Hating the Sin and Hating the Sinner

At church we been learning about the Love of God for this past semester. Today, we talked about what God hates. There are a lot of passages which talk about how God hates sin. We are familiar with many of them.

The Psalms are full of them. In the Psalms, sin is understood as falling short of the standard of the Old Testament Law. Any violation of God's Law is sin. The New Testament tells us that anyone who violates even a single point is a sinner. In the end, we are all sinners. That's why we need a Savior. But there's nothing new here from what we heard in Sunday School.

What was interesting was the Psalms where God talks about hating sinners.

The common line of today is to Love the sinner, hate the sin. A passage like this one says that God hates both sin and sinner.

Psalm 5:5 The boastful shall not stand before Your eyes;
You hate all who do iniquity.

In the New Testament we are commanded to love those who hate us. We are told that God does good even to those who hate him. We read that God so loved the world that He sent His Only Son to die for us. We also read that God is love.

Since He is and does all of these things we are to be like God and do them as well. We are to love as He loves.

Then how do we reconcile these Old Testament passages with what we read in the New Testament? Certainly, some people will tell us that the Old Testament is obsolete or that perhaps David didn't quite understand God. As appealing at this idea is at first glance, in the end it throws out the baby with the bathwater.

If the Old Testament is unreliable, Jesus didn't warn us. To the contrary, Jesus Himself, appealed to the Old Testament as evidence for who He is. A threat to the Old Testament is a threat against the New since the New testifies that the Old is valid.

Jesus told us that the Law will last as long as Heaven and Earth. This solution of disassociation from the Old Testament does too much damage to the text and disrupts the continuity between the Old and New Testament. This may be why some people choose not to preach from the Old Testament and stick with the New Testament. In the end, this solution renders the Old Testament god a different god than that of the New Testament.

Some in the history of the church tried to make just that claim. They were soundly rejected as heretics. They saw the Old Testament god as a demiurge - less than the real God. This was how they explained sin in the world. Blame it on the demiurge - the Old Testament god. They saw the New Testament God as the superior God. He is a closer approximation to the real thing, they might have said.

A better way to look at this may be that God loves us so much that he hates seeing us caught up in sin. They become what they worship. They become a personification of those sins. In the end, the sinner becomes indistinguishable from their sin.

At some point identifying people as their sin stops being redemptive. Perhaps that's why we are told not to do it. If someone is no more than the sin they do, where is the chance for salvation? We are to hope and believe the best. As long as there is life, there is hope. God alone can judge. That's why we are to surrender all judgement to Him and His timing.

With God, His patience and long-suffering will be long but not forever. If we believe in Hell, we have to believe that there are people God chooses to send there for rejecting His Son. His long-suffering comes to an end at some point in human history.

When Jesus returns all will be made right. Until then wheat and chaff remain in the field side by side.