Everytime I fix my eyes on the controversies that keep coming up in Evangelical circles, I keep coming back to a simple, uncomfortable reality—one that used to be assumed, not debated, not massaged, not reinterpreted until it’s unrecognizable.
God is holy.
Not “inspiring.” Not “affirming.” Not “safe.”
Holy.
“For You are not a God who delights in wickedness;
evil may not dwell with You.
The boastful shall not stand before Your eyes;
You hate all evildoers.” —Psalm 5:4–5
Read that slowly. Let it sit there without trying to soften it, explain it away, or run it through some modern filter designed to make it more palatable.
He hates all evildoers.
That verse alone would clear out 80 percent of the pulpits in America if it were actually believed.
Instead, we live in a time where people stand behind those same pulpits and do something far more brazen than open rebellion—they edit God. They trim Him down. They sand off the edges. They take the blazing, all-consuming holiness of God and reduce it to something manageable and marketable that won’t offend people.
And they call that “church.”
You’ll hear it constantly—God is love. God accepts you as you are. God just wants your heart. And yes, God is love. No serious Christian denies that. But watch how that truth gets weaponized—not to exalt Him, but to silence everything else He has said about Himself.
Because a God who is only love—and never holy, never wrathful toward sin, never opposed to wickedness—is not the God of Scripture. He’s a projection. A therapeutic construct. A god tailor-made for people who want comfort without repentance.
And that’s exactly the direction large swaths of modern Evangelicalism are drifting.
Not all at once. Not always loudly. But steadily.
What used to be outside the camp is now being debated inside it. Can women be pastors? Should I attend a gay wedding? Should we practice “pronoun hospitality”?What used to be rejected outright is now framed as a “conversation.”
You’ve got churches and conferences entertaining ideas that would have been unthinkable just a generation ago—redefining sexual identity, obscuring the created order, placing women in roles Scripture clearly reserves for men, and even—astonishingly—using religious language to defend the killing of the unborn.
And the defense is almost always the same.
“Did God really say?”
Not in those exact words, of course. It’s more polished now. More sophisticated. Wrapped in appeals to love, justice, and cultural awareness. But underneath it all, it’s the same ancient question.
Did God really say?
Did He really mean what He said about sin?
Did He really intend those boundaries?
Did He really design things that way?
Did He really speak with that kind of clarity?
And even: Are the words of Paul as authoritative as the red-letter words of Jesus?
And if the answer makes us uncomfortable—well, maybe we’ve misunderstood Him.
That’s the move.
Not outright denial. Reinterpretation. Reframing. Endless nuance until the plain meaning of the text dissolves into ambiguity.
Meanwhile, the God of Scripture hasn’t changed.
“You who are of purer eyes than to see evil and cannot look at wrong…” —Habakkuk 1:13
He doesn’t evolve with the culture. He doesn’t adjust His standards to fit modern sensibilities. He doesn’t need a PR team led by Ed Stetzer or HeGetsUs to clean up His image.
He is holy—and that holiness is not a minor attribute sitting quietly in the background. It is the blazing center of who He is. It defines how He relates to sin, how He judges, how He saves, and why the cross was necessary in the first place.
Take that away—or even just dull it—and everything else starts to collapse.
Because if God is not truly holy, then sin is not truly serious. And if sin is not truly serious, then the cross is not truly necessary. And if the cross is not truly necessary, then what exactly are we even doing?
That’s the trajectory we’re watching unfold. Not everywhere. Not in every church. But enough that it’s impossible to ignore.
And maybe the most telling sign of all is this—the sheer shock people feel when you simply repeat what Scripture says without apology.
Say that God hates evildoers, and people recoil.
Say that He opposes sin, not just in theory but in reality, and you’re accused of being harsh, unloving, even dangerous.
Say that His commands are fixed and binding, and suddenly you’re the problem.
Which raises a question that shouldn’t even need to be asked: When did God’s holiness become controversial among people who claim to follow Him?
That’s not an insignificant theological drift. That’s a fundamental shift in how God Himself is perceived.
And once you start reshaping God—once you start deciding which parts of Him are acceptable and which parts need to be reworked—you’re not worshiping Him anymore.
You’re recreating Him.
And history has shown, over and over again, where that leads.
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