It’s Ok That It Disgusts You
"Let love be genuine. Abhor what is evil; hold fast to what is good." (Romans 12:9)
You felt it. Be honest. The first time you saw it, whatever it was, the parade rolling down the avenue, the man in the wig reading to toddlers, the two grooms on the wedding cake, something deep in you recoiled. Before you had time to form a sentence about it, something older than your opinions turned its face away. A pulling back. A flinch in the gut. A no spoken by a part of you that does not wait for permission.
And then, almost immediately, you felt a second thing. You felt ashamed of the first thing. Because you have been told, ten thousand times and from every direction, that the recoil is the real sin. That the flinch is the bigotry. That the part of you that turned away is the diseased part, the unevolved part, the hateful part that decent people have learned to suppress. So you swallowed it. You arranged your face. You told yourself that the feeling was beneath you, that a loving person would not feel such a thing, and you set about the long modern work of teaching yourself not to be disgusted by what God calls disgusting.
I am writing this essay to tell you to stop.
That recoil is not the disease. That recoil is the last warning light still glowing on a conscience the world has spent two generations trying to disconnect. The flinch is not your shame. The flinch is your sanity. And the fact that they have made you feel guilty for the one healthy reflex you have left is not a sign that you are broken. It is a sign of how nearly the surgery succeeded.
YOUR DISGUST IS NOT THE DEFECT
We have to begin by recovering something the modern world has worked very hard to bury, which is that moral disgust is a gift of God and a function of a working conscience.
When Paul describes the pagans who have no Bible, he does not say they have no moral knowledge. He says the opposite. They "show that the work of the law is written on their hearts, while their conscience also bears witness" (Romans 2:15). God did not leave the human soul as a blank meter. He installed a needle, and the needle moves. It moves toward what is good and it swings hard away from what is vile, and that swing, that involuntary recoil from corruption, is not an animal leftover to be educated out of us. It is the fingerprint of the Lawgiver pressed into the conscience of His image bearers.
C.S. Lewis saw exactly what our age was doing to this and named it with terrible precision. In The Abolition of Man he warned of a civilization that would spend its energy debunking the trained moral emotions, teaching the young to sneer at every instinctive reverence and every instinctive revulsion, and would then stand back baffled at the result. "We make men without chests," he wrote, "and bid them be virtuous." The chest, in Lewis, is the seat of the trained sentiments, the place where a rightly ordered heart feels the right thing about the right object. Cut out the chest, mock the recoil, shame the flinch, and you do not produce a more rational creature. You produce a hollow one. You produce a man who can watch anything and feel nothing, and call his numbness compassion.
That is the project that has been run on you. They told you your disgust was hatred so that you would amputate it yourself. And the moment you did, they had you, because a man who feels nothing will eventually celebrate anything.
A GOD WHO HATES
Here we must say a hard thing plainly, because the whole modern objection rests on a sentimental lie, and the lie is that hatred is always the opposite of love and therefore always a sin.
It is not. Scripture is not embarrassed by holy hatred. Scripture commands it. "O you who love the LORD, hate evil" (Psalm 97:10). The two are not in tension. They are the same loyalty pointed in two directions. "The fear of the LORD is hatred of evil" (Proverbs 8:13). "Hate evil, and love good" (Amos 5:15). And when Paul tells the Roman church what genuine love actually looks like, he does not say love tolerates everything. He says, "Let love be genuine. Abhor what is evil" (Romans 12:9). The word he uses for abhor is apostygeo, a violent word, apo meaning away from and stygeo meaning to detest, to shudder at. Recoil away from. Paul puts that word in the same breath as the command to love, because he understands what the modern world has forgotten: a love that cannot hate is not a stronger love. It is a weaker one. It is a love so thin it does not care what happens to the beloved.
You cannot love the child and feel nothing about the cancer. You cannot love your wife and feel nothing about the man trying to seduce her. You cannot love your neighbor and feel nothing about the lie that is dragging him to hell. The absence of hatred toward what destroys is not the presence of love. It is the absence of it. The opposite of love was never hatred. The opposite of love is indifference, and indifference is exactly what the world is trying to install in you and call a virtue.
And lest anyone imagine this hatred is sub Christian, beneath the dignity of the Almighty, hear the Scriptures speak about God Himself. "You hate all evildoers" (Psalm 5:5). "The LORD tests the righteous, but his soul hates the wicked and the one who loves violence" (Psalm 11:5). The God who is love is the same God who hates, and there is no contradiction in Him, because His hatred is simply His love for what is good turned to face what is murdering it. A God who could look at the corruption of His image and feel nothing would not be more loving. He would be an idol.
THE DAY THE ALARM WAS CUT
Now we arrive at the most important thing in this essay, and it is the thing that should make a Christian tremble for his country rather than merely roll his eyes at it.
When Paul describes a civilization under the active judgment of God in Romans 1, he traces it down a staircase. They knew God and did not honor Him. They exchanged the truth for a lie. They were given over to dishonorable passions. And you would think the bottom step is the sin itself, men with men and women with women committing what Paul calls shameless acts. But it is not. There is one step lower, and it is the step our culture has built its whole festival upon. "Though they know God's righteous decree that those who practice such things deserve to die, they not only do them but give approval to those who practice them" (Romans 1:32). The word for give approval is syneudokeo. It means to applaud, to cheer, to throw the party.
Read that again until it lands. The deepest stage of divine judgment in the entire passage is not the doing of the sin. It is the celebration of it. It is the loss of the capacity to be ashamed. It is the death of disgust.
This is why your flinch matters so much. The conscience can be killed, and Scripture tells us exactly how it dies. Paul writes of those whose "consciences are seared" (1 Timothy 4:2). The word is kausteriazo, the same root as cauterize, the searing of a wound with a hot iron until the nerve is dead and the flesh can no longer feel. He writes elsewhere of men who "have become callous and have given themselves up to sensuality" (Ephesians 4:19), and the word translated callous means to have stopped feeling pain altogether, to have gone numb. That is what a culture does to itself. It does not vote disgust away. It cauterizes it. It brands the nerve until the recoil no longer comes, and then it mistakes the numbness for enlightenment.
I once described, in an earlier essay, how a soldier in the filth of deployment loses the ability to smell his own stench. The nose does not fail. It adapts. It simply stops reporting what it has smelled for too long. That is the condition of the modern conscience. The civilization around you cannot smell itself anymore. And when you walk in from outside, still able to smell it, still recoiling, they do not conclude that something is rotten. They conclude that something is wrong with your nose. They have lost the alarm and decided the problem is everyone whose alarm still works.
So understand what your disgust actually is. It is not a relic. It is a pulse. It is proof that the iron has not yet finished its work on you. The people who should frighten you are not the ones who flinch. They are the ones who cannot.
THE DISGUST IS A SERVANT, NOT A KING
But now I must turn and guard this truth from the wrong hands, because a doctrine of holy disgust held by a proud heart becomes a monstrous thing, and the same Bible that commands the hatred of evil commands first the hatred of evil in ourselves.
Disgust is a smoke detector. It is not a flamethrower. Its purpose is to point you away from corruption, and the first corruption it is meant to point you away from is your own. This is precisely where the Pharisee went to hell. He had a working sense of disgust. He used it beautifully. He stood in the temple and recoiled at the tax collector across the room, and thanked God he was not like that man, and walked out condemned. The tax collector, meanwhile, turned the disgust where it belonged. He could not so much as lift his eyes. He beat his chest and cried, God, be merciful to me, the sinner, and Jesus says it was that man, the one revolted by his own heart, who went home justified (Luke 18:9-14).
Watch David do it right, in the very Psalm where his hatred of evil burns hottest. "Do I not hate those who hate you, O LORD? I hate them with complete hatred" (Psalm 139:21-22). Fierce words. But read the next breath, because David does not stop there, and the man who stops there is a Pharisee. The very next line turns the searchlight around. "Search me, O God, and know my heart. See if there be any grievous way in me" (Psalm 139:23-24). The same heart that hates evil hands itself over to be searched for evil. That is the safeguard. Holy hatred that will not be searched is not holy. It is just hatred wearing a robe.
And here is the most beautiful part, the part the world can never imitate. The same gut that recoils at evil is meant to yearn over the sinner. When the Gospels describe the Lord Jesus looking at the lost, they reach for a word that comes from the same region of the body as the flinch. They say He was moved with compassion, splagchnizomai, moved in the bowels, gripped in the gut. The holy heart is visceral in both directions at once. It recoils from the sin in the very same instant it aches for the sinner. Christ did not stand at a distance from the leper holding His nose. He reached out His hand and touched the very thing the whole world found untouchable, and the leprosy did not defile Him. He cleansed it. That is the difference between the disgust of a Pharisee and the disgust of a saint. One curdles into contempt for the person. The other drives you toward the person to pull him out of the fire.
So hate the evil. Hate it with complete hatred. But aim it first at your own chest, hold it open to be searched, and never once let it harden into a sneer at the image of God in a man Christ may yet die to save.
DO NOT LET THEM SHAME THE ALARM
With all of that in place, hear the word this essay exists to deliver, and hear it as a pastor saying it slowly to a guilty conscience.
There is nothing wrong with you.
The shame you feel about your revulsion was installed. It is not native to you. It was catechized into you by a world that needed your alarm silenced before it could proceed, and it had a strategy, and the strategy was a name. They took the most ancient and healthy moral recoil in the human soul and they called it a phobia, a sickness, a mental defect with the suffix of a disorder bolted onto the end. They diagnosed your conscience as an illness. And like any patient told often enough that he is sick, you began to believe it, and to apologize for the one organ in you that was still functioning correctly.
Refuse the diagnosis. You do not have a disorder. You have a conscience. What they call your hatred is, in the cases where it is rightly aimed at the evil and not at the man, simply the love of God for His own good design, still alive in you, still firing, still refusing to call darkness light. Do not let them re educate it out of you. Do not let them shame you into amputating the last healthy nerve you have. The world is not asking you to become more loving. It is asking you to become numb, and then to praise your numbness as though it were the fruit of the Spirit.
It is not. The fruit of the Spirit is not the inability to be disgusted by evil. The saints have always been the most easily grieved people on earth, the quickest to feel the wrongness of a wrong world, because the closer a heart draws to the holiness of God the more sharply it feels the offense of sin. Jonathan Edwards taught that true religion consists in very large part in holy affections, and that a settled hatred of sin is among the truest of them. A dull heart that feels nothing at the sight of evil is not a mature heart. It is a sick one. Your tenderness toward the offense is the health they have taught you to call disease.
THE LOVE THAT HATES
And now, where everything in this series must finally go. To the cross.
If you want to see the hatred of God and the love of God in the same place, at full strength, at the same moment, you do not look at a parade and you do not look in a mirror. You look at Calvary. There, on a Roman cross, God displayed His infinite hatred of sin and His infinite love for sinners in a single unbearable act. The hatred is in the wrath. Sin was so genuinely disgusting to a holy God, so truly worthy of the recoil, that nothing less than the death of His own Son could answer for it. The cross is God telling you that your flinch was not an overreaction. It was an underreaction. Sin is so revolting that it killed God.
But the love is in the same wood. For the One who hated the sin that much loved the sinner more, and climbed onto the very disgust we deserved, and drank it down to the dregs so that we would not have to. At the cross the hatred and the love do not cancel. They embrace. And anyone who has stood there and understood it walks away with both forever fused in his chest, a holy hatred of the evil and a holy love for the lost, exactly the two things the modern world swears can never live in one heart.
Then comes the line that keeps the whole thing from becoming a sneer. Paul ran through the catalog of the very sins we have been talking about, the sexually immoral, the men who practice homosexuality, the whole list, and then he turned to the church and said five words that should empty every Pharisee in the room. "And such were some of you." Were. "But you were washed, you were sanctified, you were justified in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ" (1 Corinthians 6:11). The disgust you feel at that sin, Christian, you were once meant to feel at yourself, and grace reached into the very thing you now recoil from and washed a sinner clean. That is who you are talking about. Not an enemy to be despised. A version of yourself that mercy got to first.
So let it disgust you. Please, for the love of God and the good of your soul, let it disgust you. The day it stops is the day to be afraid, because that is the day the iron finally finishes its work and the alarm goes silent and you join the applauding crowd at the bottom of the staircase. Until that day, your revulsion is a mercy. It is God keeping a nerve alive in you that He intends to use.
Only do with it what He did with His. Aim it first at your own heart. Hold it open to be searched. Let it drive you not to contempt but to the cross, and from the cross out to the very people it recoils from, with the truth in one hand and a rescue in the other.
It is ok that it disgusts you.
Thank God your conscience still works. Now go and love something enough to hate what is killing it.
