Divine Hatred

The boastful will not stand before Your eyes; You hate all who do injustice.  Psalm 5:5  NASB

Injustice – The God of love hates something—ʾāwen.  Maybe we don’t think about the “loving” God as a God who hates, but we need to.  Why?  Because the ethical foundation of the creation isn’t the work of a “Santa Claus” God.  It’s the work of a holy, righteous God, and a holy, righteous God despises anything that works against His purposes.  In fact, He hates these things.  The Hebrew verb is śānēʾ.

It expresses an emotional attitude toward persons and things which are opposed, detested, despised and with which one wishes to have no contact or relationship. It is therefore the opposite of love. Whereas love draws and unites, hate separates and keeps distant. The hated and hating persons are considered foes or enemies and are considered odious, utterly unappealing.^[1]

Notice that the verb is emotional!  God feels revulsion toward wickedness.  It’s personal for Him.  This personal disgust is aimed, not at the idea of injustice, nor at the actions of injustice, but at the people who act unjustly.  They are the object of His hatred.  We make a mistake by spouting the often-heard aphorism, “Hate the sin but love the sinner.”  That’s not what the psalmist tells us.  God hates them!   God personally despises, detests, and is opposed to them!  Given this unmitigated hatred toward those who act unjustly, what do we do with a verse like this: “The Lord is not slow about His promise, as some count slowness, but is patient toward you, not wishing for any to perish but for all to come to repentance” (2 Peter 3:9)?  Is the apparent contradiction grounds for the theological argument that the God of the “Old Testament” was a vengeful, angry God, but the God of the “New Testament” is loving and forgiving, as some have claimed?  Perhaps we need to know exactly what “injustice” is before we write of this verse as ethically unacceptable.

“ . . . all who do injustice” uses the Hebrew term ʾāwen.  Found eighty-five times in the Tanach, it covers the ideas of trouble, sorrow, idolatry, wickedness, emptiness, and iniquity.  “The primary meaning of the word seems to have two facets: a stress on trouble which moves on to wickedness, and an emphasis on emptiness which moves on to idolatry.”^[2]  Notice that the word is directional.  It moves from one condition toward another.  Trouble, in itself, is not hated by God.  But trouble without reliance on God’s faithfulness pushes us toward a rejection of God’s sovereignty, namely, wickedness, that is, rešaʿ, as we saw in the previous verse, “the negative behavior of evil thoughts, words and deeds, a behavior not only contrary to God’s character, but also hostile to the community and which at the same time betrays the inner disharmony and unrest of a man.” ^[3]  Just so, emptiness is not evil, but it can lean toward filling that space with something other than God.  And that is idolatry.

Who, then, are those who do injustice?  Those who set a trajectory that leads to wickedness or idolatry.  What is that trajectory?  The refusal to accept God’s sovereignty and God’s sufficiency.  Not the kind of “injustice” we’re used to in our modern social-justice world, is it?  Livingston notes, “Since the word stresses the planning and expression of deception and points to the painful aftermath of sin, it should be noted more.”^[4]  Those who do injustice do so deliberately!  They exile God from His rightful place as Lord of all.  They turn to themselves in times of stress.  They neither seek nor countenance divine intervention.  They are, in the words of Marcel Eliade, “ non-religious,” without reference to anything other than themselves.  We have plenty of examples.

And God hates them!

He may wish that they could be saved, restored, returned to His purposes, but the fact that they choose to oppose the Creator at every possible turn means they are His enemies.  And enemies must be defeated.

Topical Index: hate, śānēʾ, wickedness, rešaʿ, injustice, ʾāwen, trouble, idolatry, Psalm 5:5

^[1] (1999). 2272 שָׂנֵא. In R. L. Harris, G. L. Archer Jr., & B. K. Waltke (Eds.), Theological Wordbook of the Old Testament (electronic ed., p. 880). Moody Press.

^[2] Livingston, G. H. (1999). 48 און. In R. L. Harris, G. L. Archer Jr., & B. K. Waltke (Eds.), Theological Wordbook of the Old Testament(electronic ed., p. 23). Moody Press.

^[3] Livingston, G. H. (1999). 2222 רָשַׁע. In R. L. Harris, G. L. Archer Jr., & B. K. Waltke (Eds.), Theological Wordbook of the Old Testament(electronic ed., p. 863). Moody Press.

^[4] Livingston, G. H. (1999). 48 און. In R. L. Harris, G. L. Archer Jr., & B. K. Waltke (Eds.), Theological Wordbook of the Old Testament(electronic ed., p. 24). Moody Press.