Tolle Lege: Love in Hard Places

Readability :  1

Length:  195 pp

Author:  D.A. Carson

D.A. Carson’s Love in Hard Places touched the whole of me.  It fed my mind, enflamed my heart, convicted my conscience, and compelled me to action.  Carson is in my humble opinion (though it is substantiated by many  of higher  acumen) the best New Testament Scholar currently living, and it shows in this masterful examination of the difficult command of God to love our neighbor as ourselves.  Carson deals with loving enemies big (those who would persecute us physically or mentally) and small (that annoying co-worker).  One chapter, a most rewarding one, is dedicated toward teasing out two especially difficult cases, racism and Osama bin Laden.  In all of this Carson never ceases to be gospel, Christ, and God-centered.  This is among my most favorite of books, I highly recommend it.

There is a sense in which the followers of Jesus are to see themselves, as it were, as an outpost within time, within the time of fallenness, of the consummated kingdom still to come.

[In response to the accusation that Christian brotherly love is a lesser kind of love] More to the point, in one crucial chapter in John’s gospel, God’s intra-Trinitarian love is set forth as the model and standard of Christians loving Christians.  “I have made you known to them,” Jesus tells his Father, “and will continue to make you known in order that the love you have for me may be in them and that I myself may be in them” (John 17:26).  It is very difficult to deprecate the love of Christians, without simultaneously deprecating God’s intra-Trinitarian love and the very unity of the Godhead.

That is why, in the ultimate sense, only God has the ultimate right to forgive sins, all sins – for all sins have first and foremost been committed against him, as David himself recognized (Ps. 51:4).  This is not to deny that many others may be abused, violated, offended; it is to say that in the ultimate sense, what gives sin its deepest odium, its most heinous hue, is that it offends the God who made us and stands as our judge.

What this suggests, then, is that moral indignation, even moral outrage, may on occasion be proof of love – love for the victim, love for the church of God, love for the truth, love for God and his glory.  Not to be outraged may in such cases be evidence, not of gentleness and love, but of a failure of love.