“The fear of the LORD is to hate evil; pride and arrogance and the evil way and the perverse mouth I hate.” Proverbs 8:13
God is love. For obvious reasons we hear this message loud, clear, and frequently from the church in our culture. We don’t usually hear that God hates. Hearing that God hates things is uncomfortable for us and makes people defensive. Because we don’t talk about the things God hates, the message that God is love has been twisted into something that, in terrible irony, isn’t love at all and therefore isn’t God.
A loving God must hate evil because evil is the very definition of that which is at war with God. Evil fosters destruction, pain, suffering, death and is wholly opposite of who God is. A loving God must hate pride. Pride exalts oneself and one’s own judgments above God’s. Pride causes us to turn our back on God, who is the only source of life, and choose death for ourselves. A loving God must hate arrogance which is pride in full bloom and on display in a celebration of death. A loving God must hate the perverse mouth. The perverse mouth uses lying, deception, or cruel words to lead people away from God, which destroys their souls.
Therefore, the fear of the LORD, faithfulness to God, is to hate these things as well. Hatred implies action. If you love your garden, you not only must feed and water it, but you must also eliminate weeds and pests that, left undealt with, will destroy it. If you tolerate weeds and pests, your garden will not thrive. Neither will your garden coexist with weeds and pest, but weeds and pests will take it over and make it unfruitful. Toleration of what God hates certainly does not lead to things getting better, nor does it maintain the status quo. Toleration of what God hates leads to the establishment of those things over and against what God loves. Proverbs 8:36 teaches that if we do not hate what God hates, we love death.
If we love God, we must hate evil, pluck it up everywhere we see it and cast it out like weeds in a garden so that what God loves can be fruitful and multiply. We are all gardeners under the Master Gardener, Jesus Christ. May God cause our senses to be trained to rightly discern good and evil so that we too can be master gardeners in all areas of life.
His mercy endures forever!
Pastor Flynn