Hating the Enemies of God
Should we or should we not?
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Psalm 139 is one of my all-time favorites. It reminds me how much my Abba in Heaven, the Creator of the Universe, loves me—His little daughter—and has known me since I, too, was formed in my mother’s womb.
This psalm is one of the significant Pro-Life passages of holy scripture that prove that life begins at conception and that God watches over us in great detail, with love.
Psalms 139:1-24 For the director of music. Of David. A psalm. You have searched me, LORD, and you know me. (2) You know when I sit and when I rise; you perceive my thoughts from afar. (3) You discern my going out and my lying down; you are familiar with all my ways. (4) Before a word is on my tongue you, LORD, know it completely. (5) You hem me in behind and before, and you lay your hand upon me. (6) Such knowledge is too wonderful for me, too lofty for me to attain. (7) Where can I go from your Spirit? Where can I flee from your presence? (8) If I go up to the heavens, you are there; if I make my bed in the depths, you are there. (9) If I rise on the wings of the dawn, if I settle on the far side of the sea, (10) even there your hand will guide me, your right hand will hold me fast. (11) If I say, “Surely the darkness will hide me and the light become night around me,” (12) even the darkness will not be dark to you; the night will shine like the day, for darkness is as light to you. (13) For you created my inmost being; you knit me together in my mother’s womb. (14) I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made; your works are wonderful, I know that full well. (15) My frame was not hidden from you when I was made in the secret place, when I was woven together in the depths of the earth. (16) Your eyes saw my unformed body; all the days ordained for me were written in your book before one of them came to be. (17) How precious to me are your thoughts, God! How vast is the sum of them! (18) Were I to count them, they would outnumber the grains of sand— when I awake, I am still with you.
Such beautiful praise, such intimate conversation with God; David is praising the Lord and extolling His greatness.
Then we come upon the last six verses, and it seems these thoughts don’t belong; to the Western mind, they are dissonant.
(19) If only you, God, would slay the wicked! Away from me, you who are bloodthirsty! (20) They speak of you with evil intent; your adversaries misuse your name. (21) Do I not hate those who hate you, LORD, and abhor those who are in rebellion against you? (22) I have nothing but hatred for them; I count them my enemies. (23) Search me, God, and know my heart; test me and know my anxious thoughts. (24) See if there is any offensive way in me, and lead me in the way everlasting.
To be fair to David, we must recognize that right at the end of this portion of the verse; he is asking God to ensure that he (David) is not also an enemy! He does not want to be on the outs with the Lord, so he asks God to give him a checkup to ensure he is in fellowship! What an attitude to emulate! No wonder God called David a man after His own heart!
Modern Christians don’t understand this talk of hate, so they try to clothe it as a shortcoming on David’s part. They say it demonstrates David’s sinfulness.
They will point to the fact that Jesus told us how to treat our own enemies. We are to forgive those who trespass against US. We are to love OUR enemies.
That is not the same as dealing with evil men for what they do to others.
We Christians get confused about this issue, so we try to force ourselves to have emotional love for ungodly, unrepentant people who steal, kill, and destroy others just like their father, the devil.
Again. We humans only have the power to forgive those who trespass against US. It is not morally right or virtuous to forgive those who commit crimes against the innocent and weak – that is not love. That is confusion.
For instance:
I cannot forgive Ted Bundy, even if I wanted to, because he did not sin against me. Giving a blanket pardon in the name of LOVE is a great disservice to Bundy’s victims. It belongs to God to judge. I could pray for Bundy or his victims’ families, or however the Spirit should lead me, but I have no business putting myself in the judge’s seat on a matter that does not personally concern me. Do you see?
To extrapolate a little further, perhaps someone has sinned against you, and I learn of it; I may take up the offense for you, but I cannot forgive them. Only you can.
On the other hand, if I take up the offense on your behalf, that will only harm me because God gives grace to the one who has been wronged; there is such a thing as being a busybody, but that’s a lesson for another time.
If we all did our job as believers, there would be plenty of righteousness and peace going around; many would receive forgiveness from us for something within our personal experience that demands it of us.
When we sin, we go to God for forgiveness for our sins – then we receive mercy by the blood of Jesus, and through faith, we are cleansed.
Nobody else can bring us into the right relationship with the Father except the Son through the working of the Holy Spirit. Nobody else can forgive our sins.
We can forgive someone for sinning against us personally, but we cannot absolve them of their sins. That is God’s work.
Jesus modeled true forgiveness by laying down His life for us while we were still His enemies. But we had to embrace the forgiveness provided for us before it did US any good. The gift was there from the moment He decided to give it. It was full of glory and love, mercy, and yet also full of justice--the soul that sins must die. Jesus stepped in and took that death on behalf of every sinner. So it is only by faith that one confesses sin, asks for pardon from the death he deserves, and receives forgiveness and a new life.
When someone comes to us for the forgiveness of sins they have committed against someone else, we can pray for them and help them understand the steps to repentance, restitution, and restoration, but we cannot do the work of the Holy Spirit. That is between them and God.
When someone sins against us, Jesus tells us how to handle it if they ask for forgiveness.
Matthew 18:21-35 Then Peter came to Jesus and asked, “Lord, how many times shall I forgive my brother or sister who sins against me? Up to seven times?” (22) Jesus answered, “I tell you, not seven times, but seventy-seven times.
Jesus wasn’t assigning a multiplication problem for Peter to solve; He was putting a point across; just as our Father in Heaven forgives us repeatedly, we are to attempt to do the same thing toward our brother or sister who sins against us.
(23) “Therefore, the kingdom of heaven is like a king who wanted to settle accounts with his servants. (24) As he began the settlement, a man who owed him ten thousand bags of gold was brought to him. (25) Since he was not able to pay, the master ordered that he and his wife and his children and all that he had be sold to repay the debt. (26) “At this the servant fell on his knees before him. ‘Be patient with me,’ he begged, ‘and I will pay back everything.’ (27) The servant’s master took pity on him, canceled the debt and let him go.
The master in this parable is our Heavenly Father. We beg for forgiveness of our genuine debts, and He forgives us on our promise to repay all we owe.
(28) “But when that servant went out, he found one of his fellow servants who owed him a hundred silver coins. He grabbed him and began to choke him. ‘Pay back what you owe me!’ he demanded. (29) “His fellow servant fell to his knees and begged him, ‘Be patient with me, and I will pay it back.’ (30) “But he refused. Instead, he went off and had the man thrown into prison until he could pay the debt.
I am always amazed when I read this portion of the parable; it is like the left hand doesn’t know what the right hand is doing—there is no continuity of understanding, no ability to correlate how we expect God to treat us and how He expects us to treat others.
(31) When the other servants saw what had happened, they were outraged and went and told their master everything that had happened. (32) “Then the master called the servant in. ‘You wicked servant,’ he said, ‘I canceled all that debt of yours because you begged me to. (33) Shouldn’t you have had mercy on your fellow servant just as I had on you?’ (34) In anger his master handed him over to the jailers to be tortured, until he should pay back all he owed. (35) “This is how my heavenly Father will treat each of you unless you forgive your brother or sister from your heart.”
This warning from Jesus to His disciples—such are you and I—warrants our full attention. If we don’t forgive each other from our hearts, we will receive from our Father in Heaven what we have dished out to our brothers and sister.
In Paul’s letter to the Ephesians, he addressed the issue of the believer’s godliness and faithfulness in earthly relationships:
Ephesians 4:17-27 So I tell you this, and insist on it in the Lord, that you must no longer live as the Gentiles do, in the futility of their thinking. (18) They are darkened in their understanding and separated from the life of God because of the ignorance that is in them due to the hardening of their hearts. (19) Having lost all sensitivity, they have given themselves over to sensuality so as to indulge in every kind of impurity, and they are full of greed.
Paul called out the Gentiles’ way of relating to God and each other: darkness, futile, separated, ignorant, hard-hearted, insensitive, given to sensuality, impure, and full of greed.
(20) That, however, is not the way of life you learned (21) when you heard about Christ and were taught in him in accordance with the truth that is in Jesus. (22) You were taught, with regard to your former way of life, to put off your old self, which is being corrupted by its deceitful desires; (23) to be made new in the attitude of your minds; (24) and to put on the new self, created to be like God in true righteousness and holiness. (25) Therefore each of you must put off falsehood and speak truthfully to your neighbor, for we are all members of one body.
Paul’s revolutionary words have challenged believers ever since he wrote them. He reminded them that they were taught the truth in Christ Jesus: to renounce the old self with its deceitful desires, to be made new in attitude, to put on the new self, which God created to be righteous and holy, and to speak truthfully to their neighbors because we are all members of one body—THE BODY OF CHRIST!
(26) “In your anger do not sin”: Do not let the sun go down while you are still angry, (27) and do not give the devil a foothold.
Now that we understand what God expects of us in our relationships with other believers, we must confront the last six verses of Psalm 139. Why? Because some believers may find that they carry a sense of false guilt over hating the works of evil men, and they won’t know how to dispose of their anger and hatred without sinning.
In Perelandra, by C.S. Lewis, Ransom must physically fight the demoniac, Weston--or as Ranson calls him, the Unman--to save Perelandra from falling as Earth did in the days of Adam and Eve. Grappling, struggling, clawing from above ground and into deep caverns below the surface, Ransom has a revelation about his desperate fight against evil: “The joy came from finding at last what hatred was made for.”
Back to King David:
(19) If only you, God, would slay the wicked! Away from me, you who are bloodthirsty! (20) They speak of you with evil intent; your adversaries misuse your name. (21) Do I not hate those who hate you, LORD, and abhor those who are in rebellion against you? (22) I have nothing but hatred for them; I count them my enemies. (23) Search me, God, and know my heart; test me and know my anxious thoughts. (24) See if there is any offensive way in me, and lead me in the way everlasting.
Moral equivocation has been the downfall of our nation. A true black and white exists-- true righteousness versus vile wickedness. We must have our compasses set to True North and follow our Lord. There is no flattening the curve, no grading on a scale.
It is one thing to have empathy and compassion for someone who has sinned because we have done the same and know how miserable it is. But make no mistake about it; it is an affront to a holy God to try to excuse or be soft on sin that destroys the life of another.
We cannot do a proper job in our spiritual warfare if we are unclear about the line between good and evil.
There are terrible evils that are being uncovered in this nation. We grieve over the unspeakable horrors being revealed against babies and children; we cry out to God concerning what has been going on under our government buildings and institutions, down in tunnels, where our military is fighting a terrible battle to set prisoners free and execute the wicked.
We do a terrible injustice to those poor little ones if we seek to excuse or justify those who have ravaged and destroyed their lives! We cannot blame the sin of the wicked on lousy upbringing or pity them! In our spiritual battle, we must be clear in our understanding of evil. This nation got in trouble once we began to call something a “sickness” instead of a sin.
How do we respond?
When I first understood this concept of forgiving others for what they did to me, I listed people who had harmed me and wrote down exactly what I was forgiving them for. By writing these down, I learned which things were done to me and which were not. That clarified my position before God. As I prayed for myself, I also prayed for those I was called to forgive. God helped me to do it, and I felt great peace.
But what about the heinous crimes committed at every government level against innocents? Am I wrong to hate them? And, is the call to forgive extended to them? Must I emotionally love them and sorrowfully, perhaps even regretfully, ignore what they have done?
Talk is cheap. Anyone can say words. That is not repentance. That is not sorrow. Godly sorrow leads to repentance. To repent is to be ready to turn around and renounce the old ways. It is also to be prepared to pay restitution and to make amends to whomever we have wronged (nothing drives our repentance home, like listing what we owe and becoming determined to pay it back).
I must side with David. I am only human, and I know my limitations. I hate the evildoers, and I want nothing to do with them. I will not administer a false salve for their sakes, and I have no real power to do so. If I were to meet one of the perpetrators, I would be harsh about his sin and tell him what judgment God’s word says he will meet unless he repents.
One final thought.
We know that when Jesus returns, He will return as the Conquering King of kings, the Lion of the Tribe of Judah. No one evil will be able to stand, and there will be a great slaughter as Jesus purges the earth of evil men and restores the righteous to their rightful place.
Jesus alone knows who is His and Who He has loved. We can never think we are more righteous than Jesus – we must never presume to know better than He who should live and who should die. He never asked us to judge the world or to take vengeance on evildoers; He asked us to forgive those who had harmed us and to walk in the Spirit.
Is it wrong to hate those who hate God? No, it is healthy; it demonstrates that we understand what God requires of man and that we agree with His righteous Law.
But let’s remember that David was the king, and it was within his purview to deal with sinners according to God’s Law and by God’s word! God has appointed rulers to dispense and keep His law. He has given them authority to deal with lawbreakers.
When a government is righteous and dispenses God’s Law and Word to the people, it will have a military body to enforce that law; this is God’s plan until Messiah comes.
Our government has failed, and there is rot in the core. Innocents are slaughtered, the Church is oppressed, and the people cry for justice. We hate those who cheat and lie and take advantage of the poor, the powerless, the widow, the orphan, and those wrongfully imprisoned; God hates these, too.
Remember that while we were yet sinners, Christ died for the ungodly (that’s you and me). God will show mercy to whom He will show mercy, and He will not turn anyone who calls on His name away.
The solution to the issue of hatred for God’s enemies is this:
1. ASK for His Mercy on our behalf
2. ASK for His Mercy on behalf of all who suffer
3. ASK for His Mercy for those who cause the suffering.
In this, we will be most like Jesus. We leave it to God’s Mercy to decide, releasing us from the burden and responsibility of sitting in the Judgment Seat.
My brothers and sisters, this is a spiritual battle our souls must engage and overcome so that our spiritual warfare is most effective, being led by the Holy Spirit, Whose job—according to JESUS- is to convict and convince concerning sin, righteousness, and judgment.
Shalom,
Pastora Cate