Bible Study Just Be Nice: Ungodly Love.

[Tenchi]

Luke 13:1-5 (NASB)
1 Now on the same occasion there were some present who reported to Him about the Galileans whose blood Pilate had mixed with their sacrifices.
2 And Jesus said to them, "Do you suppose that these Galileans were greater sinners than all other Galileans because they suffered this fate?
3 "I tell you, no, but unless you repent, you will all likewise perish.
4 "Or do you suppose that those eighteen on whom the tower in Siloam fell and killed them were worse culprits than all the men who live in Jerusalem?
5 "I tell you, no, but unless you repent, you will all likewise perish."​

There has long been this notion among Christians in the West (North America, western Europe) that being like Christ can be encapsulated in the injunction, "Just be nice." This is, they believe, an appropriate distillation of what it is to manifest Jesus. Certainly, there's nothing wrong, per se, with "being nice" to other people - so long as "nice" conforms to Scripture rather than to secular culture, or human preference. The Christian person ought to be gracious in their speech and conduct (Colossians 4:6); they ought to be self-sacrificing and humble in their charity (1 John 4:11); they ought to be patient, meek and gentle in their general comportment (2 Timothy 2:24; Galatians 5:22-23).

Unfortunately, many Christians have, quite unconsciously, adopted a worldly conception of "niceness" that conflicts very directly and sharply with the love of Christ described in the Gospels. This happens in no small part because western Christians have only a passing familiarity with God's word, the Bible, and so accept contortions of its contents uncritically that are offered to them by Christ-hating proponents of humanistic, relativistic and, increasingly, mad "Woke" ideologies. These ideologies have deeply-saturated western culture, insinuating into almost everything the biblically-illiterate Christian encounters daily in popular media (news, literature, entertainment, sports, the arts, education). Largely ignorant of the contents of their faith, they haven't the wherewithal to recognize, let alone assess, contradictions to it. As a result, when secular views appear to coincide with Christian ones, there is an immediate acceptance of them by the Christian. This has been the case especially in the matter of what it is to be "nice" to others.

Modern, western secular culture expresses "niceness" by a radical affirmation of the individual's feelings and ideas about themselves. If, for example, a man feels he is actually a woman (or vice versa), worldly "niceness" demands he be affirmed in his feelings. And this affirmation extends to supporting him in whatever extreme measures he adopts in conforming himself to his feelings. If he feels he'd like to chemically-castrate himself, or even have his penis removed, by surgical means permanently and irreversibly deforming his genitalia into a grotesque version of a woman's that is chronically prone to infection and pain, well, great, he should be encouraged to do so. If he desires to add womanly breasts to his form and confuse his physical features with feminine hormones, well, niceness demands he be totally supported in such desires. "Niceness" in this instance means to respect and even celebrate whatever delusion and madness toward which a person feels strongly inclined. This is not what it means to be "nice," as far as the Bible is concerned.

On a very fundamental, and therefore somewhat obscure, level, Christianity diverges from the World in what it means to be nice to others. In order to understand this difference properly, it's necessary to understand the biblical view of Truth. God says to us in His word, that all Truth emanates ultimately from, and points to, Him (Deuteronomy 32:3-4; Psalm 33:4; John 14:6; Titus 1:1-2; 1 John 1:6). If what is called Truth does not do so, it is not actually Truth but is, typically, exactly the opposite: a lie. Always, a lie diverges from the Ground of all Reality and Truth, leading away from God into the only other alternative which is fantasy, delusion and the darkness and destruction of sin.

Proverbs 14:12 (NASB)
12 There is a way which seems right to a man, But its end is the way of death.

Proverbs 5:3-6 (NASB)
3 For the lips of an adulteress drip honey And smoother than oil is her speech;
4 But in the end she is bitter as wormwood, Sharp as a two-edged sword.
5 Her feet go down to death, Her steps take hold of Sheol.
6 She does not ponder the path of life; Her ways are unstable, she does not know it.

2 Thessalonians 2:9-10 (NASB)
9 that is, the one whose coming is in accord with the activity of Satan, with all power and signs and false wonders,
10 and with all the deception of wickedness for those who perish, because they did not receive the love of the truth so as to be saved.

John 8:44 (NASB)
44 "You are of your father the devil, and you want to do the desires of your father. He was a murderer from the beginning, and does not stand in the truth because there is no truth in him. Whenever he speaks a lie, he speaks from his own nature, for he is a liar and the father of lies.

Romans 1:24-26 (NASB)
24 Therefore God gave them over in the lusts of their hearts to impurity, so that their bodies would be dishonored among them.
25 For they exchanged the truth of God for a lie, and worshiped and served the creature rather than the Creator, who is blessed forever. Amen.
26 For this reason God gave them over to degrading passions...

Romans 6:23 (NASB)
23 For the wages of sin is death...

In light of the enormous - and, potentially, eternal - danger that diverging from the Truth involves, and being a servant and champion of the Truth, the Christian cannot ever claim to love another - they certainly are not being nice - if they in any way accommodate the lies, and the inevitably-resulting sin and death, that others may want to embrace.

A biblical conception of Truth cannot blend a bit of what is false with the Truth; there can be no compromise with un-Truth. Christians, however, often make such a compromise in order to be nice:

It will hurt the deluded person to contradict their feelings, especially when they've adopted those feelings as their identity, the Christian might think. Being nice means we never hurt another person, and so, we must never make them feel bad about themselves, about their intense desires and strongly-held beliefs.

Continued below.

 

[Tenchi]

Is this in-line with the example of Jesus? Did he always walk on egg-shells when he was around other people, being nice by being silent in the face of sin? Absolutely not. Consider the Bible passage offered at the beginning of this post. Consider also the following:

Matthew 23:13 (NASB)
13 "But woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites...

Matthew 23:15 (NASB)
15 "Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites, because you travel around on sea and land to make one proselyte; and when he becomes one, you make him twice as much a son of hell as yourselves.

Matthew 23:16-17 (NASB)
16 "Woe to you, blind guides, who say, 'Whoever swears by the temple, that is nothing; but whoever swears by the gold of the temple is obligated.'
17 "You fools and blind men! ...

Matthew 23:27-28 (NASB)
27 "Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you are like whitewashed tombs which on the outside appear beautiful, but inside they are full of dead men's bones and all uncleanness.
28 "So you, too, outwardly appear righteous to men, but inwardly you are full of hypocrisy and lawlessness.

Mark 9:43 (NASB)
43 "If your hand causes you to stumble, cut it off; it is better for you to enter life crippled, than, having your two hands, to go into hell, into the unquenchable fire,

Mark 9:47-49 (NASB)
47 "If your eye causes you to stumble, throw it out; it is better for you to enter the kingdom of God with one eye, than, having two eyes, to be cast into hell,
48 where their worm does not die, and the fire is not quenched.
49 "For everyone will be salted with fire.

Matthew 25:41-46 (NASB)
41 "Then He will also say to those on His left, 'Depart from Me, accursed ones, into the eternal fire which has been prepared for the devil and his angels;
42 for I was hungry, and you gave Me nothing to eat; I was thirsty, and you gave Me nothing to drink;
43 I was a stranger, and you did not invite Me in; naked, and you did not clothe Me; sick, and in prison, and you did not visit Me.'
44 "Then they themselves also will answer, 'Lord, when did we see You hungry, or thirsty, or a stranger, or naked, or sick, or in prison, and did not take care of You?'
45 "Then He will answer them, 'Truly I say to you, to the extent that you did not do it to one of the least of these, you did not do it to Me.'
46 "These will go away into eternal punishment, but the righteous into eternal life."

John 5:14 (NASB)
14 Afterward Jesus found him in the temple and said to him, "Behold, you have become well; do not sin anymore, so that nothing worse happens to you."

And so on. I could, I suppose, cite Christ's violent cleansing of the temple, too, but this would be "gilding the lily," I think. In any case, nothing provoked a hard response from Jesus like falseness and falsehood. He had zero patience, no commitment to niceness at all, when encountering two-faced deception and the willful corruption of Truth. If Christians are to properly emulate his example, secular notions of niceness cannot inform their conduct. Especially in the Romans 1 times in which we are living, there is constant cause for the disciple of Jesus to be light, exposing "disgraceful things done in secret." (Ephesians 5:11-13) This isn't a call to ugly, nasty invective and condemnation, however, only to frank, plain, uncompromising statements of Truth that serve God rather than the sensitivities of the wicked rushing headlong toward hell.

Imagine walking by a house and seeing the roof on fire, towering flames roaring fiercely and black smoke filling the air. You can see through the front window of the house a family gathered watching t.v., oblivious to the danger above them. You can see it will be only a short time before the fiery conflagration that the roof has become will collapse onto the family below, killing them all. What do you do? Do you think to yourself, "Well, I don't want to make the family uncomfortable; I don't want them to feel threatened and unsafe. I'll have to be gradual and gentle about my approach to warning them. I must, above all, be nice." Would this be a rational, reasonable - or moral - approach to take? Or would the terrible and immediate jeopardy under which the family literally sat, require much more direct and strident action? Obviously, if you had even the slightest genuine concern for the people in the burning house, you'd kick in their door, if you had to, and haul them from the premises, leaving explanations for later. Certainly, at the least, you would loudly and urgently call them to flee the situation they were in, plainly describing the terrible danger of it. Concerns about their willingness to hear you, or worries about their potential skepticism toward your warnings, if you are a right-thinking, truly-caring person, would not give you any pause in racing to their door and pounding urgently upon it, hollering at the top of your lungs for the family to exit their house.

Christians, though, seeing the awful, fiery and ETERNAL jeopardy of the lost often feel little urgency, or any profound concern, for their rescue. Though the dark, smoking mouth of hell yawn opens beneath the unrepentant sinner, Christians have taken the view that they have all the time in the world to "build relationships" with the lost, earn their trust, and create a "safe space" in which to, as gently as possible, share with them their need of a Savior. For some bizarre reason, those who've been saved often assume, without any good basis for doing so, that their lost neighbor on his way to everlasting torment and separation from God, has years yet, perhaps, during which the Christian can ever-so-delicately maneuver around to talking to him about the Gospel. Where is this guaranteed? How is this assumption reasonable? No one knows the day nor the hour of their own death, let alone that of another.

Many Christians also have taken up the idea that they are crucial to God's saving work. In particular, they believe that only in the midst of well-established relationships can the Gospel be properly shared. But this is not what is in evidence in the New Testament. Three thousand people came to faith in Christ by street preaching (Acts 2). A short time later, Peter went into a Jewish temple and did the same again, preaching to strangers the saving work of Christ (Acts 3:11-4:4) and bringing to faith in Christ about five thousand people. There was no relationship building, no getting into the life of the lost, no doing life together, before the Gospel was communicated; there was none of this "Preach the Gospel and if necessary use words," nonsense. No, the apostles went out into public places and in the power of the Spirit, not well-built relationships, shared the Good News of salvation with total strangers. And God saved all those He knew would be saved.

Is there no place for "relationship evangelism," then? Of course there is. But not exclusively, by any means. And certainly, in online forum encounters, where there is no guarantee one will ever interact with a lost person seeking answers from God again, the Christian ought to be truthful far above being "nice." It is God, after all, who saves, by His truth and power redeeming the lost, not by our ability to sugar-coat and slip the truth of salvation past the lost person's defenses and sensitivities (2 Timothy 2:25; John 16:8; John 6:44).

2 Corinthians 4:3
3 But if our gospel is hidden, it is hidden from them who are perishing."

 

[Hidden In Him]

Many Christians also have taken up the idea that they are crucial to God's saving work. In particular, they believe that only in the midst of well-established relationships can the Gospel be properly shared. But this is not what is in evidence in the New Testament. Three thousand people came to faith in Christ by street preaching (Acts 2). A short time later, Peter went into a Jewish temple and did the same again, preaching to strangers the saving work of Christ (Acts 3:11-4:4) and bringing to faith in Christ about five thousand people. There was no relationship building, no getting into the life of the lost, no doing life together, before the Gospel was communicated; there was none of this "Preach the Gospel and if necessary use words," nonsense. No, the apostles went out into public places and in the power of the Spirit, not well-built relationships, shared the Good News of salvation with total strangers. And God saved all those He knew would be saved.

I think it's a decent argument. One can dawdle forever and never get around to telling them anything, and I have been guilty of this myself. But I do think you get to them through love, which does at least require a little time of interaction and getting to know one another on a friendly basis. Once it is established that you are a caring person and not just someone pushing religion down their throats, then the door is open to bring up the subject of Christ and it potentially start a conversation.

So I'd say "nice" serves a purpose if it is the godly kind of nice. Like you, I don't take a-moralistic "nice" as actually being nice at all, just more like being apathetic.

 

[for_his_glory]

IMO, I feel the name "Christianity" has taken on a bad rap by those who I like to call "stiffnecked hypocrites" that look down on others deeming themselves being very religious and not in a good way. They will throw you a false nice and a false love as an outward appearance, even telling others they will pray for them, but would not lift a finger to help others that are in need. It's like that of James 2:15-16.

We are to have the mind of Christ and follow in His footsteps, Ephesians 5:1; James 1:27; 1John 2:6.

 

[Tenchi]

I think it's a decent argument. One can dawdle forever and never get around to telling them anything, and I have been guilty of this myself. But I do think you get to them through love, which does at least require a little time of interaction and getting to know one another on a friendly basis.

Often, when I get this response from Christians in regards to evangelism, what, at bottom, they mean is that the lost person must feel they are loved by the Christian person before the Christian can share the Gospel. Is this a reasonable basis upon which to evangelize, though? For a number of reasons, I find it difficult to say, "Yes."

1.) As the house-on-fire analogy draws out, sometimes the most loving thing is to act without concern for the feelings, courtesy, or comfort of the person one is trying to save. It would be very...inappropriate to stop in the middle of rescuing someone from certain death to ensure that they felt entirely comfortable with being rescued and certain of the loving motives of their rescuer. If time is of the essence, and the danger is great and terrible - as is the case for every lost person threatened by the looming specter of eternal hell - it seems to me the height of both foolishness and carelessness to fuss endlessly (or, at all, really) over securing the goodwill and comfort of the one being rescued.

2 Corinthians 4:3
3 But if our gospel is hidden, it is hidden from them who are perishing."

2.) The lost have a perverted sense of "love." Often these days, the unsaved person thinks of love as a radical affirmation - and even celebration - of the very thing for which God will cast them into hell. It isn't enough to care about their eternal destiny; if the lost homosexual man is to be sure that you love him, you must applaud his sin. The idea that the unsaved person's cherished sin is worthy of God's hatred and wrathful punishment, under this current, warped, secular notion of "love," makes evangelism impossible. At no time will a lost person with this view of "love" ever think a Christian who tells them they're a sinner destined for eternal hell is loving.

3.) Love and Truth go hand-in-hand in God's economy of things.

1 John 3:18 (NASB)
18 Little children, let us not love with word or with tongue, but in deed and truth.

1 Corinthians 13:4-6 (NASB)
4 Love is patient, love is kind and is not jealous; love does not brag and is not arrogant,
5 does not act unbecomingly; it does not seek its own, is not provoked, does not take into account a wrong suffered,
6 does not rejoice in unrighteousness, but rejoices in the truth;

Ephesians 5:8-9 (NASB)
8 for you were formerly darkness, but now you are Light in the Lord; walk as children of Light
9 (for the fruit of the Light consists in all goodness and righteousness and truth),

The Christian who thinks they can obscure the truth of the Gospel from their unsaved neighbor and love them at the same time doesn't properly understand godly love. It is always the truth that one's unsaved friend is going to hell if she doesn't come to a saving faith in Jesus Christ before she dies. One can have endless, friendly, "loving" discussions of politics, or philosophy, or social justice, or literature, or science with her, but if she never hears the life-saving truth of the Gospel as well, one has not truly loved her. What use laughing and wrangling pleasantly with her over "big ideas" at Starbuck's, or taking fun excursions to the local mall together, or maybe even enjoying a two-week vacation in the Caribbean, if she should die by accident or disease tomorrow and go to hell? Whatever the Christian might tell herself about her love of her unsaved friend, it is not love she has shown her friend that has kept the truth of her need of a Savior from her.

 

[Hidden In Him]

2 Corinthians 4:3
3 But if our gospel is hidden, it is hidden from them who are perishing."

I dunno, Tenchi. In some ways I agree with you, but then I read a verse like this and there are definitely some ways I do not. The whole problem is not that they have not been told in most cases, but that their ears have been covered over to what they have heard. The truth is hidden from them because they are spiritually deaf, much like the Jews in Paul's time. He could have told them a hundred times over and it would have fallen on deaf ears. In fact, it would have likely just hardened their hearts to it even more...

I think your position has to account more for spiritual blindness being removed first.

 

[Tenchi]

I dunno, Tenchi. In some ways I agree with you, but then I read a verse like this and there are definitely some ways I do not. The whole problem is not that they have not been told in most cases, but that their ears have been covered over to what they have heard. The truth is hidden from them because they are spiritually deaf, much like the Jews in Paul's time. He could have told them a hundred times over and it would have fallen on deaf ears. In fact, it would have likely just hardened their hearts to it even more...

I think your position has to account more for spiritual blindness being removed first.

As I pointed out in my OP, it is first and foremost by the work of God, that the spiritually-blind come to faith in Christ. But the "power of God unto salvation" is contained within the Gospel itself.

Romans 1:16
16 For I am not ashamed of the gospel of Christ: for it is the power of God unto salvation to every one who believes; to the Jew first, and also to the Greek.

And so, the preaching of the cross is sufficient to dissolve the hardness of the lost person's mind and heart (a la, Acts 2).
This is, in part, why it is so vital to share the Gospel with the lost and not make our relationship-building with them the crucial feature of evangelism. This isn't, though, as I've noted several times already in this thread, to suggest that the believer may throw off all need to be gentle, patient, kind and gracious in their evangelism. (2 Timothy 2:24-26)

 

[Hidden In Him]

Romans 1:16
16 For I am not ashamed of the gospel of Christ: for it is the power of God unto salvation to every one who believes; to the Jew first, and also to the Greek.

And so, the preaching of the cross is sufficient to dissolve the hardness of the lost person's mind and heart (a la, Acts 2).

I wish I could agree with that, Tenchi, but if it were true we would have saved the world by now. It is only "the power of God unto salvation" to those who believe, and until their eyes are opened spiritually, they will not.

 

[Tenchi]

I wish I could agree with that, Tenchi, but if it were true we would have saved the world by now. It is only "the power of God unto salvation" to those who believe, and until their eyes are opened spiritually, they will not.

The Gospel preached is sufficient to dissolve the hardness of a lost person's mind and heart, but this sufficiency doesn't necessarily entail that the Gospel have a coercive, irresistible effect. A cheese sandwich is sufficient to ease the hunger of a hungry person, but this doesn't mean that a hungry person encountering the sandwich can't help but eat it. So, too, the Gospel.

I agree that apart from God, without His illumination, conviction and efforts to persuade, no one can be saved.

 

[jasonc]

Indirectly this was discussed at the men's group