Category: hatred

Understanding Hatred in the Light of Scripture

Brent Pollard

The Quotable and the True

There is a saying, widely admired and frequently borrowed, that the opposite of love is not hatred but indifference. It comes from the pen — or rather, the anguished memory — of Elie Wiesel, a man forged in the unspeakable furnace of the Holocaust. One understands why a survivor of such silence would reach for such a formulation. And yet, however piercing its moral force, we dare not let the eloquence of human suffering redefine the vocabulary of Divine revelation. The Scripture, that pure and uncompromising mirror held up to the soul of man, uses both words — love and hate — with a precision that our sentimental culture has long since abandoned.

If we are to understand why Jesus warned His own disciples that the world would hate them (John 15.18), we must first do the hard and humbling work of asking whathate actually means in God’s mind.

Hatred as Preference: What God Said About Esau

Consider first the text that has perplexed the casual reader and emboldened the careful theologian alike. “I have loved Jacob,” declared the Lord through His prophet, “but Esau I have hated” (Malachi 1.2-3, ESV). When the Apostle Paul, guided by the Spirit of truth, returns to this same declaration in Romans 9.13, he does so in the context of divine election — God’s predetermination.

Here is something the modern reader must wrestle with honestly: God was not indifferent to Esau. He commanded Israel in Deuteronomy 23.7 not to abhor the Edomites, Esau’s descendants, because of the kinship between the two peoples. Esau remained, as it were, on the ledger of Divine concern — just not on the ledger of Divine preference. To be hated, in this sense, is not to be despised into nonexistence. It is to be passed over in the matter of sovereign choosing. The love of God toward Jacob was an electing, covenanting love; the “hate” toward Esau was the absence of that particular, distinguishing grace.

This is no small distinction. When Jesus tells His disciples, “the world hates you” (John 15.19), He employs the very same shade of meaning. The world, quite simply, prefers its own. It has chosen its allegiances, arranged its affections, and set its face against the kingdom to which the Christian now belongs.

The Dark Logic of Envy: Cain and the Leveling Impulse

But, left unchecked, preference rarely remains philosophical. It curdles. It sours. It seeks expression in something far more sinister.

Look at Cain (Genesis 4.3ff). On the surface, his is the oldest murder in human history, and we are tempted to diagnose it simply as hatred. But peer beneath the surface, and you will find something older and uglier still — envy. Cain did not merely dislike Abel. He could not endure that God received Abel’s offering and rejected his own. The righteousness of his brother became an unbearable indictment of his own spiritual failure. And so, in the twisted logic that envy always produces, Cain reasoned — if such darkness can be called reason — that by removing Abel, he might also remove the standard by which he himself was found wanting.

This is the great lie buried at the heart of all persecution: that you can silence the conscience by silencing the saint. That you can eliminate the light of godliness by eliminating the godly. It is not a new strategy. It is as ancient as the first gravedigger. And it has never once worked.

The Animalistic Rage: What They Did to Stephen

There is, however, another face of this hatred — rawer, louder, and less calculated than Cain’s cold envy. We see it in that charged and terrifying moment when the enemies of Stephen, the first Christian martyr, heard his uncompromising proclamation of the crucified and risen Christ.

They gnashed their teeth (Acts 7.54). The Greek word used here is vivid —it was used of wild animals eating greedily or snarling at a threat. These were not men engaged in reasoned debate. They had descended beneath the level of rational discourse into something feral and ungoverned. They had, in the language we have explored previously, engaged in the process of othering — the deliberate psychological act of stripping a fellow human being of his humanity so that one’s conscience need not object to his destruction.

Here is a sobering truth for the soul willing to receive it: hatred rarely announces itself in its final form. It begins as preference, hardens into contempt, arms itself with ideology, and at last erupts into violence — all while convincing itself that it serves some higher cause. The mob that stoned Stephen believed, in the darkest chambers of their self-deception, that they were doing God a service (John 16.2).

The Kingdom Transfer and the World’s Response

To understand why the world’s preference so reliably curdles into persecution, we must understand what happened at your conversion. Paul, writing to the Colossians, describes it in breathtaking terms: you were transferred — the word carries the imagery of a military deportation — from the domain of darkness into the kingdom of God’s beloved Son (Colossians 1.13). You did not merely adjust your moral preferences. You changed empires.

And this brings us to the unsettling heart of the matter. Who governs the empire you left? One need not resolve every theological nuance of sovereignty to take seriously what the devil himself claimed during his temptation of our Lord — that the kingdoms of this world lay within his offering (Matthew 4.8-9; Luke 4.5-7). Jesus did not dispute the claim. He refused the terms. That the world is presently organized under a system of spiritual influence hostile to God is not a paranoid fantasy — it is a New Testament assumption.

When Jesus describes the devil in John 8.44, He reaches for two words: liar and murderer. This is no abstract theological label. It is a job description. A being who lies will produce a culture of deception; a being who murders will, when cornered by righteousness, produce a culture of violence. We ought not to be surprised, therefore, when those most deeply shaped by the prince of this world react to the disciple of Christ with rage, rejection, and — in its most extreme expression — death.

Prepared, Not Paralyzed: Living in the Shadow of the Cross

None of this, of course, is meant to produce within the Christian heart a spirit of panic or cowering retreat. Jesus did not offer these warnings to frighten His disciples into silence — He offered them so that His disciples would not be caught off guard and shipwrecked in their faith (John 16.1). Paul echoes the same intention when he assures Timothy with unflinching directness: all who desire to live a godly life in Christ Jesus will be persecuted (2 Timothy 3.12). This is not a remote possibility. It is a settled promise.

The question, then, is not whether the hatred of the world will touch the faithful Christian — it is how the faithful Christian will stand when it does.

Here is what the Scripture affirms with the confidence of a thousand witnesses: you are not standing alone. The same Christ who warned you of the world’s hatred promised also the presence of the Comforter (John 15.26). The God who transferred you into His kingdom will not abandon you to the kingdom you left. He is with you in the furnace, as He was with the three Hebrew men in the fire of Babylon (Daniel 3.25). He is present in the courtroom, as He was with Paul before governors and kings (Acts 27.23-24).

Shining, Not Shrinking

The world’s hatred is real. Its forms are varied — sometimes it wears the cool mask of social exclusion, sometimes the angry face of open hostility. But in every expression, it shares a common root: a preference for darkness over light, for the kingdom of the deceiver over the kingdom of the Redeemer.

You, beloved disciple, are a citizen of another country. Your ultimate loyalty belongs not to the approval of men, but to the glory of God. The hatred of the world, however it manifests, cannot alter that citizenship, cannot revoke that adoption, and cannot extinguish that light.

Stand firm. Shine on. And remember — the darkness has never once overcome the light (John 1.5).