Does God hate? If God is love, how can He hate?
God does hate — Scripture says so plainly, and it says so about the same God whose nature is love. The tension is only felt when we imagine that love means indifference, so the real question is what kind of love God has, and what exactly He hates.
Love as God's nature
Commentators draw a careful line between what God is and how He acts toward evil. One writer notes that Scripture never says God is holiness, though it does say He is holy, and it does say He is love:
J. N. DarbyIt is not said, He is holiness — indeed mere holiness would only push the sinner away. He is holy. He is just, and therefore there must be judgment; but He is love, and love draws me. This is the spring of all His dealings until He is forced to act — not naturally forced, but forced by reason of evil… We delight in holiness because He is holy, but love is His nature; that is what He is. He is holy love.
Love that ignores evil is not love
If God shrugged at evil, His love would collapse into carelessness. One writer tests the idea with a family:
J. N. DarbyIf I have ten children, and they go wrong, and I say, "Well, I am to show love to them," and I take no account of their evil ways; or if some of them go wrong and I treat them as if it made no difference to me whether they do well or badly — this is not love but carelessness about evil. This is the kind of love unconverted people look for, namely that God should be as careless about evil as they are; but this is not divine love, which hates the evil, yet rises over it.
The same point is made about rulers: nobody accuses a judge of hating his citizens because he punishes criminals.
The Bible TreasuryWould not God — having given His law, or at least a conscience to man to tell good from evil — be acting unjustly and unwisely if He let sin go unpunished? A ruler certainly does not deserve the charge of lacking love for his subjects because he punishes evildoers. On the contrary, love makes this his duty.
Hatred as the other face of love
Hating evil is not a mood God falls into; it is what loving good looks like when it meets its opposite.
A J PollockOur Lord is the example of this. We read of Him in prophecy, "You have loved righteousness and hated wickedness." This is quoted and applied to the Lord in Hebrews 1:9. To love righteousness is to hate its opposite, wickedness. The more intense the love of righteousness, the more intense the hatred of wickedness.
Because God loves people, sin becomes His enemy — it is the thing wrecking those He loves.
Leslie M. GrantThe measure of God's love to Israel is the measure of His hatred against everything that harms Israel. Since God loves people, He must hate sin, because sin harms and damages people. If people take sides with their sin against God, then they must suffer the same judgment their sin brings.
Where commentators differ: hating the sinner
Some writers read the Psalms as saying God hates the wicked themselves. Commenting on Psalm 11, one observes that in a time when evil seems to win,
Hamilton Smithfaith knows that God hates the wicked and the violent, and that His favour is toward the upright. This will be made clear by the judgment that will soon fall on the wicked, though for the moment the Lord holds back from dealing with the evil, and uses the circumstances to test the righteous for their blessing and His glory.
Others insist the word for God's settled attitude toward a person is never hatred, and that treating His wrath as hatred confuses two different things:
Paul WilsonThis "confuses hatred with judicial anger. There is no hatred in God toward man, certainly. Yet God is a righteous judge, and God is angry every day, and ought to be." … God's wrath against the sinner because of his sin is not inconsistent with infinite and sovereign love. So Christ in the synagogue looked at them with anger, grieved at the hardness of their hearts. The grief was love; the anger was His righteous estimate of their sin.
"Esau I have hated"
The hardest sentence in the Bible on this subject is often misread as a decision made before Esau drew breath. Note when it was actually spoken — not in Genesis, but in Malachi, the last book of the Old Testament:
William KellyI could imagine nothing more dreadful than to say so in Genesis. Scripture never presents God as saying, before the child was born and had shown his wickedness and proud malice, "Esau I have hated." That is where the mind of man is so false… It is God's choice to do good where and how He pleases; it is never the purpose of His will to hate any man. There is no such doctrine in the Bible.
Another writer puts the asymmetry in a single line: God's love is free and unearned, but "the free love of divine grace has no corresponding free hate, but longsuffering patience toward the creatures He had made."
What this means for you
The practical damage of this question is that people read God's holiness as personal rejection.
Walter T. P. WolstonPeople in sin think God does not love them. It is an enormous mistake. He loves the sinner, while He hates his sins. "For God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life."
Summary
- Nature. Love is what God is; righteousness, holiness and truth are how that love behaves when it meets evil.
- Necessity. Loving righteousness intensely means hating wickedness intensely — the two rise and fall together.
- Protection. He hates sin because sin damages the people He loves; indifference to it would be carelessness, not love.
- Direction. Commentators differ over whether that hatred touches the person or only his sin and guilt; all agree wrath against sin does not cancel love for the sinner.
- Proof. "Esau I have hated" came after centuries of trial, not before birth — God's free love has no matching free hate, only patience.