Perfect Hatred and Unfitting Love (2)

All You Need is Love?

Most people mistake Jesus for The Beatles when they say ‘All you need is love’. It is not as though love is not an apt summary of Jesus’ teaching. It is that many imagine the love of the John Lenon’s variety, severed from any theological mooring. Such love has lost its distinctively Christian character and has become a free-floating mist that now serves as a cover for all kinds of horrendous acts.

This amorphous love has tolerance as its highest virtue. But this tolerance orphaned and rid of its sibling virtues is in fact a vice. Hence, Jesus commends the church at Ephesus for their ‘intolerance’:

² I know your deeds, your hard work and your perseverance. I know that you cannot tolerate wicked people, that you have tested those who claim to be apostles but are not, and have found them false.¹

Christian love is—or at least strives to be—perfect as the heavenly father is perfect. It wields a love-hate double-edged sword as it confronts the world. It loves righteousness and hates iniquities.

So you see that this love differs from an amoebic love extending its pseudopodium in all directions as it constantly changes form. It is not the love that embraces empty, decontextualized sloganeering: ‘Judge not’, ‘live and let live’, ‘do you’. If Jesus expects this love to test its apostles, then it will test all things and hold fast to only that which is good. This love is rightly proportioned and targeted.

Shun Unfitting Love

Christian love is to will the good of the other. If love then is to be done right, it must derive its compass from the summum bonum—the highest good—whom Christians take to be God. This is love built on the solid rock that can weather all storms. Without this tethering, love is reduced to mere mushiness and amiability that can be easily hijacked or co-opted by any clandestine malevolent actor—love on quicksand.

This fantastical love cloaks heinous deeds with nice-sounding euphemisms in order to lull the unsuspecting into acquiescence. It terms self-restraint as repression and encourages wanton sexual profligacy. When this recklessness leads to unplanned pregnancies, it terms murdering babies ‘healthcare’. This unfitting love is adept at coming up with pleasant expressions for unpleasant things, such as gender affirming care for defacing children’s genitals and bodies.

Run from this Dionysiac love and embrace the well-tempered love of Christ.

Shun Hypocrisy

When David contemplated the perfect knowledge of God and saw a need to perfectly hate those who hate the Lord and did wicked things, he did not lose sight of the possibility that he himself could be harboring wicked ways.

²³ Search me, O God, and know my heart: try me, and know my thoughts:

²⁴ And see if there be any wicked way in me, and lead me in the way everlasting.²

He knew that even his heart was not hidden from God’s penetrative knowledge. His cry then was for God to heal him of these possible wicked ways. Perfect hatred does not hate only the vice in others, it in fact begins by hating the vice in himself.

As part of Jesus’ sermon on the mount, he chided folks who were quick to spot the speck in their brother’s eyes, while completely missing the log in their own eyes. It is in that context that he uttered the oft-repeated clause: ‘Judge not, that you be not judged’.

It is not that Jesus was blanketly saying one must not judge, but rather that one must not judge hypocritically. For it was he who also said:

²⁴ Do not judge by appearances, but judge with right judgment.³

The bone of contention then is the rubric for right judgement. One must shun hypocrisy in judging. Your vice detection device (let’s call it VDD) ought not to be more active for others than it is for you. Yet, your VDD ought not to be turned off to pander to people.

You don’t love people by being quiet about their vices because they are ‘loving’ people. You hate their vice, and aim to help them excise it as you do—and as they do with you—yours.

Anything short of this is hypocrisy.

Embrace Perfect Hatred

Jesus discourages that morbid tolerance that mistakes love for affirming people’s vices. We must love the Nicolaitans, but hate their works.

²⁰ But I have this against you, that you tolerate that woman Jezebel, who calls herself a prophetess and is teaching and seducing my servants to practice sexual immorality and to eat food sacrificed to idols.⁴

But there is a different kind of breed who don’t see their vice as a weakness or something to be rid of. They instead see it as a selling point and something with which to actively proselytize others. They have become conjoined to their vices and refuse every attempt to bring them to repentance.

²¹ I gave her time to repent, but she refuses to repent of her sexual immorality.⁵

They have irredeemably cleaved to their rebellion. They are like Jerusalem to whom Jesus says:

³⁷ “O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, the city that kills the prophets and stones those who are sent to it! How often would I have gathered your children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings, and you were not willing!⁶

Of these types, Jesus has a more radical measure.

²² Behold, I will throw her onto a sickbed, and those who commit adultery with her I will throw into great tribulation, unless they repent of her works, ²³ and I will strike her children dead. And all the churches will know that I am he who searches mind and heart, and I will give to each of you according to your works.⁷

He brings on his judgment full throttle.

³⁸ See, your house is left to you desolate.⁸

The walls of your city will be broken and not one stone of the temple will be left one upon another. For those who rebuff the surgeon’s hand, who reject all his surgical attempts to excise the vice from the person—let’s call it radical hamartectomy⁹—their person will be judged along with their vice and serve as its entombment.

It is these types—bloodthirsty, blasphemous, and rebellious—that David petitions the Lord to slay. For these types, we are to have utter hatred. They stand in active contempt for the gospel. They include false prophets and teachers in the midst who are fleecing the sheep, entering into households, and capturing weak women.

They are Jannes and Jambres, enemies of the cross whose end is destruction, men of corrupt minds and destitute of the truth. These types are not handled with kid gloves. These types (if in the midst) are to be delivered to Satan by the elders of the church for the destruction of the flesh, perhaps his spirit may be ultimately saved.

In Summary

Some may be apprehensive at the mere thought of having hatred. But as you have seen, hate which is rightly proportioned and rightly targeted is a virtue. Perfect hatred. It is not a vindictive hatred seeking to incinerate another. It is first renovative and restorative, seeking to burn up vices like a refiner’s fire, so that persons may come out purified.

For the wicked and unreasonable men who spite all calls to repentance, this hatred commends them to the just judgement of God.

⁶ Seeing it is a righteous thing with God to recompense tribulation to them that trouble you¹⁰

This perfect hatred does not take laws into its hands. Remember, David refused to slay Saul. Perfect hatred leaves judgement to God and his sanctioned civil and ecclesiastical authorities. For vengeance is his and rest assured that he will repay.

So my dear brethren, I commend you to perfect hatred and fitting love.

1. Revelation 2:2 (NIV)

2. Psalm 139:23-24

3. John 7:24

4. Revelation 2:20

5. Revelation 2:21

6. Matthew 23:37

7. Revelation 2:22-23

8. Matthew 23:38

9. The Greek transliteration for sin is ‘harmatia’

10. 2 Thessalonians 1:6