps 7:11), but then we would have to believe the Bible.
Christians mock Thomas Jefferson, the deist, for literally cutting verses out of his Bible. We may not be so physically violent to the printed text; but when we read, interpret, and preach, while pretending certain verses are not there, we do the same as Jefferson. This is another big problem in the church. Everybody claims they believe the Bible, but when they twist the Scripture to fit their sinful desires, they prove they do not believe the Bible. Women elders, pastors, and preachers will never preach 1 Timothy 2 for this very reason. Prosperity preachers will never preach Ezekiel 34 for the same reason.
Our opinion of love is very different than God’s revelation of love. If God hates sin, and something is sinful, then he does not love the sinful object filled with sin. When God poured out consuming fire upon Sodom, it was not just the sin that was consumed. The sinners did not fare well, either.
It is not that the gardener loves the field but hates the dandelion. He hates the field until the dandelions are completely gone. The fields of Sodom, Bethsaida, and Chorazin were all cursed, and they have not been inhabited since God poured out judgment and curse on them. The same will someday be true of the earth, following the day of the Lord’s wrath (2 Pet 3:10–12; Rev 19:11–21). Until then, it is dandelion proliferation.
God pours out His wrath on sinners because Yahweh is a God of wrath (Rom 1:18), who is just in His judgment of what is ruined by sin. The whole earth is to be burned with fire (2 Pet 3:10–12). You have heard it said, “God hates sin, but loves the sinner,” but I tell you, “God hates sin, and because we are filled with sin, God’s wrath is directed against sinners.” Unless God, the Gardener, does something to rectify the problem, there is no hope.
By nature, dandelions are weeds, not flowers, and by nature, sinners are not saints. Weeds are not welcome. Sinners are undesirable. Both are plucked up and thrown away into the fire. Weeds are poisoned to death, so that what is chosen to be in the garden, by the gardener, thrives.
Sinners, who are chosen for salvation from the earth, are miraculously made new and will be transplanted in the new earth. This is the Good News of God’s plan of salvation for elect sinners. God is the only One who wills and works to accomplish what is impossible with man: radical transformation (Jn 1:12–13; Rom 9:15, 16, 18). So, there is hope (Col 1:27), and we praise God for having mercy on weeds like us. He has chosen to transform some, but not all (Mt 20:28; Mk 10:45).
When a Christian says, “God loves you,” to a sinner, it is like someone passing by a house with dandelions in the yard, which decided to be there of their own free will, and saying to the dandelions, “the owner of this yard loves you.” Clearly, the herald of this news does not know the owner, who has intentions for a complete re-landscaping of the yard. To presume the owner will return to his yard to celebrate the dandelions is simply misguided.
“God loves you,” is a wild presumption on the part of the Christian speaking to a non-Christian or to a group of people. As we have learned, we must respond to this glib statement, “God loves you,” with questions: Which god? What is this love? Who is “you”?
While you try to convince the weeds of the owner’s love for dandelions, he is actually preparing for their destruction. You must not lie to people. This is why you do not say, “God loves you,” to just anybody, especially a group of people you do not know. They just might be dandelions, and like you, God hates dandelions.
David Norczyk
Spokane Valley, Washington
April 10, 2021
