Love and Righteousness

"Help us, O God of our salvation, for the glory of Thy name; and deliver us and purge away our sins, for Thy name's sake...and render unto our neighbors sevenfold into their bosom their reproach, wherewith they have reproached Thee, O Lord." Ps. 79:9, 12

Redemption and damnation, salvation and judgment, love and righteousness; whichever way that you put it, these are the two arms of God's government, two of the most essential qualities of His character. It is these two qualities that are the most sorely attacked today by the religious and secular alike.
We hate the love of God as Scripture presents it, i.e., a holy love that desires to make lovable and lovely the hateful and ugly beloved. It is less like Romeo and Juliet and more like The Taming of the Shrew. It is a love that will not tolerate any stain or blemish, not matter how much we tolerate or even cherish it. We despise such a heavy-handed and true love, so we boil God's love down into either a fluffy sentimentalism that means absolutely nothing or a cruel toleration that winks at the damnation of a soul out of fear of being labelled "mean," "insensitive," or other useless buzz words of contemporary society. The love of God is a consuming fire: all that is imperfect will burn away.
Likewise, we hate the righteousness of God because it directly conflicts with our damnable version of the love of God. If our supreme deity is to be sentimental and tolerant, then He must necessarily not be moral. The sentimental and tolerant man suffuses all things into an incomprehensible whole; the moral man sets everything in rigid distinctions, distinctions like right and wrong, good and evil. Such distinctions are inherent in true righteousness, and thus righteousness is an insufferable eye-sore to the modern world (esp. Modern Christendom). Consequently, they choose not to talk about it; it is too much of a landmine. The righteousness of God is a consuming fire: all that is imperfect will burn away.
If we are to remain loyal to God and His revelations of Himself, then we must maintain the reality of His holy character, i.e., the fullness and harmony of His qualities, viz., love and righteousness. The world does not need sentimental toleration, a fluffy cruelty that "loves" it by amassing it into a pile of indistinguishable nothingness that it can safely ignore; what the world needs is a holy and true love and righteousness that burns away our impurities and makes us fit for itself.

-Jon Vowell