Hatred Necessary to Love

“Do not I hate them, O Lord, that hate Thee? And am not I grieved with those that rise up against Thee?”—Psalm cxxxix. 21.

The passage: The Psalmist asks God whether he does not hate those who hate God, and whether he is not grieved by those who rise up against God.

The Psalmist answers his own question: “Yea, I hate them right sore, even as though they were mine enemies.” Most of us would answer very differently. We would say, “Hate them? We hate nothing. We try to obey Christ’s command, Love thy neighbour as thyself.”

“There is a way which seemeth right to a man, but the end of it is the way of death.” I believe our plausible, self-satisfied language shows that we are in great danger of wandering onto that dark road, if we are not already on it. We think ourselves far more gentle, humane and charitable than David was. If we have the courage to consider what he meant and what we mean, I fear we shall find that we are as far behind him in these Christian graces as we are in the zeal and earnestness we may perhaps allow him.

I. The force of the sentence turns on the word Thee. Who were those that hated God and rose up against Him? To know, we must know what David believed about God. He did not, like the heathen, simply ask the sky, the sea or the air to teach him of God, though they did teach him much. They spoke of peace in the midst of strife and permanence in the midst of change. They led him to think of One who might be the source of peace amid human strife, and who stays the same amid all changes in human thought and feeling. Something must abide, Nature told Man. The heart asked what it was, and trembled to hear the answer. “Is it a thing or a person, a friend to embrace or an enemy to flee? Either way I must be closely connected with it, nearer to me than to the whole universe. Otherwise why is there in me this witness of a right I am to follow, of a truth that is to be in my inward parts? But if He is so near, why is He hidden? If I cannot find Him out, is it impossible that He should make Himself known?” “He has made Himself known”: this was David’s faith. “He has declared Himself to me as my Guide, Teacher, Friend, Judge and King, and as the Guide, Teacher, Friend, Judge and King of my nation. He teacheth my hands to war and my fingers to fight. He is the source of my strength, my freedom, my hope. In Him are the springs of my life. From Him comes the discernment of justice and equity, and the wisdom to rule and to obey. From Him comes the unity of my nation, which exists as a nation only in Him.”

David believed this, and he believed it more the clearer his mind became, the less it was darkened by sensuality, superstition or self-glorification, and the more freely and bravely he acted. He knew a Divine Presence was with him, and it was no trick or fantasy. If he confounded that Presence with himself, supposing it was created by the spirit that confessed it, everything within him became trick and imposture. But when he clung to this Righteous Living Judge and Lawgiver, and wanted all his life ruled by Him, then he himself, his fellow-men and the world around him came out of mist and shadow into sunlight. Everything was seen in its true proportions. Hear him in the Psalm of our text. The Lord has searched him out and known him; knows his sitting down and rising up; understands his thought long before; is about his path and his bed and spies out all his ways; knows every word on his tongue; has fashioned him behind and before and laid a hand upon him. Such knowledge is too wonderful and high for him to attain. Think of these words. A Being near to a creature made in His image makes that creature aware of His presence. David was seeking the Ruler of his spirit, if haply he might find Him, and lo, He was close by, looking into the depths of his being and kindling the very desires He satisfies. What awe in such a discovery! Yet what rest, what a sense of standing on an eternal foundation, a rock against which the waves may beat horribly but cannot shake. “He is not there because my teachers tell me so, or because my fathers left records of Him. Thanks be to Him for teachers and records! They testify of what is, which does not depend on them, but on which they depend. Nor is He there because I believe in Him. My faith is given by Him; it is only the answer in me to the truth that calls it forth. When I lose my faith I come into waters with no ground, or find myself on drifting sand. But that very experience shows me that my faith did not form the rock I stand on, nor did the faiths of a thousand generations. My faith fails whenever I begin to put it in place of God. Nor do I establish this Righteous Ruler of my inner self on His throne by my obedience. My disobedience testifies of Him as much as my obedience does. The sense of separation from Him, and all the disorders that follow from it, show me that He is, and what kind of Being He is. So do the disbelief and disobedience of men generally, and all that flows from them: the cowardice, superstition, falsehood, tyranny, lust and cruelty that set the universe at war and turn it into a cage of unclean beasts. They tell me of the goodness, truth and graciousness they are fighting against, which shall destroy them at last.”

II. “Do not I hate those things, O Lord, which hate Thee; am I not grieved with those that rise up against Thee?” You will say he hated actual flesh-and-blood men: Moabites, Hagarenes, Goliaths, Sauls. I do not care to dispute it. He hated whatever rose up against righteousness and truth on earth and sought to set up a lie. I cannot tell how far the particular man or nation was the object of his aversion. To some extent I am sure it was, because I find it so, probably to a much greater extent, in ourselves. But I am sure that just so far as he hated men or nations for rising up against the God of Truth and Goodness, he was hating their untruth and unrighteousness, and hating the same untruth and unrighteousness in himself. Their enemies were his enemies. He felt that deadly powers were doing deadly mischief in God’s world. He who was about his path and his bed showed him what they were. He felt them plaguing his own heart, tormenting him every moment, withdrawing him from trust and obedience, dragging him into a whirlpool of contradictory thoughts, words and acts. In the inmost region of his being he had to meet these principalities of spiritual wickedness and wrestle with them in the high places. There he was trained to hate them, from a thorough knowledge of their intense essential vileness. This hatred grew in proportion to his belief in, trust in, and delight in a Being of absolute purity and perfection. The dimmer his vision of such a Being, the more tolerant he was of whatever opposed his nation and resisted his will. The surer he was that God is, that He is the Lord of man, and that He seeks to establish righteousness and truth on earth, the more fiercely he abhorred whatever denied God and aimed at keeping the earth an abode of deceit and wrong. When he forgot God’s name and disbelieved in His mercy, he could be meek and gentle with the butchers of the world and of the chosen race. When his heart was thoroughly possessed by the Divine Spirit, “he hated them right sore, even as though they were his enemies.”

III. Can it be, brethren, that the blessing of our Christian profession is that we have acquired a patience toward whatever hates God and rises up against Him, which David lacked? Then our profession surely does not mean following the example of Christ and being like Him; it means something quite opposite. Do you find in Him any sign of this patience, this tolerance? You are told that when He was reviled, “He reviled not again; when He suffered, He threatened not.” You hear that He bore the contradiction of sinners against Himself, and ate and drank with publicans and sinners whom the religious men of the day thought it defilement to approach. But do you not also hear of His making a scourge of small thongs and driving out of the Temple those who bought and sold there? Do you not find Him denouncing the Scribes and Pharisees as hypocrites and whited sepulchres? “Do not I hate them that hate Thee, O Father; am I not grieved with them that rise up against Thee?” was the language of the Master far more fully than of the servant, and expressed far more thoroughly the spirit of His life.

He was engaged in a conflict to the death against evil, over whether it should put out the light of the world or that light should prevail against it. Since He ascended on high He has carried on the same struggle in His Church and its members, a struggle in which He tells us we must all take part, on one side or the other. What, then, means this notion we seem to have taken up, that we are better than our forefathers because we hate less strenuously? Does it mean there is nothing left in the world that deserves to be hated? Does it mean that Christianity, refinement, civilization, science, mechanical achievement, æsthetics, or anything else we reverence, has put an end to pride, malice and cruelty? That there are no scandals and abominations in the nation, no fierce party-spirit or lying in the Church? That men everywhere worship the God of Truth and Love and not the Evil Spirit of Falsehood and Ill-Will? No one dreams this; no one doubts that there exists what ought not to exist, what is contrary to the good of man and the character of God. Our kindness and gentleness have a different root. We are used to these things; we suppose they cannot be helped; we think God is indifferent to them. That is, we have ceased to believe in a God of Truth and Love, and do not suppose that what is evil rises up against Him.

As for our hating less those who rise up against us, or who dislike our religious, political or philosophical notions, I cannot see the evidence of it. Thanks be to God, we can no longer indulge our desire to suppress opposing opinions as we once did. Earnest men have fought and bled so that none of us should have that power. For the present we limit ourselves to bitter words, dark insinuations, the destruction of one another’s characters, and the undermining of moral freedom in the land. But withdraw the legal restraints on our mutual animosities for an instant, give any one sect or party the chance to indulge its passions fully against the rest, and it would be seen how much excuse we have for boasting of our charity, or even our toleration.

IV. That bitterness on behalf of our own notions and dogmas, that desire to crush whatever and whoever runs counter to them, can, I believe, be overcome only by earnestly cultivating the temper we have denounced in David. Determine to hate what rises up in you against God, that first and chiefly, and along with your indifference, cowardice and meanness you will hate your conceit of your own poor judgment, your dislike of opposition to it, and your unwillingness to have your thoughts probed to the quick. An intense certainty that there is a God of Truth without iniquity, who must mean to sweep all falsehood and injustice from the earth, will make you desire above all things that He search you and try your ways, detect whatever in you is yours and not His, and burn it with unquenchable fire. Acknowledging a God revealed in Jesus Christ, in whom is light and no darkness at all, will compel us to want no traditions of the past and no conceits of our own minds to shut Him out. Acknowledging a God who beareth all things, hopeth all things, endureth all things, and has been long-suffering with all His creatures and with us, will make us tremble to deal harshly with the struggles and doubts of our fellow-beings, and still more with their convictions. If God’s Spirit, the Spirit of Truth, is the only Guide to Truth, and is seeking to guide us right, how we must fear to check His mighty work in our own spirit or in anyone we meet! How we must desire to be His instruments and not His foes, and so to share His own grace and gentleness!

So with this hatred deeply and inwardly cherished will come true charity, not imaginary, and genuine toleration, not the bastard kind. To detect the right meaning, sound faith and divine inspiration hidden under confused, rough, angry words aimed at ourselves, even at principles dearer to us than ourselves, is a duty we learn at the Cross and a faculty only Christ can give. We shall exercise it just because we believe Truth all-important and falsehood accursed, loving the one and hating the other. We shall remember that God honoured Job, who complained bitterly, spoke words like the east wind, and was determined to know the meaning of the Divine judgments, more than the three friends who pretended to justify Him and only showed their lack of sympathy with His purposes of mercy and goodness. We shall want to hate more and more whatever is contrary to that mercy and goodness, which are parts of His being, and so to bear more and more with whatever merely crosses our tastes, inclinations and judgments.

Brethren, I think these lessons are not out of place at the beginning of a general election. Parties are mingled and confused, and leaders, perhaps principles, are uncertain, but I suspect we shall find excuses enough for denouncing one another, if not for hating one another. General maxims about goodwill and forbearance are idle at such times; everyone accepts them and no one heeds them. I would press another exhortation: give full scope to your hatred. You will need it, for you will be tempted to do things hateful in God’s sight, which you should do your utmost to make hateful in men’s sight. The frauds candidates use to disguise their meaning, to pass for intending what they do not intend, to win votes from two opposite quarters: do they not deserve to be hated with a perfect hatred? Is not every slander against an opponent, and every encouragement to tongues and pens less scrupulous than your own, part of a hateful system? Is not trafficking with party symbols and ambiguous phrases that may mean everything or nothing hateful, and trafficking with sacred names for low purposes more profane and hateful still? Should not everything that bewilders the consciences, or degrades the moral nature, of those whose support you seek be hated as an insult to the God who seeks truth in His creatures? Do not all these deceitful words and acts add up to a frightful sum of falsehood, destroying the land we pretend to save, and must they not bring God’s curse upon us? Oh, for a more burning rage in us all against whatever makes our professions ridiculous, and our acts and words destructive of sincerity in ourselves and in all whom they influence! And since we are so unfit to search each other, having so many hidden falsehoods of our own, let us rejoice, while we tremble, that God has promised to search us and try us, to see what wicked way there is in us, and to lead us in His true and everlasting way.