God Loves… Himself

Romans 1:18-32 shows very clearly that all unbelievers hate God. The text does not use the word hate, but if we are looking at what it means to hate God Romans 1:18-32 gives us what that means in a very practical way. We tend to think of hatred as being anger and detesting of another with the desire to do them harm. We might think of it as only hot feelings set against another. But Scripture drives us to other ways of looking at hatred. As we have looked at in other BLOGS, hatred would include the inward displeasure with the character of another. That means that to hate another takes on a far broader meaning. Romans 1:18-20 tells us that God is obvious to all people because God makes Himself evident to them. He makes Himself evident to them by making Himself known within them and then through nature. As a result of these things all human beings are without excuse.

Yet, verse 21 tells us that even though all people know God, these people do not honor Him as God or give thanks. Instead of honoring Him, they become futile in their speculations and their heart is darkened. The foolish heart that is darkened is proud and thinks of itself wise when in fact that heart has become foolish. What that dark and foolish heart does is to exchange the glory of God for forms of humans and animals. What is this but a trading the knowledge and worship of God for the worship of false gods in the form of humans and animals? That is an act of hatred toward God. The response of God is to turn them over to the lusts of their hearts. The sin that they fall into is their punishment. The hatred that they have of God leads them to suppress the truth of Him even more and so they are turned over to more and more darkness. Their hatred of God becomes a greater hatred. In doing this what we see is that the dark and foolish heart of human beings exchanges the truth of God for a lie. The creature is then worshipped. This is a practical hatred of God.

In human terms if a person takes the known character of a second person and then intentionally turns from the known character to say terrible things of the second person, we would call that hatred. That is what unbelievers do to God. This would, of course, include many in the religious world as well. The text does not exclude religious people, but in fact mentions idolatry (in practice) several times. What we have, then, is a description of the heart that hates God. This is a heart that lives as it lives by exchanging the truth of who God is so that it can go on in its sin. This leads to more sin which is in itself hatred of God. Unbelievers do not just live for themselves, which they wholeheartedly do, but in living for self they are also being the image of the devil in the world. Their life of sin is an act of enmity toward God and the seed of the woman. Sin itself is hatred toward God in that it is an act which shows a person detests the character of God in His holiness and loves the opposite of holiness which is sin. The more one is given over to sin the more one is given over to hatred of God.

Verse 28 shows the same point as well. This knowledge of God that God has made evident to people within them and to them (v. 19) they do not want to retain. This refusal to acknowledge God is really a refusal to retain the knowledge of Him that He has placed within the human soul. This is an active displeasure toward the knowledge of God and is a desire for Him to cease from existence. The reason that this knowledge of God is pushed out with a refusal to recognize it is because sinners hate Him and do not want to recognize Him and His rights over them. When this knowledge is pushed out, suppressed, or cast away with detestation, this is an act of hatred toward God and is as opposite of the Great Commandment to love Him with all of the being that there can be. We are to pursue the knowledge of God and we are to love Him. But instead of pursuing more knowledge of God, unbelievers try to push out the knowledge of God that is there already. Instead of loving the God that they know, unbelievers hate that God and try to get Him out of their knowledge.

Day in and day out the unbeliever has a ferocious hatred of God as s/he will not acknowledge God and will not love Him. Day in and day out the unbeliever hates God and will not retain Him in knowledge but instead pursues sin which in itself is an act of hatred of God. When Jesus walked on earth He was hated because He was God in human flesh. The glory that unbelievers exchange for a lie and suppresses with all their energy was now walking and teaching among them. They hated Him so much that they killed Him. Scripture also promises believers now that if we wish to live godly in Christ Jesus we will also be persecuted (II Timothy 3:12). Why is that? True godliness is to be centered upon God. A true likeness of Christ is for us to shine forth Christ. People will hate that because they hate God. Imagine, then, what many do who try to make God a likeable character to people in evangelism. They have also hated God and so have changed Him to make Him acceptable to others and themselves. This is truly a great wickedness and is an act of hatred for God and for the Gospel of God.

It offends and puzzles many people when someone makes the claim that each and every unbeliever hates God. If we think of hate as this burning dislike and desire to do harm, many people do not think that they have that toward God. This hatred can come in different ways and be hidden from us and others as well. Hatred for God can be hidden in ways of religion and of Christianity as well. It is hidden in humanism and it is hidden in forms of what some would term as God-centeredness. It is hidden, though not very well, in Pelagian forms of theology. It can also be hidden in Arminian and Reformed versions of theology. Is there a branch of theology that it cannot be hidden in? There is not. The human heart is born dead in sin and is at enmity with God. The human heart has God in its knowledge but it does not want Him there. So the depraved heart that is steeped in self-love and deceitfulness casts God out of its knowledge even in holding to versions of theology. The human heart can hate God and still hold the truth of God in its creed and yet use that truth to deceive itself about the hatred of its heart for God. When Jeremiah 17:9 tells us that “the heart is more deceitful than all else,” we should listen and cry out to God about our own.

When we hate another we hate something about that person that is very disagreeable to us. Cain is the example for this: “For this is the message which you have heard from the beginning, that we should love one another; 12 not as Cain, who was of the evil one and slew his brother. And for what reason did he slay him? Because his deeds were evil, and his brother’s were righteous” (I John 3:11-12). Cain hated Abel because Abel’s actions and sacrifices were righteous and Cain’s were not (see also Genesis 4). Regardless of what God thought about Abel’s actions, they were disagreeable to Cain and so he hated and killed Abel. Abel pleased God and Cain did not. Behind that is that Abel did what was commanded of God and so his sacrifices were pleasing to God. Cain did not do what was commanded and so his offerings were not acceptable. He could not change or harm God so he killed Abel. His real hatred, however, was at God. Abel’s offerings pointed to the truth about God and how God alone could set out how to please Him and how He was to be approached. Cain wanted to do what was right in his own eyes and do things the way he wanted. Genesis 9:6 tells us the real problem with murder: “Whoever sheds man’s blood, by man his blood shall be shed, for in the image of God He made man.” The real crime with murder is that it is an attack on God. Cain hated God and so struck at the image of God who was his brother Abel. Cain hated God.

What this passage teaches us is that hatred for God can come out in several ways. Cain was born in the image of his father Adam who was a fallen man at this point. Notice that contrast between Genesis 5:1 and 5:3: “This is the book of the generations of Adam. In the day when God created man, He made him in the likeness of God. 2 He created them male and female, and He blessed them and named them Man in the day when they were created. 3 When Adam had lived one hundred and thirty years, he became the father of a son in his own likeness, according to his image, and named him Seth.” In verse one God created man in the likeness of God. After the fall, Adam became a father of a son in his own likeness and according to his own image. Cain was born dead in sin with enmity toward God. Part of the curse that was placed on Satan in Genesis 3:15 is that there would be enmity between the seeds. Cain hated Abel because there was enmity between the seed of the woman and the seed of the Serpent. Cain did acts of worship and offered sacrifices to God, but his hatred was hidden even by his “worship.”

Throughout the history of Israel the external worship was kept up and yet the people committed acts of enmity against God by following other gods and worshipping idols. They kept a pretense up toward God but in truth they hated Him. The same thing is true today. There is much pretense of worship going on in buildings that have the name “Christian” on them, but the external acts of worship are only hiding the true hatred of God that is in the hearts of people. Professing atheists and open sinners only maintain their acts of sin by not retaining the knowledge of God (Romans 1:21, 28). When they push this knowledge of God that they have out, they are then filled with all sorts of sin (v. 29). But the same thing is true of those who claim to be Christians. By their religion they are trying for a good conscience so they can sleep and not be utterly miserable, but their very religion can only be arrived at by casting out the knowledge of God and then being filled with wickedness. When someone comes along and points to the truth of who God is, the hidden hatred in the heart will come out. The true God is very disagreeable to people as He is opposite to who they are and what they desire. A person that points out the truth of who God is to people will be the instrument of arousing the hatred of people and the hatred of God that they have will come out toward the messenger. Yet until people see their hatred for God, they will not see the wickedness and vileness of their own hearts. Instead they will continue on in their hatred of God while covering it over with religion. A true preacher of God will never please anyone other than those who truly love God.

In trying to understand what it means to love God and then to hate Him, we cannot use the standard ways of understanding love to do so. Many interpret Romans 9:13, where it says “Just as it is written, “JACOB I LOVED, BUT ESAU I HATED,” as simply meaning that God loved Esau less than He did Jacob. In other places where the Bible uses the word “hate” it is interpreted as “love less” as well. However, when Scripture speaks of some men loving God and others as hating Him, it is self-evident that the word “hate” is not used to mean “love less” in those instances. All human beings do not love God and are not distinguished by their degree of love for God. Love and hate are opposites. We are commanded to love God with all of our being and yet unbelievers are said to hate God. Exodus 20:5 says this clearly: “You shall not worship them or serve them; for I, the LORD your God, am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers on the children, on the third and the fourth generations of those who hate Me.” But human beings have a very high view of themselves and along with their deceived hearts and ignorance of God they will not admit to hating God. They even convince themselves that they love Him. It is vital, therefore, to get it across in some way to people what it means to hate God. After all, Romans 5:10 teaches us that Christ died for His enemies and only enemies need to be reconciled: “For if while we were enemies we were reconciled to God through the death of His Son, much more, having been reconciled, we shall be saved by His life.”

Romans 8:7 gives us another clue in our search: “because the mind set on the flesh is hostile toward God; for it does not subject itself to the law of God, for it is not even able to do so.” The mind that is the fleshly mind and is focused on the flesh, even if it is very religious, is hostility toward God. Romans 1:30 gives us a list of sins that God has turned people over to: “slanderers, haters of God, insolent, arrogant, boastful, inventors of evil, disobedient to parents.” The “haters of God” part of the list is followed by insolent, arrogant, and the boastful. Surely, then, whatever it means to hate God it is linked with pride. Combined with the mind set on the flesh as hostility toward God we can at least see that self-centeredness and pride are components of hating God.

It is also important to note that the object of hatred is the true character of the true God and not some of the false things that people set out about Him. In some way all people could have something they would call love toward God if we watered down the character of God enough and set out enough things about Him that would please the carnal and selfish heart. But the assertion of Scripture is that all sinners that have not been born from above or born again and reconciled to God do hate Him and the truth about Him. So if we are going to try to understand what it means to hate God, we have to note that it is the true character of God that people hate. The god that is declared and talked about in our day bears little resemblance to the God of Scripture. It is no wonder that people go around thinking that they love God when in fact they hate Him. People will love other people and God as long as they think other people and God love them. We love those who love us (Luke 6:32). That is one reason why modern evangelism is clearly bankrupt when it starts with “God loves you.” Sinners love themselves and all who love them. They can believe without any grace at all that God loves them and therefore that they love Him.

There are causes and reasons why we love and hate things or people. If I take a bite of food and declare that I hate it, I am saying that it is disagreeable to my taste buds and that the food displeasing to eat. If I take a bite of food and declare that I love it, I am saying that my taste buds are delighted and I have pleasure in eating that food. When an unbeliever says that s/he hates another person, that person is saying that s/he is repulsed by the mannerisms or character of that person. We can hate something about another person or we can hate the person. That usually means that we hate how that person acts toward us or we hate the person because they have offended us and so we hate what they do because the other does things that do not conform to my self-love. In one sense at times we think of hating another as being repulsed by the other. It might even boil down in many cases to hating the character of the person and what they stand for.

For the moment we can think of hatred for God as being repulsed by His true character. This is why we must declare the truth of who God is. Until people are repulsed to some degree by the true character of God they will not see their sinful nature and hearts. They will not know what it means to have a change of heart and what it means to be born from above. Until people see that their spiritual taste buds (as dead in sin) are set against God and true love they will not know what sin really is and then what true love really is. The fact remains that all unbelievers hate God and are repulsed by His true character. Instead of changing the character of God to make Him pleasing to sinners, the truth of God must be preached so that sinners can be changed to make them pleasing to Him.

In the last BLOG the effort was to show that human beings are distinguished into two and only two sorts of people. There are only those that hate God and then those that love God. The Pharisees and James 4:1-4 were used to show that even very religious people hate God in truth. Though the hatred of God may not be at the level of conscious thought, it will come out when it is presented with the character of the true and living God. The very hearts of human beings are governed by a hatred of the true God or a love for the true God. As long as religious people teach others and themselves things about God that is acceptable to their heart that is governed by self-love, the hatred will not come out. So many are willing to love a God that will feed them and love them as they stumble along in life, but once they see that this God demands that they repent of their sins and look to Him alone, the hatred they have for Him will come out.

The commands of God as given in Exodus 20:5-6 point to this as well: “You shall not worship them or serve them; for I, the LORD your God, am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers on the children, on the third and the fourth generations of those who hate Me, 6 but showing lovingkindness to thousands, to those who love Me and keep My commandments.” In this text we only see one division and two kinds of human beings. It is not a division between those that have some form of belief in God and those who disbelieve. It is not the division between those who have religious rituals and those who do not. It is not the division between those that attend church or belong to church and those who do not. The only kinds of human beings that this text mentions are those that love God and those that hate Him. We see that the iniquity is visited on those that hate Him and yet lovingkindness to those that love Him and keep His commandments. We should not miss the connection between sin and the hatred of God and yet love and keeping His commandments. The Gospel of John and I John set out for us as well that true love for God is to keep His commandments. At the very least this shows us that an external obedience is not true obedience at all. We must have love for God in order to obey His commandments.

Those who live in sin live in hatred of God. Those who keep the commandments in truth live in love of God. The Greatest Commandments have to do with love and Jesus taught us that love is what is needed to fulfill the Ten Commandments (Mat 22:36-40). Paul also taught the same thing in I Corinthians 13:1-3 and then in Romans 13: “Love does no wrong to a neighbor; therefore love is the fulfillment of the law” (v. 10). However, what we must see is that keeping the Law is beyond the power of the creature. Love can only come from God and so as John 15:4-5 teaches us we can do nothing apart from Christ. The Pharisees are set before us in Scripture as those that tried to keep the Law in their own strength. Here is just one example: 27 “Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you are like whitewashed tombs which on the outside appear beautiful, but inside they are full of dead men’s bones and all uncleanness. 28 “So you, too, outwardly appear righteous to men, but inwardly you are full of hypocrisy and lawlessness” (Matthew 23).

The problem with the Pharisees is that they did not understand that they loved themselves and hated God. They thought they could keep the Law of God in their own strength and so they set out to delineate the laws and to know them so they could keep them. But what they deceived themselves about was their own hearts. All of their stringent external obedience was nothing but hatred for God because all of those things came from a heart that loved self and hated God. We cannot have more than one master at a time and will love one and hate the other. If we are mastered by our love for self we will hate God in truth. A whitewashed tomb has a beautiful and clean appearance though the inside is ceremonially unclean and full of death. The Pharisees had the outward appearance of righteousness and cleanness to others and yet on the inside they were full of lawlessness. In their very zeal to keep the law they were full of and expressed lawlessness. The Law of God cannot be kept apart from true love. So those who do not have hearts that have been changed by God and so the love of God dwells in them, those people hate God even in their most religious duties. There are people today who are zealous for holiness, preaching, evangelism, and perhaps even missions. But in all of what they are doing they hate God because they are doing it for their master which is self-love. Even the most religious people and the most Reformed person can hate God if the true love of the true God does not reside in them. We must all beware.

The nature of sin has virtually been lost in our day. The nature of human beings has been virtually lost in our day. The nature and character of God has virtually been lost in our day. These three things fit together as well. The very nature of a sinner, as described by Ephesians 2:1-3, is that s/he is dead in its sins and trespasses and by nature is a child of wrath. In this we see that a person by nature is a sinner. In other words, as has been said many times in history, a man is not a sinner because he sins but sins because he is a sinner. The nature that all human beings are born with is that of sin. What is sin? I John 3:4 defines sin for us as lawlessness. But what is lawlessness? Jesus taught us in the Great Commandments that the law is only kept by love. What we see, then, is that human beings are born dead in sin and live in sins and trespasses (violating the law of God). By definition sin is that which is not love and the Greatest Commandment is love for God. What is a human being doing if s/he does not love God?

Here is an important point. Sinners do not just do things that are bad, but they are bad. The reason they are bad is that they do not have the love of God in them and are by nature sinners against God. But if they do not have the love of God in them, they are actually haters of Him. This is not a pleasant teaching and it will not tickle the ears of those who read or hear it. However, it is biblical. Human beings are divided into two camps. It has been said many times that all human beings are either saints or aints. That is true, but even more all human beings either love God or they hate Him. It is hard for people to hear that their nice relative who is very religious and does good things might actually hate the true God. But that is exactly what Scripture teaches.

The Pharisees were very religious and claimed to love God. But when the perfect love of God came to earth in human flesh, they hated Him. When Jesus Christ raised Lazarus from the dead, they hated Him for that and wanted to kill Jesus and Lazarus. When Jesus did miracles and the people followed Him, the Pharisees hated Jesus. They began to fear that they would lose their positions of power and influence and so they tried even harder to kill Jesus. The same thing would be true today. If Jesus came back in bodily form it would be demonstrated to all that man hate God. When the true God is preached in the glory of His sovereignty and grace people hate that God. Men and women who are dead in the sin of love for themselves and their own sufficiency hate the command of God to love Him with all of their being and to die to self and trust in His sufficiency.

James 4:4 gives us some of this teaching that is so unpleasant to the natural man: “You adulteresses, do you not know that friendship with the world is hostility toward God? Therefore whoever wishes to be a friend of the world makes himself an enemy of God.” This text does not mince words and beat around the bush in order to hide the things that pierce the heart. It tells us without equivocation that a simple friendship with the world, not to mention to love the world as John teaches in I John, is an act of spiritual adultery and is hostility toward God. These are not easy words and we must try to understand them rather than explain them away. Before James 4:4 he gives us a basic idea of what worldliness is like: “What is the source of quarrels and conflicts among you? Is not the source your pleasures that wage war in your members? 2 You lust and do not have; so you commit murder. You are envious and cannot obtain; so you fight and quarrel. You do not have because you do not ask. 3 You ask and do not receive, because you ask with wrong motives, so that you may spend it on your pleasures” (James 4:1-3).

Notice that James is writing to religious people and those within the professing Church. In verses 1-3 he does not speak of committing physical adultery, but instead as lusting for things that led to their quarreling. The reason these people had so many conflicts is that they sought their pleasures and even prayed for them (apparently) at the expense of others. A mere friendship with the world is defined in this context as seeking for certain pleasures. This is what God terms to us as spiritual adultery. Spiritual adultery is when a soul is unfaithful to its Creator. Spiritual adultery is when a soul chooses worldly things for its pleasures rather than God. Spiritual adultery is when the soul prays for its pleasures rather than prays to seek God. Spiritual adultery is when there are quarrels and conflicts in a church because some are seeking worldly pleasures rather than the love of God. This friendship with the world is hostility toward God and makes self an enemy of God. We must not think that this only speaks to really evil things, but it speaks to all that desire the pleasures and things of the world even if they are in the name of religion. Our religion itself can be a seeking of our own pleasure and a hating of God. All religious people also either hate God or love Him. All liberals either hate God or love Him. All conservatives either hate God or love Him. All Arminians either hate God or love Him. All Reformed people either hate God or love Him. All unbelievers hate God and all true believers love Him. It is one or the other as there is no middle ground at all.