For everything there is a season, and a time for every matter under heaven…a time to love, and a time to hate. – Ecclesiastes 3:1, 8
When I sat down to speak with a young, confused teenage girl about following Christ, she opened up a veritable fountain of questions, statements, and beliefs that all veered hither and thither. Some people, while speaking with a pastor about spiritual things, are intimidated into silence—she, clearly, was not. She spoke so rapidly that it was difficult to keep up, let alone respond. One of the more interesting statements that came out of her mouth was: Christians have to love everyone, even the Devil, because we have to love our enemies—even God loves Satan, so we aren’t allowed to hate him. In the rush of her words, I decided to let that pass by and focus on other, more crucial questions. But it has stuck in my mind ever since.
How would you respond?
In the back of my mind, I thought of the scene in C.S. Lewis’ Perelandra where the main character, Ransom, is forced into hand-to-hand combat with another man who has been possessed by Satan. In the midst of the struggle, a new emotion washes over Ransom:
Then an experience that perhaps no good man can ever have in our world came over him–a torrent of perfectly unmixed and lawful hatred. The energy of hating, never before felt without some guilt, without some dim knowledge that he was failing fully to distinguish the sinner from the sin, rose into his arms and legs till he felt that they were pillars of burning blood.
Is there, for a Christian, such a thing as “lawful hatred”?
Hatred in the Bible
Jesus teaches us: “You have heard that it was said, You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’ 1But I say to you, Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may be sons of your Father who is in heaven. For he makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the just and on the unjust,” (Matt 5:43-45).
Here, Jesus plainly seems to be telling us that hatred towards enemies is forbidden. Even more seriously, loving—not hating—your enemies makes us like God the Father.
But this where we also remember that we always interpret one passage of Scripture in light of the whole of Scripture. And when we examine the whole, we find a more nuanced understanding of the role of hatred in the Christian life. In fact, we could go so far to say that, in certain circumstances, if you fail to hate, you fail to be like your Father in Heaven.
What do I mean? Consider a sampling of passages that display to us what God hates:
For you are not a God who delights in wickedness;
evil may not dwell with you.
The boastful shall not stand before your eyes;
you hate all evildoers.
– Psalm 5:4-5
The LORD tests the righteous,
but his soul hates the wicked and the one who loves violence.
– Psalm 11:5
For I the LORD love justice;
I hate robbery and wrong.
– Isa 61:8 (see also Jer 12:8, 44:4; Hos 9:15; Amos 5:21; Zech 8:17)
Further, this example of holy hatred isn’t restricted to God alone. David, in the Psalms, frequently describes his hatred of God’s enemies:
Do I not hate those who hate you, O LORD?
And do I not loathe those who rise up against you?
I hate them with complete hatred;
I count them my enemies.
– Psalm 139:21-22 (see also, Ps 26:5, 31:6; 101:3; 119:104, 113, 128, 163)
The Bible, in fact, repeatedly commands us to hate evil:
“Abhor what is evil; hold fast to what is good,” – Romans 12:9
“O you who love the LORD, hate evil!” – Psalm 97:10
“Hate evil, and love good, and establish justice in the gate,” – Amos 5:15 (see also Ezek 35:6)
Solomon instructs us that the epitome of wisdom—fearing the Lord—involves hating evil:
The fear of the LORD is hatred of evil.
Pride and arrogance and the way of evil
and perverted speech I hate.
– Prov 8:13
And, of course, this only limiting ourselves to the passages that explicitly uses the word for “hatred.” This doesn’t include the many other passages where God and His inspired prophets speak of the judgment that God pours out on His enemies (cf. Rev 14:11).
Thus, if we are to be “like our Father in heaven” then it would seem that there must be, in the words of Ecclesiastes, a “time to hate.”
What Hatred Is For
If God’s holiness leads Him to hate evil, then the more we are conformed to His image, the more we too should hate evil. But how can we do this, while simultaneously obeying Jesus’ dictum to not “hate” but “love” our enemies?
The answer is found in hating the right kind of enemy. The apostle Paul famously teaches us that in our struggle against the forces of evil, we recognize that we are not fighting against human beings, but the dark, spiritual forces that stand behind them. He exhorts us “to stand against the schemes of the devil” by remembering that “we do not wrestle against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers over this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places,” (Eph 6:11-12). Paul recognizes that those who reject the gospel do so because they have been blinded by Satan (2 Cor 4:4), and therefore we ought to interact with our opponents with gentleness and respect as we debate them: “And the Lord’s servant must not be quarrelsome but kind to everyone, able to teach, patiently enduring evil, correcting his opponents with gentleness. God may perhaps grant them repentance leading to a knowledge of the truth, and they may come to their senses and escape from the snare of the devil, after being captured by him to do his will,” (2 Tim 2:24-26).
Our main enemy isn’t the person standing before us, but the entity standing behind them. We love the human enemy; we hate the spiritual one.
Much to that young woman’s dismay, nowhere in the Bible are we told that God loves Satan. God has reserved for Satan the most supreme and unending display of His unvented fury and hatred: the lake of fire (Rev 20:10). If we are to be like our Father in heaven, we too should hate him and all his works here on earth…even as—and precisely because—we love those who have been so tragically blinded by his schemes.
So, when is it, as the Preacher in Ecclesiastes tells us, “a time to hate”? Whenever we encounter the work of Satan. This is what hatred is given to us for.
As Ransom reflects on the surge of unmixed hatred filling him, we are told:
It is perhaps difficult to understand why this filled Ransom not with horror but with a kind of joy. The joy came from finding at last what hatred was made for. As a boy with an axe rejoices on finding a tree, or a boy with a box of coloured chalks rejoices on finding a pile of perfectly white paper, so he rejoiced in the perfect congruity between his emotion and its object….He felt that he could so fight, so hate with a perfect hatred, for a whole year.
- Note that “hate your enemy” is not found in Leviticus 19:18, which Jesus is alluding to here: “You shall not take vengeance or bear a grudge against the sons of your own people, but you shall love your neighbor as yourself: I am the LORD,” (Lev 19:18). The “hate your enemy” was, then, a common, but mistaken accretion that had grown out of a misunderstanding of the Old Testament command to love your neighbor, one that Jesus is correcting here. Jesus is not claiming that Moses originally taught that you were to hate your enemy and is now correcting Moses. ↩︎
Marc Sims 