If you’re going to hate, hate like God.
In preparation for 2025’s Exploring the Bible seminar on Reading, Understanding, and Responding to the Bible I was reading in the psalms and struck—as I have been in the past, but haven’t given as much time to it—by the way the psalmists talk about God hating not just things (like sin), but people. In particular, I was struck by this verse: “You hate all who do wrong.” (Ps 5:5, NIV)
For a long time I think I’ve kind of just let statements like that one go, because I didn’t know what to do with them. It's one thing to think of a person hating something or someone else—it’s not comfortable, but I don’t think it seems foreign to us—it’s quite another to think of God hating someone. But there it was (and is) in the psalms.
To be fair to that statement from Psalm 5:5, it doesn’t exist on its own; it finds its place within the larger context of the surrounding verses, which read:
“In the morning, Lord, you hear my voice; in the morning I lay my requests before you and wait expectantly. For you are not a God who is pleased with wickedness; with you, evil people are not welcome. The arrogant cannot stand in your presence. You hate all who do wrong; you destroy those who tell lies. The bloodthirsty and deceitful you, Lord, detest. But I, by your great love, can come into your house; in reverence I bow down toward your holy temple.” (Ps 5:3-7, NIV)
It's clear to see that David’s focus in writing this section of the psalm is on God’s response to wickedness—in particular, those who do wickedness. He writes, “…evil people are not welcome. The arrogant cannot stand in your presence.” The point is clear enough: when it comes to being with God, evil and those who do it are not welcome. He continues to explain this by writing that God hates “all who do wrong.” Further, that God detests “the bloodthirsty and deceitful.” Humanity was out of luck then, right? Amazingly, that statement is quickly followed up by one on God’s love. David writes, “But I, by your great love, can come into your house.”
At least two things seem to be true in Psalm 5:3-7. The first: that God hates, not just the wrong that people do, but the people who do the wrong. The second: that in God’s great love, David—who wasn’t perfect by any stretch of the imagination—can somehow come into God’s house.
Should we just toss this difficulty up to the poetic nature of the psalms? God doesn’t really hate anyone, that’s just a way a strong idea was expressed back in the day—similarly to saying that God doesn’t really get angry, although the Bible speaks of him getting angry. I don’t think that quite works, because there are also a lot of nice things said about God throughout the psalms—and as we just saw, right after that statement about hate. Would we also be so eager to treat those nicer statements in the same way? I also don’t think so. I do, though, think something peculiar is going on with this hate language that must be interpreted correctly to avoid misunderstanding the statements.
When you and I think about hate, we almost always think of it as an overwhelming emotional response toward a person or thing. If I say I hate Ryan who lives down the street, I mean that Ryan (as a person) really, really, really bothers me. If I say I hate him, I mean I don’t want him around at all. I mean that even his existence bothers me. That’s why a lot of us are taught to keep away from that type of language. To say we hate someone means roughly that we wish they didn’t exist. The question, then, is this: is that what the Scriptures mean when they speak of God hating all who do wrong?
I was particularly helped on this matter by looking at one of the clearest hate statements in the Bible, found within the New Testament. Paul, in Romans, quotes the prophet Malachi, and writes, “Jacob I loved, but Esau I hated.” (Ro 9:13, NIV) Pretty clear, right? God enjoys having Jacob around, but he wishes Esau would beat it, forever. The New Living Translation is really helpful here.
The translators of the NLT translated Romans 9:13 a little differently than the NIV. They went with, “I loved Jacob, but I rejected Esau.” I know you noticed the difference. Where the NIV translators set love and hate side-by-side, the NLT translators switched it up a little by setting love and rejected side-by-side. Why did they do that?
Romans 9:13 is not a difficult verse to translate from Greek into English. The two main words we’re looking at are agapao and miseo. Agapao is the Greek verb often translated as love, and miseo is the Greek verb often translated as hate. However, as I’ve mentioned elsewhere, when it comes to translating the Greek of the New Testament into English, context determines translation.
The translation process is way more involved than a simple equation of something like this Greek word equals that English word. One Greek word might be translated a number of different ways into English, because—just as it is in English—the same word isn’t always used in the same way depending on the context in which it’s used.
Think of the word love in English. If you say that you love your mom and that you love pizza, you don’t mean the same thing. If you were translating your statement about loving pizza into another language, you might want to be clear in that other language that you don’t mean you feel the same way about pizza that you do your mom. That’s kind of what’s going on with the NLT’s translation of Romans 9:13.
The NLT translators have decided that although miseo is used—and it’s often the right decision to translate it strictly as hate elsewhere—here it’s probably not the best decision, because what Paul is saying is that although God has chosen to accept Jacob (i.e., Israel—his chosen people), he is not going to accept those outside—he is rejecting them. My suggestion, to make this sentiment clearer, would have been translate agapao not as love, but as accept, so the verse would have ended up reading, “I accepted Jacob, but I rejected Esau.”
In the context of Romans 9 and the quotation of Malachi (reaching all the way back to Genesis) God is saying he is going to accept (i.e., love) all those who make him their God, and he will reject (i.e., hate) all those who don’t make him their God. It’s as if God was saying something like this: “By me choosing Jacob over Esau, before either of them had been born, I’m showing you that I have decided to make a people for myself out of the world. In them I will show my righteousness as I set my acceptance on them. They, in turn, will show their acceptance of me in the way they follow my direction to live a righteous life. As a result, you will also see my rejection of wickedness by the way I am against, and have rejected, those who do not follow me, and thus choose to make their lives in wickedness.”
This is how God hates.
His hatred is rejection. And his rejection is based on the rejection of those he created to have life. Those who reject God have been and will be given the rejection they’re seeking—God will reject them, too. When the psalmists (and others throughout the Bible) speak of God loving someone, they mean that God has chosen to favor and accept them. When those same psalmists (and others throughout the Bible) speak of God hating someone, they mean that God has chosen to reject them (partially now, and completely later).
Further—and this is really where we get to the point of this article—we must say that the way God has hated and continues to hate, is not by outright rejection just because someone has rejected him. The cross and resurrection stand in direct opposition against this sort of thinking.
God has been and continues to be rejected again, and again, and again, by countless people who have lived, are living now, and will live later, but that did not stop God from doing something for them. He made a way for them to come back, in the midst of their rejection, to experience life in him. He has removed any barrier to them coming home—the road closed signs have been removed, and the directions are clear.
For all those who at one point rejected God—which was all of us at one point or another—he has said, “Look at how much I love you by what I have done for you. I have put away your sin. I have offered life to you. Won’t you take it? Don’t you want to live? I have life in me, and I’m gladly offering it to you. And lest you think that because of your abounding sin you cannot come home, I’m telling you that as your sin has increased and may even increase later, my grace will not just match your sin, but far exceed it. You cannot out-sin my love for you.”
This is how God hates.
He is clear that he will not wink an eye at, or tolerate sin. Sin cannot come near him, because he will not allow it. His righteousness precludes that from happening. He will not welcome wickedness, but he will welcome the wicked. He will welcome you and I in the midst of our sin. He will welcome us if we want to come home. He has just one requirement: our sin cannot come with us.
So, if you and I are going to hate, we ought to hate like God. We do not need to welcome wickedness, and we do not need to welcome those who choose to live their lives in wickedness. We, however, do need to make sure those who choose to live their lives in wickedness know that there is a way home, and that the door has not been closed to them. It’s also a good idea for us to remember that, in all our rejection of wickedness, we are not God. He is the only one who is righteous to his core. We have lived in sin. We have loved sin. We have had to come back home. God has always been home. This is, of course, good for us because it allows us to invite people home in humility. We’ve had to come home, too, so we can show them the way.