The Love of God with R. C. Sproul, “The Hatred of God”, 6

The Sovereign Love of God and the Problem of Divine Hatred

As we continue our study of the love of God, in our last session we looked at the sovereign love of God in his electing of people unto salvation. And any time we wrestle with that question of election of those who are redeemed and those who are passed over, we asked about the limits to the love of God, and in fact when we examine Romans chapter 9, we hear references to the hatred of God, not of man's hatred for God, but of God's hating people.

And that really jars us because we're accustomed to thinking that God is incapable of having feelings of hatred to his creatures. Well, let's take a look at this very difficult text that we find in Romans 9, where we meet up with this idea of the hatred of God.

We'll begin in chapter 9 with verse 6 where Paul says, but it is not that the word of God has taken no effect, for they are not all Israel who are of Israel, nor are they all children because they are the seed of Abraham.

But in Isaac shall your seed be called. That is, those who are the children of the flesh, these are not the children of God, but the children of the promise are counted as the seed. For this is the word of promise, at this time I will come and Sarah shall have a son.

Election, Jacob and Esau, and the Meaning of “Hatred”

Now, here's where we get into the doctrine of election. And not only this, Paul says, but when Rebecca also had conceived by one man, even by our father Isaac, for the children not yet being born, not having done any good or evil, that the purpose of God according to election might stand, not of works, but of him who calls.

It was said to her, the older shall serve the younger, as it is written, Jacob I have loved, but Esau I have hated. And that's when Paul raises the question anticipating reactions of his readers. What shall we say?

Is there unrighteousness with God? Certainly not, for he says to Moses, I will have mercy upon whom I will have mercy. Here's the sovereignty of God's grace. I will have compassion on whomever I will have compassion.

So then, it is not of him who wills, nor of him who runs, but of God who shows mercy. Then in verse 18, therefore he has mercy on whom he wills, and whom he wills he hardens. Now here, as we deal with this doctrine, we have the most difficult statement of all, Jacob have I loved, Esau have I hated.

Now, of course, when Paul uses that language, he prefaces it with the words, it is written. Because what he writes in Romans 9, with respect to God's hating Esau, is a direct quotation from the first chapter of the Old Testament book of the prophet Malachi.

That's where we first read the text of God's hating people. In the first chapter, I'll refresh your memory, where we read in the first chapter the burden of the word of the Lord to Israel by Malachi. I have loved you, says the Lord.

And yet, you say, in what way have you loved us? Was not Esau Jacob's brother, says the Lord? Yet Jacob I have loved, but Esau I have hated. Now, how are we to understand this? Now, there are many ways of approaching this difficult text, and different commentators have approached it in different ways.

The standard method of interpreting this difficult text is to see these words, first by Malachi, and then, as they are repeated by the Apostle Paul in Romans, as simply a manner of speaking, kind of a Hebraism, kind of an idiomatic expression, not to be taken in a direct literal sense, but rather simply expresses the idea of some sort of preference.

And there is a biblical background and precedent for interpreting words of this sort in this manner of speaking as a kind of preference, where if we would translate it that way, we would say, God is simply declaring that he has preferred Jacob over Esau, or that his love for Jacob is greater than his love for Esau.

He loves them both, but he loves one more than the other, and in order to express the preference and the greater intensity of love that he has for Jacob over Esau, by way of contrast, the greater love that God has for Jacob makes the love that he has for Esau seem like hatred in comparison.

Jacob, Leah, and Rachel as a Biblical Example of Preference

Again, there's a historical basis and foundation for this in the Old Testament. Let's take a look at it as we meet it in the book of Genesis. In the book of Genesis, in the 29th chapter, we have the account of Jacob's relationship to his two wives, Rachel and Leah.

Remember how he had been duped by his father-in-law, Laban, when he entered into an agreement whereby he would serve Laban for seven years, and that the fruit of that servitude would be that Laban would give him his daughter, Rachel, in marriage.

And after he put in his seven years, in the meantime the elder daughter had not been married, and so Laban reneges on the deal and foists Leah off on Jacob, and said, if you want Rachel you're going to have to marry Leah first and work another seven years in order to get Rachel.

Well, he's so committed to Rachel that he goes and agrees to this in order to win her hand in marriage. And so now, then, we visit this family that was so constructed. And we read in verse 31 of chapter 29 of Genesis, now when the Lord saw that Leah was unloved, notice that the description here of the relationship that Jacob has towards Leah, his first wife, is that Leah is unloved.

He opened her womb, but Rachel was barren. And so Leah conceived and bore a son, and she called his name Reuben. For she said, the Lord has surely looked on my affliction. Now therefore, my husband will love me.

And then she conceived again and bore a son and said, because the Lord has heard that I am unloved, he has given me this son also, and she called his name Simeon. And she conceived and bore again and said, now, this time, my husband will become attached to me because I have borne him three sons.

And so with each of these pregnancies, the hope of Leah is that now Jacob will love her. Because apparently, at least in her perception, and according to what the Scripture says, God's perception, she was unloved.

But if we move just one verse earlier, in verse 29, well, let's go back to verse 28. Then Jacob did so and fulfilled her week, so he gave him his daughter Rachel as wife also. And Laban gave his maid Bilhah to his daughter Rachel as a maid.

Then Jacob also went into Rachel, and here's the statement, and he also loved Rachel more than Leah. Now, notice he doesn't say, Rachel I love, and I don't love Leah. Or Rachel has he loved, Leah has he hated.

All it says there in verse 28 and 29 is that Jacob loved Rachel more than he loved Leah, that there was a preference, a greater dimension of love that he felt towards one wife over the other. But by comparison, Rachel felt, what, completely unloved.

And when she said, now that I've borne him these sons, maybe he will love me, really what she's saying is, maybe he'll love me as much as he loves my sister Rachel. So here we see that Hebrew idea where there is a degree of love where one is higher than the other, that by contrast, that which is less loved is considered being not loved, or the antithesis of love, which is hatred.

Jesus’ Teaching on Discipleship and “Hating” Family

And if it's unclear in that text, let's go to the New Testament to look at perhaps the most famous example of this kind of language that we find in the New Testament. We find it in Luke's Gospel in the 14th chapter in a discourse by Jesus, where in verse 25 of chapter 14 of Luke we read this statement.

Now great multitudes went with him, and he turned and said to them, if anyone comes to me and does not hate his father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters, yes in his own life also, he cannot be my disciple.

For whosoever does not bear his cross and come after me cannot be my disciple. For which of you, intending to build a tower, does not sit down first and count the cost? And then he goes on and uses further illustrations about how a wise person before they make a commitment has to consider the consequences, has to consider the cost.

And these people that want to jump on the bandwagon of Jesus and follow along in his train and sit there and receive all the blessings that he's giving as he's healing the sick and the blind and the deaf and so on, he says to them, just a minute, if you want to be my disciple, there's a price tag attached to it.

There is a weighty cost to it. Stop and consider that cost before you follow me, because if you're not prepared to hate your mother and father, to hate your children, to hate your own life, you cannot be my disciple.

So Jesus presents to his contemporaries a prerequisite for discipleship of hating one's family. Now, this is Jesus who keeps the law of God perfectly throughout his life, who clearly understood the fifth commandment to honor one's father and mother, to love one's neighbor as much as they loved themselves.

No one understood the dimension of the love that is required by the law of God to the degree that Jesus did. Does he mean, literally, that if you want to join my band of disciples, you must be filled with hostility and enmity and hatred to your parents?

You must hate your children? No, again he's using this Hebrew idiom of preference. He's saying, I am going to require such commitment from you, such devotion, such love if you want to enter in discipleship to me, that by comparison, you would in effect be hating your parents, and hating your family, and hating your children, and hating your own life by comparison.

So I think we understand that naturally when we read this. I've never had somebody come to me and say, why isn't it that Jesus, who is supposed to be the love of God incarnate, tells people that they have to hate their parents and hate their children?

We obviously understand when we read this text that that's not what he was communicating. What he was communicating was the supremacy of the love that we are to have to him above all things of this world, including the ones we love the most here.

The Hatred of God Toward Wickedness and Hypocrisy

Now, having looked at some of these examples in the Bible, we could easily come to the conclusion and say, well, then we don't really ever have to worry about God's having hatred towards people or anything like that.

That we have a tendency to think that hatred is absolutely unbecoming of God. And one of the things that the Scriptures emphasizes over and over again is that while we were still sinners, God's love was so great for us that even then, while we were in estrangement towards him, his love overcame our hostility.

And therefore, there must not be any hostility in God. But, I think it might come as a surprise to you if I would say that God, or the Bible speaks as much about God's hatred for us as it does of his love for us.

And I don't think it will answer the question fully to merely see these expressions as Hebraisms or idioms of preference, because there is a dimension to the attitude of God towards the sinner that reflects a kind of utter disgust and loathsome character that God has for his rebellious race of human beings.

When he gets angry with Israel, he says through the voice of the prophets, I despise your feasts. I hate your solemn assemblies. They make me sick. The sacrifices that you offer in your hypocrisy have become loathsome to my nostrils.

This is strong language indicating a fury of God towards hypocrisy among his own people. But let's turn for a moment, if we can, again back to the Old Testament, to the Psalms, where we look at the fifth psalm, beginning in the first verse, Psalm 5, where there's a call to attention that begins with these words, Give ear to my words, O God, for I will pray to you in the morning, O Lord.

Consider my meditation. Here the psalmist is praying to God. Give heed to the voice of my cry, my King and my God, for to you I will pray, my voice you shall hear in the morning, O Lord, and in the morning I will direct it to you and I will look up.

And now listen to how the psalmist, under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, describes the character of God. You are not a God who takes pleasure in wickedness, nor shall evil dwell with you. We remember the complaint of Habakkuk when God was tolerating unchecked and unpunished evil in the nation, and he couldn't understand it.

He said, God, you are a God who is so holy that you can't even look upon iniquity. It's the same sentiment that the psalmist is describing here, and he says, the boastful shall not stand in your sight.

You hate all workers of iniquity. You shall destroy those who speak falsehood. The Lord abhors the bloodthirsty and deceitful man. You see that twice in this one section of the psalm. The psalmist speaks of God's hatred towards the wicked.

You hate those that are involved in iniquity. And then you abhor the bloodthirsty and the deceitful man. It's not that God is mildly disturbed with the bloodthirsty person or the person who's a liar and a cheat and deceitful.

It's that God abhors them. That's intense, and I think we have to take that seriously. Now, we say always the cliche, God hates the sin, but he loves the sinner. That's nonsense. God doesn't send the sin to hell, he sends the sinner to hell, because he abhors the impenitent sinner who becomes the object of his wrath.

And the reason that we struggle with these differences, where on the one hand the Bible talks about the incredible dimension of the love of God, that while we're still sinners he loves us, and yet on the other hand it speaks of his abhorring us and that we're loathsome in his sight and he can't stand to even look at us because of our iniquity.

What this says above everything else, ladies and gentlemen, is that there is a border to the love of God. And we cannot understand the love or the attitude of God towards his fallen creation as being exclusively one of love, because the Bible tempers its extolling of the transcendent majesty of the love of God with these warnings of the limit of his love, beyond which there is divine wrath and there is divine abhorrence.

The Danger of “Unconditional Love” Language

I know that what I'm saying here goes counter to the message that is being preached every day in our culture, in our land. There is a concept that I hear all the time from preachers that I never find in Scripture, and it is this concept, the unconditional love of God.

I'm going to explore this in greater detail in our next session, but for now I want to just say this. First I want to ask the question, where did this idea come from that God's love is unconditional? And what does this concept communicate?

Suppose I am preaching to non-believers and I'm saying to those people, God loves you unconditionally. You know they tell us in seminary that when you preach, you don't preach one sermon. You preach three sermons.

There's the sermon that the people hear, there's the sermon you thought you preached, and then there's the sermon that was actually preached, and they're not the same. So we have to understand that. And I ask myself, what does that impenitent, unconverted person hear when they listen to a sermon and they hear this announcement, God loves you unconditionally?

Let me tell you what he hears. He hears this, God loves me just as I am. I don't have to repent of my sins. I don't need a Savior. I don't have to worry about going to hell, because a God who loves everybody unconditionally won't ever send anybody to hell.

So I can keep on living a hellish life just as I am and never worry again about offending God because he cannot be offended, so unconditional is his love. I can't think of a more perilous message to communicate to people than to stand there and announce the unconditional love of God.

Now the motive for it obviously is that the preacher who has experienced the grace of God, who has experienced the redeeming love of God, is so overwhelmed by the dominion of God he wants to express it in the strongest terms.

He says, God's love is so wonderful, it's so powerful, it's so transcendent, we could even say it's unconditional. Don't do it, because you give the wrong message. God has placed an absolute condition upon the salvation of any person.

That person must embrace Christ by faith and trust in him and him alone, or that person will know only the divine wrath forever. Now, there is a love that comes from God that reaches all people, which is different from his saving love, and it's that love that we'll explore in our next session.