The Evangelical Universalist Forum

? About God's hate and......

Theology Biblical Theology
#1

Does God hate people?

I hated them: for the wickedness of their doings I will drive them out of mine house, I will love them no more … yet will I slay even the beloved fruit of their womb. – Hosea 9:15-16

And ye shall not walk in the manners of the nation, which I cast out before you: for they committed all these things, and therefore I abhorred them. – Leviticus 20:23

I will … cast your carcases upon the carcases of your idols, and my soul shall abhor you. – Leviticus 26:30
And when the LORD saw it, he abhorred them … for they are … children in whom is no faith. – Deuteronomy 32:19-20
The foolish shall not stand in thy sight: thou hatest all workers of iniquity. – Psalm 5:5

The LORD trieth the righteous: but the wicked and him that loveth violence his soul hateth. – Psalm 11:5
These six things doth the LORD hate … A false witness that speaketh lies, and he that soweth discord among brethren. – Proverbs 6:16, 19

I hated Esau. – Malachi 1:3, Romans 9:13

:astonished: :open_mouth:

I am assuming the hate is temporary?

Also, is the word HATE the proper way to interpret the original text? It certainly can’t mean hate the way WE think of it…?
I’ve heard some Christians saying…love the sinner hate the sin is not correct because God can hate the sinner… :blush:

Also, if God predetermines and creates evil and if we have no free will, then He would surly know what kind of reaction it would get from us, causing us to sin and all. Then He turns around and hates us and punishes us for something He planned all along? How could God be angry at unbelievers if He was the one that caused all the chaos to begin with?

See how all this doesn’t add up? :confused:

#2

just talking about this in another thread, actually…the God is Love thread.

Psalm 30:5 says that God’s anger endures for a moment, but His favour is for life.
also the prophets have repeated patterns of God displaying rage at the sin being practiced and then restoring those whom He often said could not be restored.

so yes, i’d say the hate is temporary…and is a necessary part of love. if God loathed us He would whipe us out. since God occasionally expresses hatred for us when we’re wicked to Him and each other, we can be sure that this hatred and rage is the ferocious side of His love burning to refine us and make us whole.
God’s anger and God’s hate are not like our hate. we often hate what we don’t understand or what we fear (or both). God understands everything and therefore His wrath is rational, unlike ours, and it has goals…given His omnipotence, and the fact we can’t surprise Him in any real way, His anger cannot take the form ours would, and has the power to accomplish its purpose.

#3

It’s important to remember we’re talking across cultural and language lines. This might be helpful: An article on the Hebrew idiom “I love X but hate Y”

When Jesus tells us that we must hate our family to follow Him, how does he mean “hate?” Surely not in the same sense we mean when we say the word.

Sonia

#4

Great posts all, and very helpful. :slight_smile: I might also add that there are times when I quite literally hate those I love. I don’t usually hate them for long, but for an hour or so, yes, I hate them. I still love them whilst I’m hating them, of course.

And then I go to God, He says something like, “Have mercy on your brother – you remember how I forgave you, right? He’s where he is on his journey and so are you, and you both have a long way to go. I am in him, being developed in him and if he behaves childishly at times, well, he is a child. So are you.”

Then I feel better and can get back to loving my loved one. Even if the thing done was oh so wrong and genuinely hate-worthy, the loved one him/herself is indeed “dear-worthy” as Julian of Norwitch so fetchingly says. Though I did hate him for a little while, yet I always did and always will love him.

#5

I do believe that was where i got the idea from… :wink: …tho i have thought of this topic from time to time…

Totally agree. :slight_smile:

Thanks for the link and yes, it was helpful. :slight_smile:
And that’s true…

I agree. :slight_smile:

Are you sure it’s hatred? or just temporary frustrated and/or angry with them?

Hate him? or the act that he did?

#6

I don’t know, Caroleem. How does one distinguish actual hatred (whatever that is) from something that feels like hatred? Couldn’t this same sort of feeling be what God is talking about? I think a lot depends on what we mean by the things that we say. Children will yell, “I hate you! I hate you!” Do they mean it? I’m sure they do, at that moment. They feel what they perceive to be hatred at that moment. Who are we to say they don’t mean it? Just because we know they’ll soon love us again, that doesn’t mean they’re being inaccurate about what they’re feeling at that moment.

If I say that I hated a loved one and that I got over it in a couple of hours, you might say, “Well, you didn’t really hate him/her, or it wouldn’t have been so temporary.” But God’s hatred is temporary, based on this scripture we’re discussing, so why not mine? And perhaps mine was every bit as justified as God’s was.

To us, the word “hate” is rather a permanent condition, or a condition only recovered from with great difficulty, but scripture here talks about God hating, and then it goes away. It’s on that example that I based what I said. So in my opinion, it’s a matter of semantics. I feel within myself an emotion I would call hatred, so I say (here, not to my loved one) that I hate. I wouldn’t say it to them; it might hurt their feelings, and I know that soon I will forget my hate and love them again, and that I would then greatly regret having said something so unkind.

And that is my point. That “hate” is a loaded word to us. It sounds permanent, but it isn’t really. We may see it as not having been hatred at all just because it didn’t last very long, but what if it was a fully appropriate response to an unjustifiable action, just as God’s hatred was? Even then, it is temporary. We say it wasn’t hate because it was temporary, and hate is not temporary. But here we have Scripture saying that God hated, and then He got over it. I think much of the problem we have with a scripture like this is that we see hate as a permanent (or semi-permanent) condition, whereas it isn’t always a given in scripture that hate is permanent.

#7

Hi Cindy,

When you blow into a trumpet your lips make thousands of interacting and conflicting vibrations. Most of them die and come to nothing. A very precise set of these vibrations, however, resonate within the trumpet tube itself and are amplified. These vibrations and the trumpet tube are literally made for each other, and generate the rich note you hear.

By analogy, my life is made up of thousands of conflicting and interacting motives, thoughts, words, actions, ideas. Most of these will come to nothing. Fortunately, a subset of these will resonate with God himself and be amplified into something eternally beautiful. This will happen at the judgment when the works of everyone are tested. The sheep will be separated from the goats, but I think there is a sheep and a goat in each of us. I’m certainly neither pure sheep nor pure goat, nor is anyone else I know. In this sense, the wicked (that part in each of us which God hates; the bits that don’t resonate) will be destroyed, leaving only that which perfectly conforms to the mind of God.

#8

God hated Esau. Esau is Edom which is Adam. Our carnal nature, the first man is what is hated. Like Allan said the goat in us. This is what is burned up. It is no longer I that live but Christ in me. It is no longer me sinning but sin dwelling in me. There are 2 men in all of us. Adam/Christ, Esau/Jacob, Ishmael/Isaac, Sinai/Zion, Hagar/Sarah. The first is done away with/hated, to establish the second. The first must die so that the second can live.