The famous Italian poet Dante Alighieri, writing around the year 1300, wrote that “all of the seven deadly sins are an attack on love. Pride, envy, and anger result from perverted love, sloth from insufficient love, and greed, gluttony, and lust from an excessive love of earthly goods.”
The Bible teaches us that God is love (1 John 4:8), and Jesus instructed that Christians should have a special kind of love, expressed in the Greek word “agape.” Christians should see every human being as worthy of love because they are created in the image of God. Dante’s observation that the things God hates are an attack on love resonates with the current state of the world, as many turn away from God.
The Bible uses various Greek words to describe how God wants us to love. The one Greek word that is NOT used is “eros,” from which our English word “erotic” is derived. Those who reject God often turn to a distorted form of love that is more than destructive. It results in frustration and prevents those involved from experiencing the true joy that God created in physical love.
Other religious systems promote what amounts to an attack on love. Practices such as polygamy, polyandry, incestuous relationships, and pedophilia all lead to abuse and frustration for everyone involved. In Matthew 19:8-9 and Mark 10:5-9, Jesus speaks of the hardness of men’s hearts, which results in women being treated as pawns and obstructs God’s plan for the nuclear family.
Hard-heartedness fosters greed, war, violence, and abuse. Ultimately, political systems that endorse such behavior will collapse. You either learn from history or repeat it. The question is, what will happen to America as atheism, naturalism, and secularism replace the teachings of Christ, and as the sins God hates bear their bitter fruit? Only time will tell.
— John N. Clayton © 2025
Reference: Power for Today for September 12, 2025, by Andy Wall and Wikipedia.