Greetings Bill, glad to see you were able to get back
online...
Yes, I have come across this verse on occasion.
Psalm 5.4-6 is a another passage with equally strong language. I must tell you
that these passages are unsettling to me: I do not like to think that our God
hates anyone. Nevertheless I must be willing to take them under consideration
and seek God's heart in trying to understand them. I think first I would like to tell you what I do not think this is saying
about God. God does not will to hate certain people, while at the same time will
to love others...
jt: Right and we can know this
because "God wills for all men to be saved and to come to the knowledge of
truth" (1 Timothy 2:3,4) ATST in His omnipotence He knows they won't be.
When Paul wrote this letter to Timothy in 62/67AD he was encouraging the infant
Church to pray for the evil Nero who God already knew would die
insane.
bt: and this in an indiscriminate way that can
only be described from our perspective in terms that appear arbitrary at
best, as if he created ABCs to love and XYZs to hate. If you happen to be
from the first group, great, God loves you and will call you to himself; if you
are from the latter group, too bad, God hates you and you're toast, and
this because he has created you for a different end. This sort of theology
forces a dichotomy within the Godhead, dueling wills, if you will -- a
split personality. A condition like this should not be considered anything other
than the deep psychosis it is.
jt: The above concept is Calvinistic
theology which distorts the sovereignty of God, it is not the teaching of
scripture.
bt: Why would a sane God command
us to love our enemies when he himself does not? and more to the point, from
where would the goodness and persuasion come to love our enemies if not from him
whose wondrous love compels us to love even those who hate us?
jt: Our enemies are primarily the
principalities, powers, and wicked spirits in the heavenlies who blind the minds
of people and compel them to act in certain ways. To walk in love toward
these people we must separate them from what controls them. It is possible
for us by the grace of God to hate the sin that binds them yet love the
sinner.
bt: Jesus tells us we must "hate" our father
and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters, even our own life, or we
cannot be his disciples (Luk 14.26).
jt: The word hate here means (love
them less than) for if we put them ahead of God we are making idols out of them
and unbelieving family members can certainly exert a lot of pressure at
times.
bt: When we read passages that say God hates
certain people -- whether evil, or violent and wicked -- does this
mean that he does not love them? Is his hate for them anti-love, or is it some
other kind of hate that he holds for those people, maybe something similar
to the hate we are to have for ourselves, and mom and dad?
jt: I don't believe we are supposed
to hate ourselves because Jesus taught that we are to love our neighbor as
ourself and He is not double minded and unstable. In Luke 14:26 it is our
own life outside of God that we are to hate..
bt: Let me tell you what I do think. Love is the
heart of God. It speaks to that eternal relationship between the Father and
the Son in the Holy Spirit. When we talk about the "essence" of God, love
is in the center of it. "God is love." Everything else, whether it be his
holiness or justice or whatever, everything else that is essence must be
understood only as it relates to his love, as disclosed by the incarnate Word
himself.
jt: I'm not trying to be smart Bill
but "essence?" I've heard that word used to describe perfume but
never God.
bt: There are other things that God does that are
not things which describe him in his essence. Forgiveness, for example, is
something that springs from his essence, but is not itself of his essence. I say
this because there was nothing to forgive when all there was was God -- Father,
Son, and Holy Spirit. Wrath is not of the essence of God; there was nothing to
be wrathful about until there was sin.
jt: The Godhead has always been Holy
and His Holiness has always been there and is what we have to deal with; sin
causes a breach between Himself and us in spite of His love.
bt: Just as those things that are of the
essence of God must be defined in relationship to love, so also must those that
are not. God is patient, and kind, and merciful, and gracious, and forgiving,
because he is love. These things flow forth from his love. The same must be said
about wrath. Wrath is God's love in action against anything that sets itself to
destroy his creation or diminish his worth.
jt: God is love Bill but there are
other aspects to his Nature and Character. Love is not God.
bt: Hate is not of the essence of God. When all
there was was that triune relationship between the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit,
there was no hate (no matter how it is defined) in God. Yet we must say that
within the makeup of God (his essence) there is potential to hate, just like
there is potential to forgive. We find in Scripture in the verse you mentioned
and elsewhere that God does hate, and he hates not only sin but in some
cases (at least) the sinner too.
jt: Bill, I don't know where you find
your concept of "essence" I don't see it in scripture but I do read that
"the fear of God is the beginning of wisdom" and knowledge of the holy is
understanding" (Proverbs 9:10) and that "wisdom is better than rubies; and all
the things that may be desired are not to be compared to it" "The fear of the
Lord is to hate evil, pride, and arrogancy, and the evil way, and the froward
mouth (God hates). Then there are the six things the Lord hates, no seven are an
abomination to Him: a proud look, a lying tongue, and hands that shed innocent
blood, a heart that devises wicked imaginations, feet that are swift in running
to mischief, a false witness that speaks lies and he that sows discord among
brethren." (Proverbs 6:16)
bt: God is love; he wills to
hate.
jt: Upon what grounds do you make the
claim that God "wills" to hate?
bt: This gets back to my initial complaint. We dare
not stand the love of God side-by-side over against his hate, as if he
could go one way as willfully as the other. Whatever it means to say that
God hates, we must understand it as something that springs forth out of love.
I think people can become so wicked and corrupt
that all there is, as far as their works, is evil. They have so sold
themselves out to sin that they have become totally depraved (cf. Rom 1. 28-32).
These are those whom God hates. That said, I do not believe that
he ever stops loving them. He is not indifferent. It is because he loves
them that he hates them.
jt: I don't agree with the above. God
hates sin - If only we would hate it the same way He does. If only we
would be as tenacious in rooting out the sin in our lives as those Texan
oncologists are in hunting down the last leukocytic cell in my grandaughters
body... though the treatment is poison and almost kills her by itself it is not
as harmful as the disease. Sin is the same kind of disease and will have
the same outcome in our lives. Jesus died to set us free from these bonds.
Even Paul wrote that sin dwelled in him causing him to do what he hates in
Romans 7 (when he was a believer for 20yrs).
bt: This we must return to over and over again:
whatever the sin that ensnares these people, Christ carried it with him to the
cross. For their sins he died. And when he died, they died. And when he rose
again, they too rose with him. They are included in him, just like you are and I
am; this because God so loves them.
jt: If I remember correctly -
this teaching is called "Identification" or "Positional Truth" and it originally
came out of the Keswick Conventions held in the UK early in the 20th
Century. We can reckon these things so until we are blue but if we
fail to deal with our own sin on a daily basis we will stay in our bonds
and die in them being of no practical use to the Kingdom of God.
bt: "And you He made alive, who were dead in trespasses
and sins, in which you once walked according to the course of this world,
according to the prince of the power of the air, the spirit who now works in the
sons of disobedience, among whom also we all once conducted ourselves in
the lusts of our flesh, fulfilling the desires of the flesh and of the mind,
and were by nature children of wrath, just as the others. But God,
who is rich in mercy, because of His great love with which He loved
us, even when we were dead in trespasses, made us alive together
with Christ (by grace you have been saved), and raised us up
together, and made us sit together in the heavenly places in
Christ Jesus," (Eph 2.1-6).
jt: "Harden not your hearts as in the
provocation in the day of temptation in the wilderness when your fathers tempted
me, proved me, and saw my works forty years. Wherefore I was grieved with that
generation and said they do always err in their heart and they have not known my
ways, so I sware in my wrath, they shall not enter into my rest. Take heed
brethren, lest there be in any of you an evil heart of unbelief in departing
from the living God - but exhort one another daily, while it is called today
lest any of you be hardened through the deceitfulness of sin. For we are made
partakers of Christ, IF we hold the beginning of our confidence steadfast unto
the end while it is said "Today if ye will hear His voice harden not your hearts
as in the provocation. For some, when they had heard, did provoke, howbeit
not all that came out of Egypt by Moses; but with whom was he grieved forty
years? Was it not with them that had sinned whose carcasses fell in the
wilderness? And to whom sware he that they should not enter into his rest, but
to them that believed not? So we see that they could not enter in because of
unbelief.....
"The Word preached did not profit them, not
being mixed with faith in them that heard it" (Hebrews 4:2)
God did not hate Israel but He had to judge
them or violate His own Word.... This standard applies to us also
- Without or aside from faith it is impossible to please God..
judyt
