Events in the larger culture around us have forced Christians to reckon with somewhat of a startling fact—Christians have enemies.
Anyone who is overly familiar with the history of the Christian church will not be surprised by this. They persecuted the early church; they persecuted our reformers; our brothers and sisters are daily persecuted in Muslim lands, and in the “developed” western world the attitude towards white conservative Christians is one of sheer animosity, vitriol and bloodlust. This shouldn’t be surprising, for our Lord Jesus Himself said, “Remember the word that I said to you: ‘A servant is not greater than his master.’ If they persecuted me, they will also persecute you.” (John 15:20). Only one purely righteous man ever walked this earth, and they brutally murdered Him, displaying Him as a criminal. The Apostle Paul wrote in his letters of the fact that Christian character, though it is loving, righteous and peaceful, is hated by the ungodly. “For we are the aroma of Christ to God among those who are being saved and among those who are perishing, to one a fragrance from death to death, to the other a fragrance from life to life.” (2 Corinthians 15-16). And of course, this all stems back to the great antithesis that there is between the seed of the woman and the seed of the serpent.
But to generations of Christians raised in comfortable, somewhat squishy, evangelical environments, these things seem almost too much to handle. If someone was raised in a religious environment where they were taught to never be judgemental, to evangelize via friendship, and essentially make peace with the world they are probably not mentally or spiritually equipped to go out into the real world and deal with the fact that there are enemies of God and of the church amongst us. After all, how could we love our enemies if we didn’t have any? Now some go the liberal route and just side with the sexually perverted baby-murderers, but others grow and mature. They know what the Bible says, they’ve meditated upon God’s Law, and they have developed one of the greatest characteristics a man can possess—conviction. And, oh, praise God if conviction be wed with virtue!
And so, in evaluating the fact that we are in a cultural crisis, there are real threats, real dangers, real enemies and people who (quite literally) want to kill us there has been an awakening to the fact that the Bible reveals to us that there is a proper place for hatred.
“Do I not hate those who hate you, O Lord?
And do I not loathe those who rise up against you?
I hate them with complete hatred;
I count them my enemies.”
Psalm 139:21-22
What David expresses here is not a sinful attitude; rather, it is a righteous and holy attitude. Believe it or not, the point of Christian morality is not to make public school teachers feel comfortable; the point is to honor God. But given the fact that this Biblical truth has lain dormant for so long, it behoves thinking Christians to ask the important question: do we know how to hate?
For you see, and perhaps it is my inner purity-spiraling pietist showing, the Bible doesn’t just say this. It says more, much more. And believe it or not, when your Sunday school teacher told you that you are supposed to love your enemies, they were not giving in to the effeminate spirit of the age; they were just quoting Jesus.
“You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’ But I say to you, Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may be sons of your Father who is in heaven. For he makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the just and on the unjust.” - Matthew 5:43–45 (ESV)
Well, what is it? Love your enemies or hate your enemies? Doesn’t it seem like the Bible is saying both things?
Now, if we were to adopt the hermeneutic of a 14-year-old Reddit atheist, this would be a prime example of a Bible contradiction. But obviously, thinking and believing Christians (aided by the illumination of God’s Holy Spirit) are able to study the text and come to a holistic and proper understanding.
Love Your Enemies
Let us start with the familiar one, Jesus’ commandment that we are to love our enemies. This is the truth Christians are much more familiar with; however, that comes with the potential negative side-effect of being misunderstood. Sometimes those verses of the Bible we memorized at a young age are the very verses of the Bible we’ve never taken the time to properly study, because we felt like we didn’t need to.
What actually is Jesus talking about? Well, Matthew 5 is the chapter in the Sermon on the Mount where Jesus is dealing with the false Rabbinic and pharisaical traditions which had corrupted a proper understanding of God’s Law (hence the reason He begins the discourse by saying “Do not even begin to think I’ve come to abolish the Law or the Prophets”, verse 17). What had taken place historically is that some of the Jewish traditions had said that Moses’ command to love your neighbor left it open to be able to hate those who weren’t your neighbor. This is what aided the hostile Jewish attitudes towards Samaritans and Gentiles (which our Lord confronts in the famous parable of the good Samaritan, Luke 10:25-37). What Jesus says is that actually a proper understanding of Moses’ words is that not only do we love our neighbors, but we do the amazing thing of actually loving our enemies. To see this witnessed in the Law of Moses, take Exodus 23:4-5:
“If you meet your enemy’s ox or his donkey going astray, you shall bring it back to him. If you see the donkey of one who hates you lying down under its burden, you shall refrain from leaving him with it; you shall rescue it with him.”
It is unfortunately the case that many Christian teachers have purported the idea that loving your enemies is a “New Testament” thing and not something taught in the Old Testament or in the Law of Moses, but they couldn’t be more wrong. There is a great and overarching unity across the Bible’s teaching. As a matter of fact, our Lord Jesus Himself says that loving our enemies makes us like our Father in heaven (Matt. 5:45). As Proverbs 25:21 says, “If your enemy is hungry, give him bread to eat, and if he is thirsty give him water to drink.”
Now, this teaching has been abused, especially by the pacifists who teach against things like capital punishment, just-war and self-defense. Jesus is talking about our response to evil against us, and is in no way, shape or form implying that we ought not to seek justice against evil or allow harm to befall the innocent. Part of the abuse stems from a misunderstanding of what it means to love. Love, in the Biblical sense, is not having warm, fuzzy emotional feelings about others (although love often is accompanied with emotions, take marriage as an example). What the Bible is telling us to do when it tells us to love our enemies is to perform positive acts of righteousness and good deeds towards our enemies. This is the other-worldly characteristic of the Christian, that he prays for his persecutors.
Hate Your Enemies
What then is the Bible talking about when we read things like Psalm 139:21-22, “Do I not hate those who hate you… I hate them with a complete hatred”? As the very text itself shows us, this is David talking about the enemies of God, not his own enemies. And as we see in the larger context, this is a Psalm of imprecation.
“Oh that you would slay the wicked, O God!
O men of blood, depart from me!”
Psalm 139:19
Many of the Psalms contain verses like this, of an imprecatory nature, where the Psalmist prays for the curse of God to fall down upon wicked men. Take, for example, Psalm 109:6-20 which contains petitions such as “He loved to curse; let curses come upon him!” (verse 17), or Psalm 137:9 which says, “Blessed shall he be who takes your little ones and dashes them against the rock!”
At every single point, the imprecatory Psalms are directed against evildoers and the wicked, not simply people who are our personal enemies but who are enemies of God Himself. It is in this context that David declares his hatred of the Lord’s enemies.
You see, as believers conform to the holiness of God, meditating upon His Law day and night, our hearts begin to reflect God’s heart. We love what God loves and hate what God hates. And so it is inevitable that believers develop a hatred of sin.
“Be angry and do not sin; do not let the sun go down on your anger, and give no opportunity to the devil.”
Ephesians 4:26-27
Therefore, if sinful men really are sinful, won’t we hate them?
Yes, but only in this qualified sense. The hatred is a byproduct of the more positive fruit of righteousness within us. It is not hatred of people as people, but hatred of sin due to a love of what is good and lovely, as David expressed it—a hatred of God’s enemies because of a love for God. In, and only in, this sense can these words or any of the imprecatory Psalms be understood. The Christian is still a peacemaker (Matthew 5:9) and in his heart what he desires more than the destruction of evil men is their salvation. John Calvin explains it in the following way:
“On the other hand, it is a proof of our having a fervent zeal for God when we have the magnanimity to declare irreconcilable war with the wicked and them who hate God, rather than court their favour at the expense of alienating the divine favour. We are to observe, however, that the hatred of which the Psalmist speaks is directed to the sins rather than the persons of the wicked. We are, so far as lies in us, to study peace with all men; we are to seek the good of all, and, if possible, they are to be reclaimed by kindness and good offices: only so far as they are enemies to God we must strenuously confront their resentment.” John Calvin, Commentary on the Book of Psalms, Psalm 139:22
Putting It All Together
How do we tie these truths together, and how can we pray imprecatory Psalms upon those we are required to love? Well, when we see evil men plotting against us, desiring to do us harm, our first response is to demonstrate the love and mercy of Jesus Christ. We are sinners who have been forgiven, and that drives our actions. While I am out evangelizing, it is not uncommon for people to shout all kinds of nasty, evil things against me. But I do not pay back evil for evil; I maintain my focus upon telling these people that if they repent of their sins, they can be forgiven. But this does not cancel out the fact that I genuinely believe in justice for those who, say, murder the preborn. Though I, as a minister of Christ’s Gospel, seek to shout the message from the housetops that Jesus will forgive even mothers who murder their own children who repent and believe, I still pray daily that God would execute vengeance upon the entire industry of child sacrifice and that the civil magistrate would do its duty in executing justice upon murderers. These things do not contradict, because I understand my unique and particular role as a Christian man and minister, the particular role of the civil government and, of course, God’s overarching sovereignty and rule over the nations.
Lastly, I just want to point out something that is often neglected when people cite Psalm 139:21-22 to support their hatred. We need to remember that it is a very dangerous thing to take this hate outside of its proper parameters and guidelines, and I do not think that it was accidental that the Holy Spirit inspired David to follow up his statement “I hate them with complete hatred; I count them my enemies” with these words:
“Search me, O God, and know my heart!
Try me and know my thoughts!
And see if there be any grievous way in me,
and lead me in the way everlasting!”
Psalm 139:23-24
Even though David’s expression of hatred for God’s enemies was righteous, he nevertheless sought out God to ensure that evil was not corrupting his own heart. My point is that hate appeals to the flesh. And it is very probably the case that if we are not careful, we are going to become all excited and zealous towards this end and forget the rest of what the Bible says, and forget the balanced Biblical perspective. Though there is a culture war, and if we are really Christians we are in it, remember that our faith is much more than a mere culture war. We are not fighting a merely political battle, and our ultimate goal is not crushing our enemies and rewarding our friends; we want to see all men subdued unto the lordship of Jesus Christ.
We advocate for justice; we pray God would bring down His enemies; and still we are peacemakers, and we are called sons of God.
Psalm 37:8–9 (ESV)
8 Refrain from anger, and forsake wrath!
Fret not yourself; it tends only to evil.
9 For the evildoers shall be cut off,
but those who wait for the Lord shall inherit the land.
I needed to read this article today. It is a struggle sometimes to figure out how to hate sin without hating the sinners. Thank you for writing this, Logan! Prayers to Charlie Kirk’s family.