The idea of God hating some people pleases the flesh. Because we are to emulate God with our lives it provides the easier path. It is not difficult to hate the most evil, vile and rejected of humanity. It is quite easy to hate our enemy. In human reasoning some people are worthy of being hated for eternity because of what they have done.
However if God loves every person who ever lived, then we have a difficult path ahead of us. If God loves everyone enough to be stripped, beaten, and to die of blood loss and suffocation for them, we too must love them this way as well. Their sins do not determine their loveliness. Their own goodness does not merit our love. It is the example of the Father & Jesus that determines their worth. In this viewpoint every single person no matter how evil, debase, or nasty is just someone whom Jesus died for. Everyone has intrinsic value because of being made in the image of God and because Jesus died for them.
A sinner is just someone who is dying of that cancer called sin. Their evil is just the outward manifestation of that cancer. A cancer we all had before coming to Christ. We are to love them with mercy, compassion and gospel love. This does not eradicate justice and the proper consequences that true justice requires. Justice is not the opposite of love and mercy. They are co-operators in God's spiritual economy. Love and mercy without justice is syrupy sweetness that gives a free pass to wrongs done. But justice without love or mercy is revenge and hate, a gleeful handing down of just desserts so they get what is coming to them.
Loving like God means seeing every sinner as a cancer patient who has yet to submit to an operation by the supreme cancer doctor, Jesus. This is how we forgive the worst that is done to us. This is how we let go of revenge and let God be our justice. If God hates then we can too and so our special tormentors get our hate instead of our forgiveness, love, and compassion. We cannot heap coals of fire upon their heads if we hate them. We can only do that by loving them enough to surrender them to God, praying for them and desiring them to come to redemption. By doing good to them and for them, our making peace with them in our hearts becomes our “revenge”. This is backwards to human feelings but exactly correct in God's way of doing things. If we are allowed to hate we do not give them the same grace we were given. Instead we become judge, jury and executioner, even if only in our our hearts and minds. Forgive them as your heavenly Father forgave you. While we were yet the enemies of God, Christ died of blood loss and suffocation for us. If anyone misunderstands this they should watch(or re-watch) The Passion of the Christ movie. That movie strips away our jelly bean, chocolate bunny notions of what Jesus went through at the cross and brings it into our hearts and minds with stark clarity. Jesus did not float through that day on a cloud of spirituality. He suffered every second of it for the world. For God so loved the WORLD that He sent His only begotten Son. Jesus suffered for the most vile human that ever lived and for us too. If He did it so must we. No one was ever hated to the foot of the cross.
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