Better Is Open Rebuke

The last chapter ended with a hard word, and this claim answers it with a soft one: “Love means gently embracing even those who teach wrongly. Correcting them forcefully is pride, not love.”

There is something right in the instinct behind this. Many people have been wounded by correction that had no love in it, delivered by someone who seemed to enjoy pointing out faults, and no one wants to become that person. Scripture, too, tells us to correct with gentleness.

But the claim does more than warn against harshness. It defines love as embracing and nothing more, and it calls correction the opposite of love. We must ask, then, what the Bible means by love, and whether it ever places rebuke inside love rather than against it.

Two Places of Love

To begin with, God’s love has two sides. There is the love that came to us first, while we were still sinners, and that is justification. And there is the love by which the person who has received it now lives, and that is sanctification.

Romans 5:8; 1 John 4:19 but God demonstrates His own agape ἀγάπη ag-ah'-pay(love) toward us in that while we were still sinners, Messiah died for us. … We love Him because He first loved us.

“While we were still sinners, Messiah died for us” is the first side: God’s love did not wait for us to be good. “We love Him because He first loved us” is the second side: having been loved, we now love.

What does that second love look like? Paul wrote it out in 1 Corinthians 13, and verse 6 answers this claim:

1 Corinthians 13:4-7 Agape(love) is patient, agape(love) is kind and is not jealous; agape(love) does not brag and is not arrogant, does not act unbecomingly; it does not seek its own, is not provoked, does not take into account a wrong suffered, does not rejoice in unrighteousness, but rejoices with the aletheia ἀλήθεια al-ay'-thi-a(truth); bears all things, believes all things, elpis ἐλπίς el-pece'(hope)s all things, endures all things.

Love is patient and love is kind. Every gentle word in that list is true, and none of it should be thrown out. But verse 6 deserves a slow reading: love “does not rejoice in unrighteousness, but rejoices with the aletheia(truth).” Love is not neutral about truth. It is glad when truth prevails.

Paul says it again in Romans:

Romans 12:9 Agape(Love) without hypocrisy — abhorring what is evil, holding fast to what is good;

Real love abhors what is evil. It is not a smile that agrees with everything.

To see wrong teaching and cover it over with a quiet “let it be” is not love rejoicing with the truth. It is sitting down with unrighteousness.

The Verse Behind “Love Your Neighbor”

The commandment “love your neighbor as yourself” is well known. It is worth seeing where it first appears, and what stands right beside it:

Leviticus 19:17-18 You shall not hate your brother in your heart; you shall surely reprove your fellow, and you shall not bear sin because of him. You shall not avenge, and you shall not bear a grudge against the sons of your people, and you shall love your neighbor as yourself; I am the LORD.

Verse 17 comes first: “You shall not hate your brother in your heart; you shall surely reprove your fellow, and you shall not bear sin because of him.” Only then, one verse later, comes “you shall love your neighbor as yourself.”

The word for hate is sane, said sah-NAY (שָׂנֵא), and the Torah sets it in a telling place. Hating a brother in one’s heart stands right beside the command to reprove him, so that the Torah treats a failure to rebuke as a form of hatred.

The commandment to love one’s neighbor, then, was never given in a world without rebuke. It was given in the same breath, and the Torah places rebuke inside the commandment of love.

The Doctor Who Said Nothing

Imagine a doctor studying your scan. He sees a tumor, large and growing. But you came in cheerful, and he does not want to spoil your day, so he smiles and says, “Everything looks fine. Go home and enjoy yourself.”

No one would call that love. We would call it malpractice. The loving doctor is the one who sits down, looks you in the eye, and tells you the hard thing while there is still time to act.

Faithful Wounds

Proverbs says it in two lines:

Proverbs 27:5-6 Better is open rebuke than hidden love. Faithful are the wounds of one who loves, but profuse are the kisses of one who hates.

The word for rebuke is tokechah תּוֹכֵחָה to-kay-khaw', correction or reproof, and it comes from the same root as the “reprove” of Leviticus 19:17. Hidden love, the love that never says the hard thing, is worth less than a rebuke spoken aloud. A friend’s wound can be faithful, while an enemy’s kisses can be many.

Yeshua Himself speaks in this way:

Revelation 3:19 Those whom I phileo φιλέω fil-eh'-o(love) I rebuke and discipline; so be zealous and metanoeson(repent, spiritual domain).

The word for rebuke here is elencho ἐλέγχω el-eng'-kho, to convict, to show someone his fault. As we saw in Chapter 13, His call to repent comes out of His love, not against it.

The apostles also did what they taught. Paul corrected Peter, a fellow apostle, in public:

Galatians 2:11-14 But when Peter came to Antioch, I opposed him to his face, because he stood condemned. For prior to the coming of certain men from James, he used to eat with the nations; but when they came, he began to withdraw and hold himself aloof, fearing the party of the circumcision. The rest of the Jews joined him in hypocrisy, with the result that even Barnabas was carried away by their hypocrisy. But when I saw that they were not straightforward about the aletheia(truth) of the good news, I said to Peter in front of all, "If you, being a Jew, live like the nations and not like the Jews, how is it that you compel the nations to live like Jews?"

Paul “opposed him to his face” and spoke to him “in front of all,” and he gives his reason: “when I saw that they were not straightforward about the aletheia(truth) of the good news.” What was at stake in Antioch belongs to Part Three. The point here is simple. Paul did not decide that love meant staying quiet.

He told Titus and Timothy to do the same:

Titus 1:13; 2 Timothy 4:2 This testimony is true. For this reason reprove them severely so that they may be sound in the faith, … preach the logos λόγος log'-os(word); be ready in season and out of season; reprove, rebuke, exhort, with great patience and instruction.

The word “reprove” in both places is the same elencho that Yeshua used in Revelation. And the goal is written into the verse itself: “so that they may be sound in the faith.” In Scripture, rebuke aims at healing.

Whitewash

Scripture has a name, by contrast, for gently covering things over. It is whitewash.

Jeremiah 6:14 And they have healed the breach of my people lightly, saying, Peace, peace; when there is no peace.

The word for breach is sheber שֶׁבֶר sheh'-ber, a break, a fracture, a crushing. The people of God were broken, and the prophets “healed” them lightly, with nothing more than a word: “Peace, peace.” It was a bandage laid on a broken bone.

Ezekiel gives the picture its name:

Ezekiel 13:10 Because, yes because, they have led my people astray, saying, 'Peace,' when there is no peace; and when one builds a partition, behold, they daub it with whitewash;

Someone builds a flimsy wall, and the prophets come along and paint it white. It looks solid, but it is not, and the people who trusted it are standing beneath it when it falls.

Isaiah shows that this is often what people want:

Isaiah 30:10 who say to the seers, "You shall not see," and to the visionaries, "You shall not envision for us right things; speak to us smooth things, envision illusions;

Some listeners ask for whitewash; they say, “speak to us smooth things.”

And Ezekiel shows what silence costs the one who keeps it:

Ezekiel 33:8 When I say to the wicked, O wicked one, you shall surely die; and you do not speak to warn the wicked from his way — he, the wicked, shall die in his iniquity, but his blood from your hand I will require.

The watchman who sees the danger and says nothing has not been kind. He has failed the very person he was set to warn, and God says, “his blood from your hand I will require.”

What Gentleness Is

None of this cancels the call to gentleness. Paul told Timothy to correct opponents “with gentleness” (2 Timothy 2:25). But biblical gentleness does not mean making the truth soft.

The Bible gives us a man who shows the difference. Scripture calls Moses the humblest man on the face of the earth, and that same man, coming down the mountain with the tablets of the covenant in his hands, saw a golden calf. What he did next shows what gentleness is and what it is not.