Hating Righteously
There was a time when men feared God, hated evil, and stood between the wolves and the flock with fire in their eyes. But that time is gone. We now live in a nation that celebrates confusion and a church that cowers in silence. Welcome to America—where we are raising a generation of gender-confused androgenites, and the church is no better. We are discipling men to behave as if Jesus wore sparkly lip balm and wouldn’t flip a table even if you nailed Him to it. The modern church has been hollowed out by sentimentality, soaked in syrup and softness, with gutless pulpits offering soothing platitudes to sinners who need steel, not sugar. Pastors apologize for having spines. Churches issue disclaimers before reading plain Scripture. And the result is a therapeutic Christianity that has amputated one of the most vital Christian virtues—the fearsome, fiery, and forgotten virtue of holy hatred.
The problem is not that the world hates. The world has always hated. The problem is that the church has forgotten how. We have forgotten that to love what is good, one must also hate what is evil. And in this selective memory, we have softened our spiritual hands so thoroughly that we can no longer hold the sword of truth without blistering.
We are surrounded by hatred every day, but almost never in the places it belongs. The world’s hatred shatters storefronts with bricks, spits in the faces of fathers, castrates children in the name of progress, marches under banners of perversion, and celebrates the mutilation of flesh as an act of liberation. It aborts the unborn and traffics the living. It passes legislation to defy the created order and then demands that we smile and bake a cake for the revolution. Meanwhile, the church hosts panel discussions about nuance and empathy, bakes brownies for Pride Month, and congratulates herself for being so gentle.
Where are the watchmen? Where are the prophets? Where are the men who burn with righteous fury—not the carnality of internet outrage or the political hissy fits of an aggrieved ego, but the blazing, sacred, covenantal hatred that flows from a holy love for God and a fear of His name? Too often, you won’t find them in the pulpits. You’ll find them replaced by life coaches, storytellers, and self-help philosophers who wouldn’t rebuke a wolf if it swallowed the entire flock in front of them. This is not the shepherding of Christ. It is the chaplaincy of hospice care, spoon-feeding morphine to a culture already spiritually dead.
God hates. That is not a controversial opinion; it is a biblical fact. He hates sin because He is holy. He hates pride (Proverbs 6:16–17), injustice (Amos 5:21–24), perversion (Romans 1:26–32), idolatry (Isaiah 44:9–20), false worship (Deuteronomy 12:31), and the shedding of innocent blood (Proverbs 6:17). He hates evil not arbitrarily, but because His character is pure, and evil is everything opposed to Him. To fear the Lord, as Proverbs 8:13 teaches, is to join Him in that hatred. It is to loathe sin precisely because we have begun to love Him. Psalm 97:10 summons all who love the Lord to hate evil. Romans 12:9 insists that genuine love must be joined with an abhorrence of wickedness. Revelation 2:6 commends the Ephesian church for hating what Christ hates.
Yet the modern church does not fear God. She fears being labeled unloving. She fears cultural rejection, lawsuits, slander, and online mobs. She fears losing status more than losing holiness. So she adapts. She rewrites her liturgies with therapeutic language. She learns to speak in euphemisms. Rebellion becomes “brokenness.” Sin becomes “struggle.” Perversion becomes “misalignment.” Justice becomes “equity.” She pacifies and qualifies until no one is convicted, and everyone is comfortably damned. But the Lord is not impressed. Through the prophet Amos, He declared, “I hate, I reject your festivals. Nor do I delight in your solemn assemblies” (Amos 5:21). Why? Because their religion was performative. Their songs did not thunder with conviction. Their hands were lifted high in worship, even as they were stained with blood. They played church while the people were devoured.
Christianity was never designed to be soft. Niceness is not a fruit of the Spirit. Christ is not your emotional support boyfriend. He is the Lion of Judah. He bled for righteousness. He roared against hypocrisy. He wept for Jerusalem and cursed a fig tree. He turned over tables and cracked a whip. He called religious leaders whitewashed tombs and a brood of vipers. When He approached the tomb of Lazarus in John 11, He was not gently sorrowful. He snorted with rage, moved with an angry groaning deep in His spirit. The One who was full of love was also full of holy hatred, because true love demands it. If you do not hate what destroys, you do not truly love what is good.
This is the crucial distinction. Holy hatred is not the opposite of Christian love—it is its necessary corollary. You cannot love purity unless you hate perversion. You cannot love truth unless you hate lies. You cannot love God unless you hate idolatry. You cannot love children and tolerate their corruption. You cannot love the church and remain neutral about the wolves. To fear the Lord is to hate evil, not manage it, explain it away, or normalize it, but to hate it with a full heart, a sound mind, and a spine forged in the Word of God.
The sentimental church is a sterile church. She smells like potpourri and sings worship songs that sound like high school love notes. She is harmless, predictable, uninspiring, and empty of fire. And the watching world knows it. Hell does not tremble at her choruses. Hell trembles when a man fears the Lord. Hell trembles when a man hates sin, even his own, enough to wage holy war against it. Hell trembles when a man teaches his sons to fight like lions and weep like saints. Hell trembles when the pulpit sounds like thunder and the pews respond with repentance.
Holy hatred builds holy men. You will never rise above your affections. What you tolerate today, you will celebrate tomorrow. What you fail to oppose, you will eventually bow to. But what you learn to biblically hate, you will wage war against. Ask yourself, do you hate your sin? Do you hate spiritual apathy? Do you hate the pornography that enslaves, the false teaching that deceives, the cowardice that silences? Do you hate the lies pumped into your children by screens and schools that despise your values and your God? Then prove it. Do not simply tweet about it. Bleed for it. Wage war on your knees. Fast until your soul is hungry for righteousness. Open your mouth. Open your Bible. Open your home to prayer, repentance, discipline, and joy. Hate sin enough to offend the world. Hate sin enough to mortify it in your own heart. Hate it enough to speak with urgency, to lead with courage, and to love with power.
But do not forget this one truth: the only way to hate rightly is to begin at the Cross. There, and only there, do we see what hatred and love look like in perfect harmony. Christ bore the hatred of God so that sinners could be freed from their love of sin. He drank the cup of wrath so that our fury could be purified and redirected—not against our neighbors, but against the flesh, the world, and the devil. The Cross is the furnace where our hatred is cruciformed—where it is sanctified, not weaponized. The One who roared against the Pharisees became the Lamb who was led to the slaughter. The One who burned with justice took our injustice upon Himself. And the One who wielded the whip bore the lashes of Roman scourges so that cowards could become conquerors and rebels could become righteous.
We hate because He first hated sin. We fight because He first fought death. We burn with holy indignation because His love has been poured into our hearts and has set us ablaze. We are not driven by rage, but by reverence. Not by bitterness, but by blood-bought bravery. The Gospel does not excuse holy hatred; it births it. It shows us what sin costs and then commands us never to treat that cost lightly again.
So where do we go from here? We go back to the God who hates perfectly and loves powerfully. We go back to His Word and sit under it until it sears our consciences and inflames our courage. We pray for hatred that is crucified and compassion that is courageous. We raise men who will stand like Elijah and roar like John the Baptist. We train sons to take up swords of Scripture and not flinch. We build churches that fear God more than Yelp reviews. We build pulpits that do not blush at hell. We form communities where sin is hated, holiness is loved, and cowardice is crucified.
Because until the church remembers how to hate with holiness,
she will never remember how to love with power.
