We have previously explored [1] the question of God hating and God praising those who hate what He hates. And we can find plenty of people who have done a great job of pointing out the nature of God’s love as well as the nature of God’s hate. When we think of God’s hate, for example, we think of God’s deserved judgment of wicked singers, and we tend to associate those with the sins of other people (sins that we may have ourselves but refuse to recognize or admit). Likewise, when we think of God’s love, we may smuggle in our own ideas of what love should be and assume that God loves as we do instead of pondering what God’s love means when it comes to his sorrowing over people who refuse to repent and obey Him and who persist in thinking the worst of Him. It is difficult, though, to keep both God’s love and God’s hate held together and reflect upon what that combination of feelings and others like it represent.
Why is there such a tension when it comes to thinking about God’s love and God’s hate simultaneously? When we think about God’s love in a universal sense, we lose sight of how God will judge those who persist in wickedness, and that as much as God loves us, He hates the darkness inside of us, and could not even look kindly on us unless he imputed the perfect righteousness of Jesus Christ to us, so great His abhorrence of evil is. And when we reflect on God’s judgment apart from God’s love, we assume that God longs for the destruction of the wicked and fail to see how great a sacrifice God and Jesus Christ were willing to pay to provide mankind a way out of the impossible mess we found ourselves in. God is in the business of loving and saving wretches and fallen sinners, for such we are, but that love for us does not mean wishing us or even accepting that we remain as we are, which is what is so mistaken about the false ragamuffin gospel. If the suffering of Jesus Christ over the judgment that was to come upon Jerusalem and the destruction of the temple in 70AD is any indication, the Eternal suffers greatly when reflecting upon the sins of humanity and the judgment that will inevitably come upon that sin, but that sorrow over the fate of sinners does not prevent that judgment from coming, just from being enjoyed.
And it is not as if God’s love and hate is the only sort of tension we deal with when we look at God. The tension between law and grace is another classic example where we have something we appreciate from God (grace) being contrasted with something we tend to naturally rebel against (law), and where we have to deal with the way that we love trying to condemn our rivals and opponents for breaking the law while we deny them grace. Just like our relationship with law and grace, we can imagine both law and grace in isolation easily enough, pondering how they relate to us and to others and how they relate individually, but not being able to easily hold the two of them together and recognize how they both apply to us and to others simultaneously. As human beings we seem particularly poor at this task, and not only bad on it just occasionally but consistently terrible when it comes to holding these sort of dichotomies together simultaneously.
That is a problem worth pondering. What is it that simultaneously makes it hard to think of qualities like love and hate simultaneously or law and grace? What is it that also makes it hard for us to think of these things as it relates to ourselves and to others simultaneously? This relates to questions of double standards. How is God both just and gracious, seeing that justice is giving people what they deserve and grace is giving people better than they deserve. Well, we can start with a basis of justice that ensures that no one gets worse than they deserve and then add to that a graciousness that allows us the freedom not to be stuck in cycles of revenge. And love and hate? We can love people but not love all aspects of their lives. Or alternatively we can hate people and love the works they have created as artists. Yet it is hard for us to ponder such feelings. Human beings seem to handle ambivalence particularly poorly, and tend to want to resolve things in extremes that allow us to forget the other side of the story. And that tends to distort reality because in order to feel comfortable we have to forget that the people we tend to despise are people like ourselves worthy of being treated justice, and certainly possibly even to receive the same sort of graciousness that we want for ourselves.
All too often, our standard of judgment is seriously skewed. We know our own internal life so we can think of the paths we took in life or the places we have been or the experiences we have had that have shaped how we think and feel about things. We know our own sensitivities and vulnerabilities and try to work around them or overcome them. For those people we like or respect or appreciate, we lack the same sort of internal knowledge but we tend to give them the benefit of the doubt or appreciate what they do for us or provide for us that allows us the goodwill to overlook their less praiseworthy qualities and to keep ourselves from viewing them with contempt. For strangers we may not know a lot about them so we are not inclined to always think badly about, except when we do not like what we happen to know about them or that which can be easily determined or discovered. And for those who are our enemies, we tend not to think charitably about them or their motives or give them any benefit of the doubt, and that accounts for a great deal of the double standards that we have to overcome in order to be just people. How many people actually want to be just, though?
[1] See, for example:
Edge Induced Cohesion 