“At thy right hand there are pleasures for evermore” (Ps. 16: 11)
The Basket Case Chronicles #157
Charity “rejoiceth not in iniquity, but rejoiceth in the truth” (1 Cor. 13:6).
This verse comes right to the point. There is one verb, used twice. Charity does not rejoice in one thing, and does rejoice in another. Though it is the same root verb, there is a distinction. Love does not rejoice in unrighteousness (adikia), but does rejoice in the truth (aletheia). The rejoicing in the first instance is chairo and in the second synchairo. Love does not rejoice in unrighteousness or iniquity, but love rejoices together with the truth. Love and truth are partners in joy.
The common dichotomy that pits love and truth against one another as though they were adversaries is either a verbal slander or an enacted slander. In the verbal slander, someone dismisses someone who is standing for the truth as necessarily unloving, or dismisses someone who is full of love as some kind of a doctrinal compromiser.
The enacted slander happens when the dichotomy is assumed, and the person chooses which one he wants to adopt. He stands for truth, and blows all errorists away with his machine gun of thruppa thruppa theology. Or he picks love, which in his mind is an amorphous gas that fills the room with sweet and sticky acceptance. Whichever way it goes, this kind of behavior makes the task of the verbal slanderer much easier, because all he has to do is say see?
So what does love do? Love refuses to have any joy in iniquity. Love refuses to celebrate an ungodly or perverse wedding, for example. Love refuses to lift a glass of joy. Love will be accused of many things for this, and the central charge will be that this posture is unloving. This is because people are defining love out of the wrong dictionary. In the famous love chapter, love refuses to rejoice in unrighteousness. Not only so, but love links arms with the truth, and they rejoice together.
That is awesome, and succinctly put!
I think you could launch a thousand different sermons linked or connected to this thought.
“Love refuses to celebrate an ungodly or perverse wedding, for example. ”
I like Doug, but I gotta say it:
This coming from a man who believes that buying and selling human beings for profit and taking away from them the very freedoms one takes for granted is perfectly consistent with “love”
http://reformed-theology.org/html/books/slavery/southern_slavery_as_it_was.htm
I’d say your definition of “love” is incoherent.
I am fond of pointing out that the Word came full of grace and truth — not half of each, but a hundred percent of both.