Does God Hate You?

If I had to guess, then I would guess that a lot of people in the world believe God hates them.

Strangely, I feel more confident in saying that a significant number of Christians believe that God hates them. They hear it preached regularly. You sinned. God hates sin. So, God hates you. But, in order to spare you from his hatred, God put your sin on Jesus. Instead of hating you, God transferred his hate to Jesus. Instead of killing you, God killed Jesus. Therefore, Jesus died the death that you deserved when you were hated by God.

God must have really hated you if he killed his own perfect, sinless son instead of you.

I could, and others have, come up many verses from the Old Testament that allude to the fact that God has a lot of hate.

Deuteronomy 1.27 says, “And you murmured in your tents and said, ‘Because the Lord hated us he brought us out of the land of Egypt, to give us into the hand of the Amorites, to destroy us.”

Deuteronomy 9.28 says, “Because the Lord was not able to bring them into the land that he promised them, and because he hated them, he has brought them out to put them to death in the wilderness.”

Psalm 11.5 says, “The Lord tests the righteous, but his soul hates the wicked and the one who loves violence.”

But, this morning I read Proverbs 10.12. It says, “Hatred stirs up strife, but love covers all offenses.” As I thought about this verse, I saw it as a picture of those who hated Jesus and crucified him and a picture of God, who was in Jesus on the cross, who loved us so much he covered all our offenses.

We are the ones that are filled with hate, not God. Our hatred stirs up, arouses, and awakens strife, controversy, contention. The ultimate end of this hatred is murder. The ultimate murder was our crucifixion of Jesus. This was the fulfillment of all hatred.

God does not hate. It only seems that way because we project our hate onto God.

Instead of hating, God loves. In fact, God is love. God’s love covered our hate that was fully revealed in the crucifixion of Jesus. Our hatred not only led to strife but offenses. The Hebrew word for offenses could also be translated, and perhaps better so, rebellion. God’s love covered every bit of our rebellion against him. Indeed, we were all at one time enemies in our minds against God. Note that God never saw as us his enemies, as people to be hated.

When we read the New Testament, it is hard to find anything that even alludes to God hating. Although, Jesus repeatedly says that he is hated by the world and that world will kill him because it hated him.

Do you know what the actual meaning of hate is?

Hate is an intense hostility and aversion usually deriving from fear, anger, or sense of injury.

So hate comes from fear, anger, or a sense of injury.

That sounds like our thoughts, feelings, and emotions toward God and others. We fear God. We are angry at God. We feel injured by God because we don’t have everything we want. So, we hate God.

The Bible never says that God is hate. But, it does say that God is love. God can only do what he is. You know…that whole I Am that I Am thing. The Bible goes on to say that there is no fear in love. And, if there is no fear, then there can be no hate in love either. Instead of fear being in love, perfect love casts out fear. For me, that is very much like love covering all of our rebellion.

I also see Jesus in Proverbs 10.12.

Love covers all offenses. The Hebrew word for covers is also used for putting on a veil or other articles of clothing. Love is put on atop, over, or above (there’s actually an untranslated Hebrew word that means something like that) all our offenses. Love is put on atop or above our hatred, covering it up.

Colossians 3.8-14 says, “But now you must put them all away: anger, wrath, malice, slander, and obscene talk from your mouth. Do not lie to one another, seeing that you have put off the old self with its practices and have put on the new self, which is being renewed in knowledge after the image of its creator. Here there is not Greek and Jew, circumcised and uncircumcised, barbarian, Scythian, slave, free; but Christ is all and in all. Put on then, as God’s chosen ones, holy and beloved, compassionate hearts, kindness, humility, meekness, patience, bearing with one another and, if one has a complaint against another, forgiving each other; as the Lord has forgiven you, so you must also forgive. And above all these put on love, which binds everything together in perfect harmony.”

Here we have the taking off the garment of hatred – anger, wrath, malice – and the putting on of the garment of love. In this way, there are no more groups that hate another – Jew and Gentile, barbarian and Scythian, slave and free. Instead, Christ is all and in all. Hatred is replace with love because God, and Christ, is love.

We are to forgive each other as the Lord has forgiven us.

When did Jesus, and God, do this?

On the cross.

When our hatred was fully stirred up to the ultimate strife – murder.

When love covered all of our rebellion.

And, because God has always been as he was on the cross, he never hated you.