The Hatred of God

“My cellmate said a wild thing the other day. He told me that the word ‘hate’ is in the bible, somewhere in the Old Testament. I told him he was full of s***. that God doesn’t hate he only loves.” This was the first comment that emerged around the circle at the jail recently when I opened the space up for anyone to share what was on their mind. Not for the first time, I thought, “Huh, didn’t see that coming.” How to respond? “Well,” I said, “your cellmate is right, the word ‘hate’ is in the bible (around 200 times, depending on the English translation). It’s often even used in connection with God.” He looked at me suspiciously before exhaling through his teeth. “Really? Man, that’s f***ed up!”

The conversation that followed was, as always, a lively one. My interlocutor is the kind of guy who’s rarely short on commentary or opinions, but he was quite insistent that God wasn’t the sort of being that was allowed to “hate.” God’s job was to love, and hate was decidedly beneath him. Hate is the sort of thing that lands people in prisons, after all. I could understand his desire for the separation. He wanted (needed?) God to be free of all moral contaminants and encumbrances. He needed things to stay in their proper place.

I tried to make the distinction between hating people and hating behaviours. “God doesn’t hate people,” I said, “only the things they do that either harm others, thwart the flourishing they were made for, or render worship in improper and destructive directions.” He nodded warily. I could tell he was either getting bored or not really buying it. “God” and “hate” still didn’t belong together, in his world.

I tried a different approach. “Well, you’re a dad, right? What if your kid was getting mixed up in all kinds of bad things, things you knew were going to lead them down a terrible path? You wouldn’t hate your kid, but wouldn’t you hate what they were doing? Would not this hatred be an expression of your love for them and your desire for their best?” This one seemed to resonate a bit more. At least I thought it did. He grew quieter. Nodded his head. “Yeah, I guess.” He grinned. “But I still don’t like it.”

I thought back to a few weeks prior. This guy had shared with the group that he had recently been close to ending it all. He was off his head on drugs, shotgun loaded, barrel in his mouth, finger on the trigger. And then his phone rang. His young son was on the other end of the line. The son that he had been missing terribly. The son that he had felt like he had failed. The son that meant everything in the world to him. The son that ended up saving his life. This was, we all agreed, a “God moment.” A moment where God reached into the pain and sorrow and helplessness and rage of a human life and said, “Oh no you don’t, let’s try this again, shall we?”

As he told this story, I remember feeling a deep sadness. But not just sadness, also anger. It broke my heart, certainly, but it also enraged me that human lives can be so riven with pain. It seemed so unfair, so arbitrary, so goddamned common. The writer of Psalm 139 claimed to hate the enemies of God with “perfect hatred.” I can’t claim that there’s anything “perfect” about what goes through my mind when I hear awful stories like the one above, but hatred doesn’t seem like too strong a word. I hate the many things that make life so hard for so many. I hate the things within us (and within myself) that make us our own worst enemies. I hate the enemy that comes to steal, kill, and destroy. I hate it that so many people feel so small and useless, so forgotten and disdained.

I believe that God is love. This is one of the deepest truths of the cosmos. It is what I have banked my life on. It is the only source of my hope. But I also believe that this love is a purifying and clarifying agent. It does not and will not tolerate that which is false and destructive and degrading and dehumanizing. Even though I do not believe that there is anything that God cannot forgive, there are some things that I am very glad that God hates. Perfectly.