The Holy Hatred of God

Hatred is a word that troubles the modern ear. Conditioned to view it only through the lens of sin, trauma, and violence, we flinch at the notion that God could hate. And yet, Scripture repeatedly and unashamedly declares He does. “The boastful shall not stand in Your sight; You hate all workers of iniquity” (Psalm 5:5). How are we to understand this?

The answer is not to deny this aspect of God’s character, but to view it rightly—as holy, perfect, and good. The hatred of God is not like our hatred, which is so often rooted in pride, wounded ego, or the lust for control. His is a holy hatred—an active, righteous opposition to all that corrupts His creation, assaults His holiness, and opposes His mercy.

The Nature of Holy Hatred

To speak of God’s hatred rightly, we must begin where all orthodox theology begins: in the holiness of God. “God is light, and in Him is no darkness at all” (1 John 1:5). His hatred is not a fluctuating emotional outburst; it is His unwavering opposition to darkness. The Lutheran Confessions affirm that “God’s wrath cannot be appeased if we set our own works against it. For Christ has been set forth as an Atoning Sacrifice so, that for His sake, the Father may be reconciled to us” (Ap IV, 80; cf. Romans 3:25). No amount of human effort can calm the wrath (or holy hatred) of God against sin; only Christ, offered in our place, can reconcile us to the Father.

This teaches us something vital: God’s hatred is real, just, and deserved—yet it is not arbitrary. It is not like ours, which so easily flares against what inconveniences us or offends our pride. His hatred is measured and moral, directed solely against sin and those who persist in it apart from repentance and faith. It is the reverse face of His love. His love for righteousness demands hatred of evil.

God must hate sin because He is holy and just. He would not be good if He does not hate what is evil. God’s moral integrity means He cannot tolerate evil; to do so would make Him complicit.

When we see evil in this world—rape, child abuse, genocide, spiritual deception—we want a God who hates. We need a God who does not merely lament evil, but rises in judgement against it. Divine hatred is not a bug in God’s system; it is the perfection of justice in a fallen world.

God’s Hatred is Not Arbitrary

Many struggle with verses that speak of God hating not just the sin, but also the sinner. (This is in stark contrast to the false “Christian” saying: “Hate the sin, love the sinner,” which is not something Scripture ever says but was said by Mahatma Gandhi.) For example, Psalm 11:5, “The LORD tests the righteous, but the wicked and the one who loves violence His soul hates.” Notice the clarity: not just violence, but the one who loves violence. What can this mean? Here again, the Lutheran distinction between Law & Gospel brings clarity. According to the Law, the sinner apart from Christ is not merely wounded, but an enemy of God.

As Paul writes, “The mind set on the flesh is hostile to God” (Romans 8:7). Luther comments the mind is hostile to God “because it is not from God but from the devil, of which Gen. 3:7 says: ‘Their eyes were opened.’ There is a reason for this hostility: it does not submit to God’s Law, namely, by not lusting, for it lusts and follows its lusts, indeed it cannot. But through grace man is well cleansed of it” (LW 25:69).

Similarly, David writes in Psalm 51:6, “Behold, You desire truth in the inward parts, and in the hidden part You will make me to know wisdom.” Again, Luther comments:

Those who are in the truth and who believe and confess on the basis of what they hear in the Word of God that they are sinners since the time of their conception and that only God is righteous—they doubt about God’s love and fear His wrath, because when human nature sees its sin, it cannot think otherwise than that God hates sinners. This is our wisdom. David teaches another wisdom, one from heaven: that God does not want to reject but to love true sinners, while those who attack this confession and do not want to be sinners are liars, and God hates them. Why should a sinner be timid or fear wrath, since God sent His Son to render satisfaction for sins? Therefore, He does not want to argue with us about righteousness, but requires us to acknowledge that we are sinners. This acknowledgement or confession is the truth, not a philosophical truth which reason hears and sees, but a theological and hidden truth which only the Spirit sees and hears. God loves this truth, but He hates whatever is not in this truth.

LW 12:355-356

God’s wrath is not a temper tantrum but a rightful response to sin—even among His chosen ones, whom He disciplines. Thus, God’s hatred is not arbitrary—it is judicial. It arises from His perfect assessment of human rebellion. We, on the other hand, hate impulsively and self-righteously. We hate others for sins we overlook in ourselves. We hate when our will is crossed, our comfort disturbed, or our pride insulted. But God “is not a man, that He should lie” (Numbers 23:19). His hatred is never unjust. He sees the heart and acts with perfect equity.

The Cross: Where Hatred and Love Met

Nowhere is God’s holy hatred more clearly revealed—and more terrifyingly beautiful—than in the cross of Christ. Here, God’s wrath against sin and His love for sinners met in a single moment—a single Person. As Isaiah prophesied, “Yet it pleased the LORD to bruise Him; He has put Him to grief” (Isaiah 53:10). The holy hatred of God fell not upon the world, but upon His only-begotten Son, who stood in our place (cf. John 3:16).

“For He made Him who knew no sin to be sin for us, that we might become the righteousness of God in Him” (2 Corinthians 5:21). Christ was the greatest sinner, not because He committed sins, but because He assumed the person of a sinner. As Luther writes most vividly:

When the merciful Father saw that we were being oppressed through the Law, that we were being held under a curse, and that we could not be liberated from it by anything, He sent His Son into the world, heaped all the sins of all men upon Him, and said to Him: “Be Peter the denier; Paul the persecutor, blasphemer, and assaulter; David the adulterer; the thief on the cross. In short, be the person of all men, the one who has committed the sins of all men. And see to it that You pay and make satisfaction for them.” Now the Law comes and says: “I find Him a sinner, who takes upon Himself the sins of all men. I do not see any other sins than those in Him. Therefore, let Him die on the cross!” And so, it attacks Him and kills Him. By this deed the whole world is purged and expiated from all sins, and thus it is set free from death and from every evil. But when sin and death have been abolished by this one man, God does not want to see anything else in the whole world, especially if it were to believe, except sheer cleansing and righteousness. And if any remnants of sin were to remain, still for the sake of Christ, the shining Sun, God would not notice them…

If the sins of the entire world are on that one man, Jesus Christ, then they are not on the world. But if they are not on Him, then they are still on the world. Again, if Christ Himself is made guilty of all the sins that we have all committed, then we are absolved from all sins, not through ourselves or through our own works or merits but through Him.

LW 26:280

Christ became sin for us—not by doing evil, but by bearing the full weight of it in our place. In this substitution, God’s hatred for sin is vindicated. Sin is not brushed aside, but condemned. Yet, because Christ bore the brunt, the sinner who believes is no longer hated. In Him, we are now “accepted in the Beloved” (Ephesians 1:6). Thus, for the baptized believer, God’s hatred has been spent. Not because sin is now tolerable, but because His justice has been satisfied in Christ.

A Warning and a Comfort

For the unrepentant sinner, however, this holy hatred remains. As Paul writes, “Because of these things the wrath of God is coming upon the sons of disobedience” (Colossians 3:6). We dare not neuter the Gospel by removing this warning. God does not wink at sin or sweep it under the rug. He does not coexist peacefully with evil. He hates what is evil because He loves what is good. One cannot be good if they tolerate evil.

Yet herein lies our comfort: that His hatred is not capricious, nor is it the final word for those who repent. “For His anger is but for a moment, His favor is for life” (Psalms 30:5). God’s wrath endures for a moment, but His mercy endures forever. Yet it endures for a moment so that we may flee to His mercy. God’s wrath is brief, designed not to destroy but to drive us toward His eternal mercy.

Thus, the hatred of God should not drive us to despair but to the arms of Christ. It is precisely because He hates sin so deeply that He sent His Son to destroy it, not us. His hatred becomes our hope, for it means evil will not win. The tyrants, the liars, the abusers, the devourers of innocence—they will not go unpunished. And by grace, the punishment we deserve for our sins has been removed, though our sins be many—for the hatred we deserved fell on the back of Christ and pierced His body, that we might receive full absolution through the love of God that brings us from being His enemies to being His beloved children.

“But God demonstrates His own love toward us, in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us. Much more then, having now been justified by His blood, we shall be saved from wrath through Him. For if when we were enemies we were reconciled to God through the death of His Son, much more, having been reconciled, we shall be saved by His life. And not only that, but we also rejoice in God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom we have now received the reconciliation” (Romans 5:8-11).