The Bible Doesn’t Say That: God Hates Sinners 1 John 4:7-8
This morning we continue our “The Bible Doesn’t Say That” series. This week we take on the statement not found anywhere in the Bible: “God hates sinners.”
If God hates sin, we are all doomed. For all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God (Romans 3:23). We’ve heard that in the Church since we were little ones. Notice the past and present tense in that statement in Romans. You have sinned and you do sin. If God hates sinners, he hated you then and he hates you now.
But there are two fundamental problems with this statement that God hates sinners:
First, 1 John 4:7-8 tells has that God is Love. It is hard to imagine that a God whose essence is love, could hate anything.
The second problem is, as Paul claims, everyone has sinned, so God, if our statement were true, hates everybody. That doesn’t sound plausible for a God of love.
But, there is a problem. The problem is Proverbs 6:16-17.
Proverbs 6:16-19, provides a list of, guess what, the things that God hates, and one of them is a particular kind of person! Which seems to contradict what we just said.
Here is the Proverbs passage: There are six things the Lord hates, seven that
are detestable to him:
17 haughty eyes,
a lying tongue,
hands that shed innocent blood,
18 a heart that devises wicked schemes,
feet that are quick to rush into evil,
19 a false witness who pours out lies
and a person who stirs up conflict in the community.
Wait a minute! God is love. How could God hate? Yet, our NIV version of Proverbs says there are at least six things God hates. Ugh.
Before we despair, let’s make sure we are using the word hate and love correctly, in a biblical sense. Those two words are very broad and could potentially mean a lot of things. Love and hate are two words misunderstood and extremely overused. Love is used for everything from fried chicken to God himself. What does that mean, though? Do you love chicken as much as you love God? Maybe more, hopefully less? Most people would differentiate between their love for chicken and their love for God, by quality and intensity.
The word hate is equally used to cover a lot of ground to express a distaste, from broccoli to the Pittsburg Steelers or the heroin epidemic. Do you really hate broccoli as much as you hate the heroin epidemic? Probably not. I hope not. But you can see it’s important to define what we mean by the word hate.
What does it mean to hate, biblically speaking? In the Old Testament, this word hate is from the Hebrew sane’(saw nay). Interestingly, it is most appears in the several occasions when God describes his feeling toward Jacob and Esau. “Jacob I have loved, but Esau I hated.” Romans 9:13 (also Malachi 1:2-3).
When the Bible says that God loves Jacob and hates Esau, it means that God has a clear and distinct preference for Jacob and then distances himself from Esau, the one that is not as good. In this context and in most contexts in the Scripture, the word hate might be more helpful if read as having a passionately strong preference for something and steadfastly distancing myself from the thing not liked, that is harmful to me, or destructive for me.
That’s more helpful on a practical level, too. Because, if I say I hate something, what does that mean? It means I passionately want to distance myself from something because it is not good for me, it is toxic, or destructive.
So God distances himself from that which is evil, toxic or destructive. He wants no part of it. If you are going to be that way and embrace those kinds of behaviors, God says have at it, but God is not going to be a part of it.
But here is the beauty of the Gospels. While God is inclined to distance himself from us when we are steeped in sin and ugly, hurtful behaviors, yet God, in spite of his hate for detestable behaviors and his inclination to distance himself from those that engage in them, because, God is fundamentally love, God reaches out and takes hold of the sinner and makes a work of art from the mess that he finds us in.
Romans 5:8 – 8 But God demonstrates his own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us.
In his dying, God sets aside his inclination to distance himself from us, and instead embraces us AND (and this is the good part) begins transforming us into a work of art.
As we read last week from Ephesians 2:8-10, “8 For it is by grace you have been saved, through faith—and this is not from yourselves, it is the gift of God— 9 not by works, so that no one can boast. 10 For we are God’s handiwork, created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared in advance for us to do.”
God’s first inclination, it would seem, is to distance himself from us, because we are wont to pursue sinful things. God hates those things. He detests them with a passion. He detests when you act unkindly, when you saw hurtful things, walk with haughty items or create conflict among the brothers and sisters. But God does not look the other way forever. Instead, he turns to you and says behold the Lamb of God who was slain, Christ Jesus who comes to you even now and desires to take your broken heart and your twisted mind and make you a masterpiece, God’s very own handiwork. All of this because God is love and so could not possibly hate sinners.
But know this, you can reject the outreached hand of God. You can reject Christ. Then your destructive path will lead you wherever you follow it. Yea, you will walk through the valley of death and there will be no one to comfort you. Jesus said I did not come to condemn, for you are condemned already. But he came to show you a different way. He came to you communicate to you God’s love, even for you a sinner.
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