Question of the Week: does God hate people?
Verses: Romans 9:13, Luke 14:26
God’s priority in all of our lives is His relationship with us. Since God is by nature loving, and us all having a relationship with Him was His idea in the first place, it’s obvious that our term for hatred is different from God’s. We as human beings hate people as an act of passion. Our emotion of hate describes the absence of love. God’s hatred is simply a lesser degree of love. When God hates, it’s always used in the Bible referring to a sense of priority in relationships. For example, when Jesus said that unless you hate father and mother, you’re not worthy to be called my disciple, it’s easy to understand from the text that He wasn’t commanding us to hate our parents. The conversation was about your priorities. Do you love your father and mother more than you love Me? If so then your priorities are out of line. It’s this kind of hatred that God expresses towards Esau. He loved Esau and Jacob in greater ways than we as humans are even capable of, yet Esau made a personal choice to distance himself from God in favor of other things. God blessed him and his descendants, but in no way compared to the blessings Jacob had in store. God’s desire for a personal relationship with us is His priority. The more room we make for Him, the more that love has room to be expressed.
For more excerpts from A Reason For Hope, visit our page HERE.
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