“If any man come to me, and hate not his father, and mother, and wife, and children, and brethren, and sisters, yea, and his own life also, he cannot be my disciple.” Luke 14:26
Perhaps no emphasis in the 21st century church has been more pronounced the the necessity to “love,” to “be loving,” and to not be guilty of “lacking love.” Such teaching has been around for a very long time in the Church in the West and it has resulted in the enervation of the Church.
This is due, of course, to the fact that the word “love” has also been drained of its meaning. When love becomes a universal instinct so that all men everywhere must be “loved” no matter what then “love” is a word that has no meaning.
In order for the word “love”to have any meaning it must have borders of definition where it ends and another disposition begins. In order for “love” to have meaning it must hate. Love, in order to be love, must hate.
The Lord Christ supports this,
“No one can serve two masters. Either you will hate the one and love the other, or you will be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve both…”
You see here that love cannot co-exist without hate. This tells us that the idea that “we should never” hate is non-Biblical and anti-Christ in its roots. Love without hate is an absurdity. A man will only love as deeply as he also hates. From this we must say that hate, properly oriented, is an absolute virtue. Hate, properly oriented, is the natural outgoing of love and this is so much the truth that without hate love cannot exist.
“We do urge hate; if you love something, that love requires you to hate anything which threatens it.”
Matthew Hale.
Here we see that positive “hate” is a positive good because it is the recoiling action of proper love. Even for those people who insist that they must only love and that to hate anything would be ignoble and sinful we find a residual hatred of all those who disagree with them that love must be ubiquitous. The “love-everybody-ers” end up hating those who actively employ properly directed “hate.”
That our culture has fallen into this “war against hate” nonsense can be seen by our preoccupation with hate crimes. Increasingly, the penalty for a crime is far graver if it can be proved that someone committed their crime because of a particular hatred. Never-mind that all crime presupposes hate at some base level. Never-mind that what is required with this kind of legislation is the ability to prove, and then try to disprove, a presence of a state of mind. This whole body of law turns already disreputable lawyers into the category of the even more disreputable shrink.
As Christians we must come to the point where we pray that the Triune God would not only give us proper love but also proper hate. Our prayer is that we would hate that which is evil. Our prayer is that we would hate what God hates. Our prayers should be that we hate injustice and Marxist concepts of social justice dressed up as God pleasing and defined justice. Our prayer is that we would demonstrate the strength of our love by the passion of our hate.
The capacity to Biblically hate aids the ability to see through the smoke and mirrors that heresies in the church and falsity in the culture serve up. If we genuinely hate that which is evil this will translate into the ability to sniff it out and define it even when it is covered up in the Church and broader culture. Bovine bunkum smells like bovine bunkum no matter how it is doused with expensive perfume and hatred for the smell of bovine bunkum can give us the ability to identify bullshit in a sea of Estee Lauder.
Hatred of falsity will give us the ability to detect and resist it. A Biblical hate thus gives us spidey senses that tingle when what and who we love are threatened. Hatred is an important element in family love. When we love our family we will hate that or who threatens or attacks our family. Hate, as the corresponding proper reflection of love, has built Christian Western Civilization. Without a properly defined hate we would be a weak, vacillating, and forever defeated people. This, in part, explains why so many of the enemies of Biblical Christianity keep pushing such a false narrative of hate that men who have their wives raped and murdered can’t even find it within themselves to be publicly outraged with the beast criminals who are caught. This, in part, explains why men have lost the capacity to be exercised and disheveled when the character and honor of the Lord Christ is pilloried and castigated. Men have been repeatedly and forever told that hatred isn’t proper and because they have believed that the ability to defend with passion what we love has been forfeited.
Without a solid emboldening embrace of biblical hate we are twilight men, men without chests, mere half-lings. Without well know hatreds, if we have any identity at all it is the identity of the limpid and the wallflower. Show me a man who is not epistemologically self conscious in his hatreds and I will introduce to you a dishwater man.
It serves the interests of the elites of our cog culture to distract us from the ability to properly hate. If we can be formed into a people who, at best, “love everybody and everything,” or at worst, are blase about everybody and everything, the consequence is an easily controlled population. Cattle are best corralled when they are passionless.
The ironic thing in all this is that those who laud this pietistic false love while eschewing a biblical hatred end up not getting love in the least but instead a vitamin deleted and fatigued niceness that is full of paper thin sentimental feelings. This kind of required ubiquitous love for everything and anything means that we love the stranger and alien with the same regard as we love our own children. Thus we give our children the same status as orphans. This kind of required ubiquitous love for everything and anything means that we love the illegal immigrant the same way we love our fellow citizen. Love must admit of distinctions and degrees, that eventually move into hate or love can not be love.
The ancient Latin poet Decimus Magnus Ausonius (A.D. 310-395) wrote, “Truth is the mother of all hatred.” If we are passionate for the truth we will be full of rightly oriented hatreds.
More then all this we should have it as our own goal to be hated, or at the very least we should rejoice for being hated for all the right reasons. Our Lord Christ said,
“Blessed are you when people hate you and when they exclude you and revile you and spurn your name as evil, on account of the Son of Man! Rejoice in that day, and leap for joy, for behold, your reward is great in heaven; for so their fathers did to the prophets.” Luke 6:22-23
