God Hates Persons?

We are informed that God hates sinners.

This can be seen on any number of you tube posts.

What troubles me is the self righteousness of the assertion that if God does not hate those who claim this  then they are not sinners. This is as if the Apostle John never spoke when he said "He who claims to have no sin is a liar and the truth is not in him."

We are all sinners. If God hates sinners then God hates every one of us and we are all damned. For surely he who hates wishes the destruction or suffering of those he hates. Calvinists may assert this of God , but it is written  that God is not willing that any should perish.

But even if this is not so, and I am hard pressed to think how it could not be so, but for the sake of argument let us grant that God is willing that some perish, are we to believe that when the Holy Spirit reaches out to sinners to save any sinner that this is an act of hatred, for it must be if God hates sinners?

God hated sinners so much that He reached out to the Apostle Paul on the Damascus Road that dark night, and to me also in my own smaller Damascus Road conversion  just over 36 years ago?.

Hatred?

Really?

And what of when scripture says the opposite? For it says "God  commends His love to us in that while we were yet sinners Christ died for us."

While we were sinners He did the ultimate act of love and died for us.  He would not die for a good man, as Paul said, but for a sinner. Yet He hates sinners, these fanatical preachers would have us believe.

God hates sin, but the classic distinction between a God who hates sin and loves sinners has been lost by naive literalists who hunt through Scripture for verses to confirm their prejudices and then wrench these passage out of context.  For context it is that often determines meaning: sometime immediate context, sometime however the context is broad.

Where did this teaching come from then if it is so false?

Among other verses pressed into service for this error is "Jacob I loved but Esau I hated"

Clearly, then, God hates persons.

And if God hates persons then surely we who are born again are to imitate God and hate persons also. This is the most chilling implication of such an idea: that religious fanatics will run riot  in hatred and call it loving God. It is as if Jesus never said of those who were murdering Him on the cross, "forgive them for they know not what they are doing."

But if we are all protestants here then we know that some bible verses are not to be taken literally. After all we all flatly deny that "this is my body" means that we are eating Christ in the communion service. The passage is a metaphor for intimate relational communion, and to take it in such a naively  literalistic fashion is to miss the point of it completely. Indeed the forlorn queues of Church members lining up like cars as a gas station to take their weekly shot of bread and wine demonstrate that all intimacy and relationship is shown to be lost by this doctrine.

Are there any passages where context shows that  hate is used metaphorically, or as hyperbole?

Yes indeed there is  "unless any man hate his father, mother even his own life he cannot be my disciple," Jesus said. But are we therefore to break the 5th commandment on principle and literally hate our parents? Of course not. The meaning here is that our love for Him should be so deep that our love for any other, which is indeed commanded of us, is to be almost as hate by comparison. This is what hyperbole is, a literary exaggeration to make a point.

And Hebrew is full of such devices.

Failing to notice these is a species of word twisting which likely, to try and put the best construction on  their motivation for such things,  emerged from  a pious but misguided determination to avoid word twisting by ignoring such things as the style and mechanical workings, so to speak, of a language.

So what in fact does "Jacob I loved" actually mean? Does a non literal interpretation do violence to the meaning of the thing?

I take it that "Esau I hated is a hyperbole for "Esau I strongly disapproved of."

There is no violence to meaning here, though naive literalists may demur, as the change is subtle but of immensely significant import, because if God does hate persons then the Scripture "he is no respecter of persons" is false. This would mean that God plays favourites, is not impartial and so is no just Judge.

So does God only love those who He knows will respond to Him? Well, firstly no Calvinist can take this line for they hold that Grace is irresistible- if God speaks to anyone then they will respond. End of story. Incidentally I mention Calvinism as to my knowledge the notion that God hates persons is a Calvinist doctrine, but I will take correction on this if proffered.

So God loves those who respond to Him?  Then he clearly only sent His son for the elect, flatly and blasphemously denying the meaning of the most famous verse in Scripture John 3:16 - "For God so loved the world that He sent his only begotten Son that whosoever believe should not perish but have eternal life."

Some may cite John 14:21 -23 which implies when lifted out of context that God only loves those who obey Him and love Him first. But this cannot be the case, for elsewhere it says "we love as He first loved us."  Indeed, if we are carnal, have minds set on the flesh and so cannot submit, it can be no other way. We will love because He first loved us and only because He first loved us, or we remain dead in sin and carnality. But  then as we love him as a result of this He will manifest his love even further, a kind of virtuous cycle moving us from glory to glory as we are transformed by the renewing of our minds through one on one tutelage in personal relationship with the Holy Spirit as his disciples.

So, as God is love, He must necessarily love all without favouritism. or His love is only human and so is not agape.

Therefore God does not hate persons, for all the Hebraic metaphor which states when misread that He does.

And what is the significance of this?

If they preach a God who hates person they themselves are of little faith. They may likely never have  tasted the goodness of the Lord for themselves so are in no position to preach when they do not believe.

Moreover if some people decide that such as God as they preach is a monster, as indeed He would be if this doctrine were true, and so reject Him, who will God work his  vengeance on but the preacher who encouraged this rejection  of the gospel?  This is why it is written "let not many become teachers lest we incur as stricter judgement."

That God is love is scriptural. It is indeed the primary core of Who and What God the Almighty, the Holy and Terrible, is. That this term must be explained in order to expose the abuse which is easy believism and other such indulgent presumptions  and to place it properly with His wrath  where the carnal mind will choose one or  the other to their destruction, this is of course, is axiomatic.

But such abuses are not countered by embracing the opposite error, namely that God hates persons.

Let the Paul Washers and the David  Platts of the church repent of preaching this that they cease encouraging the rejection of the faith by others, and that they also may rediscover the goodness of the Lord  for themselves. For they  have forsaken this if they ever knew it in the first place, and in their denial, based on their own hatred and rage they  preach a God much like themselves, namely of God who hates persons