Biblical Oddities: God Hates The Wicked

One of the common sayings in the Church today is that “God loves the sinner but hates the sin”. In other words, while God doesn’t like what the wicked are doing, He loves them personally; God has a problem with their actions but He doesn’t have a problem with them as people.

If you have been taught to think that then you might be shocked when you come across verses like this one:

Psalm 5:5: “The foolish shall not stand in thy sight: thou hatest all workers of iniquity.”

Notice that this verse does not say “God loves everyone; He just doesn’t like their sin”. Nope. Instead it is quite blunt: God hates all workers of iniquity.

That is not the only place where we find this idea. Take this verse, for instance:

Psalm 7:11: “God judgeth the righteous, and God is angry with the wicked every day.”

Does this verse say that God is angry with sin every day? Nope. It says that God is angry with the wicked.

You see, in the Church today we have lost sight of the fact that God is actually angry with the wicked. We have forgotten that the wrath of God is piled up against those who have rejected Him. The lost are actually God’s enemies, not His friends:

James 4:4: “Ye adulterers and adulteresses, know ye not that the friendship of the world is enmity with God? whosoever therefore will be a friend of the world is the enemy of God.”

That is what makes the Cross so amazing: God was not dying for His friends, but for His enemies. God showed His awesome love by dying for those He was angry with:

Romans 5:6: “For when we were yet without strength, in due time Christ died for the ungodly.
7 For scarcely for a righteous man will one die: yet peradventure for a good man some would even dare to die.
8 But God commendeth his love toward us, in that, while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us.”

Let me repeat that: Christ did not die for His friends, but for His enemies. He showed love and compassion to people who deserved His wrath.

We do the lost a great disservice when we hide the fact that God is actually angry with them. The message of the gospel is not “You need to come to Jesus because God loves you and wants to do wonderful things in your life.” None of the apostles ever preached that message to anybody. Their message was quite different: they told people to save themselves from the coming wrath of God. Jesus Himself told people that if they did not repent and believe then they would perish. The message was clear and direct: God is angry with you because of all of your sins, and if you do not repent you will be damned. God, in His love, has made a way for you to be saved, and you need to run to Jesus and save yourself from the wrath to come.

These days the lost are not being told that God has something against them. All they hear is “God loves you”. They don’t understand that they are in a lot of trouble because preachers aren’t telling them that; instead pastors are saying that “God wants to make your life better”. The message that the apostles preached is not what is being preached from pulpits across the country.

It is a terrible, terrible thing to walk up to a lost person and say “God loves you and wants to give you a better life”, and then not say anything else. The lost must be told about the wrath of God. They must be made to understand that they have wronged an infinite God and that if something is not done they will face His infinite wrath. They must be told that they are in very great trouble. That is what Jesus did and that is what the apostles did – and that is what we must do as well.