Recently this question was posed to me: Do you hate sin like God hates sin?
I have always thought of hatred as such a strong word, if I honestly think about it I am not sure if I have ever hated something. There are a lot of things I don’t like, like how the fear of rejection gets in the way of sharing the Good News, how our lies destroy friendships, how hypocrisy builds a wall between us, and how if I eat too much peanut butter I feel super bloated. But that is just it, do I look at the peanut butter dilemma the same as I do the lies issue.
Do I HATE sin?
What it sounds like is that maybe I just strongly dislike the consequences that sin provides, maybe I would even say I hate those repercussions, but hate sin? hmm, maybe not.
There are quite a few passages that show us what God hates, and that we should then also hate these things.
Proverbs 6:16-19
“ 16 There are six things the Lord hates –
no, seven things he detests;
17 haughty eyes,
a lying tongue,
hands that kill the innocent,
18 a heart that plots evil,
feet that race to do wrong,
19 a false witness who pours out lies,
a person who sows discord in a family. “
Proverbs 11:1
“The Lord detests the use of dishonest scales,
but he delights in accurate weights.”
Proverbs 28:9
“God detests the prayers
of a person who ignores the law.”
Proverbs 8:13a
“All who fear the Lord will hate evil.”
Psalms 45:7
“You love justice and hate evil.
Therefore God, your God, has anointed you,
Pouring out the oil of joy on you more than anyone else.”
Job 1:1
“Job was a man who lived in Uz. He was honest inside and out, a man of his word, who was totally devoted to God and hated evil with a passion.”
A couple weeks ago I was reading/studying the book of Hosea (If you’re not familiar with that book you should be! It paints a beautiful picture of God’s relationship with his people). In the 2nd chapter it talks about leading her (the sinful prostitute who continually goes back to her sinful ways) into the desert. There God would speak tenderly to her (V.14). It says that after that she will give herself to him there. I love the way the James Faucet-Brown Commentary put it:
“It was necessary to bring her to the wilderness (that is temporal want and trials) first to make her sin hateful to her by its bitter fruits and God’s subsequent grace the more precious to her by the contrast of the ‘wilderness’.”
How often do we walk through life without an end goal and end up getting distracted by anything that is shiny and glitters in the sunlight? Soon enough we are lost, we can’t find our way back to the path and we cry out for help. We seem to return to this cycle absentmindedly and (at least in my life) it happens over and over again.
It is so easy for us to fall into the ways of sin, not knowing that not all that glitters is gold.
But one thing I do know. GOD IS GOLD.
