Hatred

My wife, Merle, and I mark correspondence course Bible lessons for prisoners through an organisation called Crossroad Prison Ministries.  It’s a wonderful program where we often see amazing results.  But mentoring prisoners can also be a little confronting and students do often ask perceptive but difficult questions.

A recent lesson from Roy was a good case in point.  Roy’s lesson included a study of Psalm 139.  This Psalm of David begins by highlighting that God knows us intimately and He is everywhere.  David makes clear that we cannot hide from God; nor can we hide anything from God, because, as David puts it, “Before a word is on my tongue, You, Lord, know it completely.”  Psalm 139 also has some beautiful images of God forming us in our Mother’s womb and it reminds us that God ordained all our days for us before one of them even came to be.  Psalm 139 is a favourite with many Bible-readers.

However, the closing section of that psalm often puzzles people – and it certainly caused problems for Roy.  In that Psalm’s closing verses David calls on God to destroy the wicked.  He uses some very strong language, “Do I not hate those who hate You O Lord?  And do I not loathe those who rise up against You?  I hate them with complete hatred.  I count them my enemies.”

Roy’s question was: “How can a song writer, who expressed so many wonderful thoughts about God, be so completely full of hatred?”

That’s a good question.  Maybe you share Roy’s concern.  Didn’t Jesus teach us the priority of love?  Jesus summed up the law of God by saying: You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and you shall love your neighbour as yourself.  In fact, Jesus even told us to love our enemies.  Yet here we have David saying how full of hate he was towards those who had rebelled against God.  And, by the way, David is not the only song-writer in the Bible who expresses such sentiments either.  The final verse of Psalm 137 is even more problematic.

So how would you answer Roy’s question?  Do we see such sentiments about hate and vengeance as just belonging to the less enlightened era of Old Testament times?  Or do we dismiss them as simply being the sinful sentiments of someone who was still less than perfect?  There was, in early Christian history, a man called Marcion.  He tried to solve this problem by claiming that the God of the Old Testament was not the same as the New Testament God who is the Father of Jesus.

Well, there has to be a better answer and I think there is.  The question I would ask is this: if you had been living in a European country occupied by the Nazis during World War II would it be okay to hate Adolph Hitler?  Or do you expect that Jesus might want you to love even Hitler?  Is it not possible that there is an enemy so evil and so opposed to God and all that is good, that we can do nothing else but hate them?

That was the issue that Dietrich Bonhoeffer faced.  He was a convinced pacifist and took the words of Jesus seriously about turning the other cheek.  But Bonhoeffer came to the point where he understood the utter evil of the Nazi regime, and therefore became involved in a plot to assassinate Hitler.  Bonhoeffer paid for that with his life.  Perhaps there is something wrong with us if we don’t hate such evil.

So where does that leave us when it comes to Jesus calling us to love even our enemies?  It seems to me that when Jesus told us to love our enemies he was talking about our own personal enemies – people who are perhaps giving us a hard time.  Loving such enemies can be, as they say, heaping burning coals on their head.  Many an enemy has been won over by deeds of loving kindness.

However when evil becomes institutionalised and systemic then that goes way beyond our personal likes and dislikes.  Remember too that David in Psalm 139 is not just speaking only as a private individual but as God’s anointed Ruler who is called to administer justice under God.  And that raises just one other issue: these were not just David’s enemies; he speaks of them as God’s enemies.

John Westendorp
2MaxFM March 15th 2026 

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