“You’re going to run into a lot of people who profess to be Christians. They’re going to say, “He’s my Father…He’s my Savior.” You’ll hear that. But nine times out of ten, if you’re not talking to a staunch, jaded atheist, you’re going to hear that God is love. Now there is some biblical truth to that, but the problem is that word cannot defined in our culture. It is a junk drawer word. Do you know how I know that? Because you love your dog and you love your wife. You’re not saying the same thing there. You love Tex-Mex, you love your sports team, and it has nothing to do at all with you; it has to do more with what they bring to you, what they give to you. So if I could more articulately define what we mean when we say we love, we mean, “Right now, in this moment, in this situation, this makes me feel good. And if the moment changes, if the situation changes or if my feeling changes, I no longer love it.” This explains our bipolar swinging when something doesn’t work out.
Once again, don’t hear me speaking as a theologian, because I’m speaking to you as one who reads The Wall Street Journal. Just look at our divorce rates. Do you know what that is? That is, “As long as you make me happy, I’m in. As long as you are a means to my end, I’m in. But if you let that change, I might just fall out of love.” As if love is some sort of emotive firing off of adrenaline. It’s a junk drawer word. It’s why we turn so quickly on our teams, on our cars. We love our house till the plumbing breaks, then we hate our house. We love our car till it doesn’t start, and then we hate our car. During the same game, we will love and hate our team. “They’re going to do it…They do this to me every year!” This is because that word means nothing. It means, “I like it right now.”

So now you’ve got a word that’s devoid of meaning being attached to ultimate reality. God is love. Now if you’ll dig around, what people mean when they say that is that God is some sort of wrathless fairy like Tinker Bell who floats about sprinkling pixie dust on people. The quickest way to make a secular mind furious and an evangelical mind nervous is to talk about God as being wrathful, to talk about the reality that God is a just judge. That bothers people, and it’s surprising that it does. It’s surprising because our culture loves just judges. How many CSI TV shows are there? We love justice. If a show on television isn’t about justice, it’s about doctors. It’s like there are no other topics in the American psyche. Give us law and give us medicine in any context. That’s just what we want to watch. Change the characters, make them hotter and we’ll watch it. So we love justice until someone starts to talk about God being just. Then all of a sudden we don’t like it. Christians get nervous about that. They get nervous about the idea of hell. They get nervous about a God who would judge people. Secular people grow furious at this idea. As if to be just and to have wrath means you’re not loving. You see, since we have no definition of love, this gets confusing.

Here’s what I would contend. If you actually love something, you’re far more likely to have wrath. Because if you don’t love something, then what could make you wrathful? It’s when you do love something that judgment and wrath are possible. When you don’t love, it’s not possible because you don’t care. So if you love this thing and it gets tarnished, abused, stolen and violated, you don’t care. You don’t love it. It doesn’t mean anything to you. But if you love it, now there’s violence, isn’t there? Now there’s aggression, now there’s wrath and now there’s judgment, because what is sacred has been violated. You see, this is just a part of American culture that is just so silly.”

Matt Chandler, The Just Judge