Love the sinner, hate the sin. That’s a familiar mantra for Christians trying to follow the example of Jesus Christ, who had compassion on the woman accused of adultery and then told her*, “Go, and from now on sin no more.”

Clearly, sin is and always will be part of the human condition, so the point of the command Jesus gave is for us to repent and set a pattern of turning from sin while showing grace to others.

That’s a far cry from dedicating a month to waving flags celebrating the sins of pride and sexual deviance.

Christians have always struggled with how to address sin — because we’re also sinners. We too often look the other way from sins like gluttony, greed, or gossip while bringing down a particularly big judgmental hammer on the sin of homosexual behavior. Some Christians are guilty of mistreating and harshly condemning homosexuals while their own heterosexual marriages crumble, or while they use pornography or are guilty of fornication.

“Let him who is without sin among you be the first to throw a stone at her,” Jesus said in the aforementioned passage in John 8.

Yet today it has become fashionable to atone for this by swinging the pendulum much too far the other way. Now we have pastors and priests arguing that “the truly Christian thing to do is fly the Pride flag” and that “Scripture is unclear about same-sex relationships.” (News flash: Both statements are false.) Other pastors and priests are themselves not only unrepentant but flamboyantly prideful homosexuals or “transgenders.”

What a terrible testimony and utterly failed discipleship under the namesake of their religion.

With all of that setup, just before Pride Month began with its rainbow everything, a rainbow flag was spotted on the set of a popular Christian TV show called “The Chosen.” The show’s official response to a fan’s question about it was seemingly thoughtful:

Just like with our hundreds of cast and crew who have different beliefs (or no belief at all) than we do, we will work with anyone on our show who helps us portray or honor the authentic Jesus. We ask that audiences let the show speak for itself and focus on the message, not the messenger, because we’ll always let you down.

“The Chosen” is produced by actors and many other personnel from the entertainment industry, and if there’s any field particularly populated with LGBT individuals, it’s the arts. Maybe it’s not realistic to produce a high-quality product such as “The Chosen” without hiring a few LGBT non-Christians, and, as we already mentioned, some folks who call themselves Christians whole-heartedly buy into the gender cult.

So perhaps this is just the Christians loving the sinners and hiring the best people regardless.

Or perhaps not.

Two of the actors on the show also took to Twitter to condemn anyone who objects to the rainbow flag on set, adding rainbow flags and hearts to their tweets to emphasize the point.

“Anyone who is going to go at one of our family members for something like this, is no fan of ours,” asserted Giavani Cairo, who portrays Thaddeus. “They can close the door on the way out.”

“Get outta here with your hate, homophobia and ignorance,” added Jordan Ross, who plays Little James. “Not very Jesus-like of you.”

There’s a difference between working with someone and celebrating that unique symbol of pride in sin and of a radically intolerant movement that is wholly antithetical to Scripture. There’s a difference between producing, say, a Marvel movie and a show about Jesus taken from the Gospels — a show that is crowdfunded by Christians who love what has so far been a mostly biblically faithful presentation.

There’s also a big difference between loving people and endorsing their self-destructive sins. It is not loving to leave someone mired in sin and sexual brokenness without ever telling them the truth. “The truth,” as Jesus also said in John 8, “will set you free.”

“Unfortunately,” as our Mark Alexander once wrote, “it is much easier to uphold sin than it is to confront sin and love the sinner enough to guide him toward healing. This accounts for why most homosexuals are abandoned to their misery.”

Worse, the two actors and their fellow cast members who retweeted their comments condemned anyone who points out the sin based on belief in the very Bible the show is supposed to bring to the screen.

It’s one thing for a beer company or clothing retailer or baseball team to cram the rainbow garbage down our throats. It’s another thing to have it done by those who are supposed to be our Christian brothers and sisters.

To those brothers and sisters, we offer a pointed warning: You can’t “honor the authentic Jesus” by using and defending a symbol meant to dishonor His created order. In fact, the rainbow originated in Genesis 9 when, after the flood, God promised via that sign to “remember my covenant that is between me and you and every living creature of all flesh.” It’s a sign of redemption from sin, not approval of it.

The Rainbow Mafia twisted that sign into a defiant symbol of exactly the kind of wickedness that led to the flood in the first place. As the prophet Isaiah wrote, “Woe to those who call evil good and good evil.”

We suppose the truest words in “The Chosen’s” response were these: “We’ll always let you down.” Indeed, people always will. Thankfully, Jesus never does.

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* The earliest manuscripts don’t contain that story in John 8.

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Update: Director Dallas Jenkins offered a thorough and thoughtful response. We stand by what we wrote above for the reasons given in the unedited article itself. That said, Jenkins makes a case that we wish more people adhered to in a free speech society: