Biblical Hate

There has been some discussion about the propriety of Christians hating sinners. I thought I'd take a closer look.

"If any man come to Me, and hate not his father, and mother, and wife, and children, and brethren, and sisters, yea, and his own life also, he cannot be My disciple." (Luke 14:26)

There you have it ... the biblical command to hate everyone except Christ. What more do you need?

Well, of course, you need to figure out how to reconcile the command to hate everyone (including yourself) with the biblical command to love your neighbor. "Oh, that's easy! It says to love your neighbor. Your family is not your neighbor. Hate them (and yourself)!" No, that's not working. "Well, you just have to take God at His word! You are BOTH commanded to love and to hate at the same time in the same sense. Just because it's illogical to you doesn't mean that it's wrong!" Sorry. That's not working either. You're either going to have to allow that the Bible is contradictory ... or you're going to have to correlate these two things.

So, let's look at biblical hatred. In Deuteronomy 21:15-17, God forbids showing favoritism to the firstborn son of a wife who is loved over the actual firstborn son of a "hated" wife. Get that? A "hated wife." Apparently, this husband was perfectly happy to produce children with both wives. It's just that one of them is hated. That should be jarring to the thought processes. The Hebrew word is, well, written in Hebrew, so I can't duplicate it here. Grab your Strong's and look at 8130. (In English-type transliterated lettering it resembles sane, but it's not.) It occurs in various forms in the Old Testament over 140 times. It is translated as "hate" or "foe" or "enemy" or the like. It is often contrasted with "love." But is it the same "hate" that we think of today?

Perhaps we can get a hint from Genesis 29. You probably remember the story of Jacob and his wives, Leah and Rachel. Jacob loved Rachel, but Jacob's father-in-law tricked him into marrying the older daughter, Leah, first. So we read, "So Jacob went in to Rachel also, and he loved Rachel more than Leah, and served Laban for another seven years. When the LORD saw that Leah was hated, he opened her womb, but Rachel was barren" (Gen 29:30-31). Do you see a hint here? In verse 30, we see that Jacob "loved Rachel more than Leah," but in verse 31, "the LORD saw that Leah was hated." If "hate" in this sense is the same as we think of it, this isn't reasonable. Look at it. It says that Jacob loved Rachel more than Leah. That clearly suggests that he loved Leah some. Further, he loved her enough to have children with her. (Look, we clearly don't have sex with people we despise when we have the opportunity to do so with people we love. It just wouldn't make sense.) It looks as if the idea is not "hate" in the sense that we mean it, but "hate" in the sense of "of lesser value."

If that is the case, let's see what happens when we insert that in the Luke passage above. "If any man come to Me, and not value his father, and mother, and wife, and children, and brethren, and sisters, yea, and his own life also less than Me, he cannot be My disciple." That's clear enough. It makes sense. Further, it doesn't violate "love your neighbor."

There's another thing it doesn't violate. It doesn't violate the other things going on in Scripture. Keep in mind that our version of "hate" is an intense hostility toward someone or something along with a desire for bad things to happen to them. Now compare that, for instance, with Jesus's propensity to hang out with sinners. Now, if the requirement is to despise the enemies of God, what was He doing there? Sinning, apparently. And how about Paul's comment about separating from sinners? "I wrote to you in my letter not to associate with sexually immoral people -- not at all meaning the sexually immoral of this world, or the greedy and swindlers, or idolaters, since then you would need to go out of the world" (1 Cor 5:9-10). Paul specifically states that he is not commanding to separate from unbelievers. He even assumes that we love ourselves (Eph 5:28) and assumes it's good, which would contradict Jesus's command to hate ourselves (if that's the command). We also have Paul's word (Rom 8:5-8) that Natural Man is the enemy of God. So if we are supposed to "hate" (in our sense) those who are the enemies of God, then we are to have a strong aversion toward everyone who is not a believer ... and then some. Or how about 1 John 2:9 where we read "Whoever says he is in the light and hates his brother is still in darkness"? If we combine Luke 14 with 1 John 2, it would appear that we must hate our brethren to be Christ's disciple, but if we do, we are still in darkness.

Or ... perhaps biblical hate is not the same as English-speaking hate. Perhaps, as Strong's suggests, it means "love less" rather than our version of "hate." Perhaps we need to be careful how we understand terms like this.