I want you to imagine just for one moment that you’ve got a dear friend named Pete.  Now Pete is a perfectly nice and respectable fellow.  He holds a job, pays his taxes.  He’s witty, engaging, friendly.  He’s just about everything you’d want in a friend.  There’s just one problem with Pete.  Pete’s a compulsive jaywalker.  He gets a thrill from walking out into traffic where there’s not any legal crossing.  You know this about Pete, to be sure.  You’ve seen the bandages and the bruises from time to time.  You visited him in the hospital once when he broke a leg after being hit by a car.  It was there that you gently asked Pete if he ought to consider finding himself a safer hobby.  He replied – “But I love jaywalking.  If I couldn’t jaywalk, then I just don’t think I’d be able to fully express who I am.”  When he said those words, you knew something was amiss but you couldn’t quite put your finger on what so you decided to let it slide. Pete’s your dear friend and you want to make him happy.

Happiness is, after all, one of our primary ends as citizens of the United States of America.  Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, that’s what the Declaration of Independence states.  So, we have lots of liberties.  A plethora of societally approved ways to pursue happiness and those avenues are growing by the second whether they should or not.

Should anyone or any organization question somebody else’s pursuit of happiness?  More often than not, one of the first words they’ll hear lobbed in their direction is tolerance.  “You’ve got to be tolerant” those voices will say as though it was our primary objective in life.  Tolerance is the nearly exclusionary virtue promoted by modern society.  It’s a fair question to ask –Why do we espouse tolerance so much?

Well, the first reason is most likely because tolerance doesn’t cost us very much.  It’s far easier to be tolerant than it is to be engaged.  I mean, I can sit back and tolerate anyone and anything from the confines of my living room without lifting a finger.

Tolerance is valued also because we can’t stand, nor should we approve of its opposite…intolerance.  Who hasn’t withered under the lash of intolerance?  As we all know, intolerance can lead to unkind words all the way up to unspeakable acts of violence.

I ought to point out that the Bible does advocate tolerance through its usage of the word forbearance.  Forbearance is somewhat akin to tolerance so tolerance isn’t without ample Biblical endorsement.  At the same time, it should be noted that, in the Biblical sense, tolerance has a different meaning than I think we’d give it.  Biblically, “Forbearance” could be explained as showing patience, even though something is owed to us.  It’s controlling oneself when provoked or offended.  Its synonyms show us some of the nuances of forbearance: “patience, leniency and yes, tolerance.”

So yes, Biblically, the word can mean tolerance and it’s promoted by the Lord our God as a good thing.  But it’s never to be the case that we practice such tolerance in a Biblically uninformed manner or without the infusion by of other Christian attributes into it like love and holiness.  In fact, practicing tolerance apart from a Biblical understanding of it can lead us towards being some pretty mixed-up Christians.  Recently, a good friend of mine who happens to be a pastor in another denomination proudly posted an article from another pastor in his denomination.  Now the pastor I’m speaking of has gotten his feet held to the fire by others within his denomination.  “Why?” you ask – because he placed a stone statue of Krisha, a Hindu deity, on the grounds of his church.  Now in the article, this pastor writes a well-meaning defense of his actions in respect to the statue.  Prominently mentioned in the article is our Western virtue in chief – tolerance.  It isn’t the case that people in his denomination think that Hindus are evil, rather they understand the Bible.  Thou shall have no other gods before me…and they think that means something.

So, what do we do with tolerance when it leads us to error?  What do we do we our pursuit of tolerance puts on an opposite path than the Bible would have us take?  To return to our illustration about Pete – what do we do with Pete?  Do we continue tolerating his jaywalking flat-out knowing that no good end will come of it?

Hear again Romans 6:23 – “For the wages of sin is death, but the free gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord.”

Let’s look at the first part of the passage.  “For the wages of sin is death.”  If this were put into a logical proposition it would mean that the consequent of sin is death.  And here Paul doesn’t mean just the earthly  death we all experience although that’s part of it.  So too does Paul have in view the eternal death which comes from not being in Christ.

As I’ve said numerous times, the Bible isn’t “soft on sin” to coin a phrase.  Believe me when I tell you this, there isn’t a chapter or verse, not a jot or a tittle, in which the Word of God tolerates sin.  Yes, the wrongdoer is forgiven.  Yes, the transgressor is justified in Christ though faith.  Yes, God loves sinner BUT GOD HATES THE SIN.  So, if you infer for one single second that God, in His love, is tolerant of SIN, then you’re in deep error.  God abhors sin because God is Holy and Righteous.