One thing worth adding to the broader conversation is that Charnock helps us see that God's love is not merely a general sentiment toward humanity as an abstraction. It is a love that reaches to individual men and women, and it is this particularity that makes the distinction between his general goodness and his electing love so pastorally rich rather than cold or arbitrary.
Charnock is clear that God loves every creature as the work of his own hands, and that this is a real affection toward real persons, not an impersonal benevolence toward "mankind" in the aggregate:
Every creature has some communications from him, which cannot be without some affection to them; every creature has a footstep of divine goodness upon it. God therefore loves that goodness in the creature, else he would not love himself. God hates no creature, no, not the devils and damned as creatures. He is not an enemy to them as they are the works of his hands. He is properly an enemy who does simply and absolutely wish evil to another. But God does not absolutely wish evil to the damned; that justice that he inflicts upon them, the deserved punishment of their sin, is part of his goodness.
Charnock will not even say that God hates the devils as creatures, because he loves the being he gave them even in their ruin. How much more, then, does he love individual fallen men and women as his creatures. The problem is never the person as such, but the sin that has invaded and corrupted the person. Charnock makes this distinction with great precision:
God only hates the sin, not the sinner. He desires only the destruction of the one, not the other. The nature of a man does not displease him, because it is a work of his own goodness. But the nature of the sinner displeases him, because it is a work of the sinner's own extravagance. Divine goodness pitches not its hatred primarily upon the sinner but upon the sin, but since he cannot punish the sin without punishing the subject to which it cleaves, the sinner falls under his lash. Who ever regards a good judge as an enemy to the malefactor but rather as an enemy to his crime when he does sentence and execute him?
Now, someone will immediately raise Psalm 5:5 and Psalm 11:5, where Scripture speaks of God hating workers of iniquity and his soul hating the wicked. Charnock deals with these texts directly. He does not soften them or explain them away. He affirms them fully while showing that the object of God's hatred, even in those passages, is properly sin itself:
He abhors it so, that his hatred redounds upon the person who commits it. He hates all workers of iniquity (Ps. 5:5). Sin is the only primary object of his displeasure. He is not displeased with the nature of man as man, for man was derived from him, but with the nature of man as sinful, which is from the sinner himself. He hates no person for all the penal evils upon him, though they were more by ten thousand times than Job was struck with, but only for his sin.
And on Psalm 11:5 specifically, Charnock shows that the hatred spoken of there flows directly and necessarily from God's holiness toward sin, and that its expression in punishment is the only consistent outworking of that hatred:
There is an indissoluble connection between his hatred of sin and punishment of the offender: the wicked his soul hates, upon the wicked he shall rain snares, fire and brimstone (Ps. 11:5-6). He cannot approve of it without denying himself, and a total impunity would be a degree of approbation.
What Charnock is doing here is important. He is not collapsing the language of Scripture or pretending Psalm 5:5 does not say what it says. He is instead locating the ground of that hatred precisely in sin, so that when God hates the workers of iniquity, he hates them on account of what they have made themselves, not on account of what he made them. The person as God's creature retains his love; the person as a sinner under unrepented, unforgiven sin falls under a wrath that is inseparable from his holiness.
This leads to one of Charnock's most careful formulations:
God indeed may be reconciled to the sinner but never to the sin, for then he should renounce himself, deny his own essence and his own divinity, if his inclinations to the love of goodness and his aversion from evil could be changed.
This is the hinge. God is reconciled to sinners through Christ, and this reconciliation is real. But it is never a reconciliation to their sin. His hatred of sin in Psalm 5:5 and Psalm 11:5 is permanent and unchangeable because it is grounded in his own nature. What changes for the elect is not God's attitude toward sin but the imputation of Christ's righteousness that removes sin's guilt from the person, so that the person is no longer met by the divine hatred those texts describe.
God genuinely loves men as his creatures, including the particular individual men spoken of in Psalm 5 and Psalm 11, as the work of his hands. What he hates in them is the sin that clings to them, a hatred so pure and so total that it cannot be altered even by the blood of Christ except in the sense that the blood of Christ removes the guilt from the person. Charnock deepens this further in his treatment of the holiness of God, showing that this hatred is not inconsistent with God also loving the persons of the elect in Christ:
A gardener hates a weed the more for being in the bed with the most precious flowers. God's hatred is universally fixed against sin, and he hates it as much in those whose persons shall not fall under his eternal anger as being secured in the arms of a Redeemer, by whom the guilt is wiped off and the filth shall be totally washed away. Though he hates their sin and cannot but hate it, he loves their persons, as being united as members to the mediator and mystical head. A man may love a gangrened member, because it is a member of his own body or a member of a dear relation, but he loathes the gangrene in it, more than in those wherein he is not so much concerned.
John 3:16 and election are not in conflict. God genuinely loves the world, individual men and women included, in a way that extends to his grief that he takes no pleasure in the death of the wicked. His electing love is the particularizing of that goodness, directed toward specific persons in a way that overcomes their sin, applies the blood of Christ to them, and secures them for glory. The love is not less real in its general form because there is a more particular form. And the more particular form is not arbitrary cruelty, because God's hatred is directed at sin and his love at the creature bearing it.
