PSALM 5:1–6 The God Who Hates
READ: PSALM 5:1–6
V. 5 “You hate all evildoers.”
God is love. That’s what the apostle John wrote (1 John 4:8) and we all like to meditate on that. God manifested his love by sending his only Son into the world to work our salvation. However, have you ever considered that God also hates? That’s much harder to process. But David brings God’s hatred to the fore in this prayer. When did you last pray about God’s hatred?
David thinks of God’s hatred as he is surrounded by boastful evildoers, people who speak lies, bloodthirsty and deceitful men. That’s because he knows and greatly loves God in his holiness. This is how we need to know him too—as the gloriously perfect, pure, holy, righteous, and faithful God. Our holy God can have no other feeling for sin than hatred. He cannot tolerate it and will not leave bloodthirsty and deceitful men unpunished.
Maybe it’s uncomfortable for us to think about the LORD this way. It highlights our own unworthiness before him as people all too much still inclined to sin. But David had no issue with that. He confesses in his prayer that God hates evildoers. And that’s because David also knows God is love, that he has appointed a Messiah who will provide blessing and “refuge” to all who put their trust in him (Ps. 2:12). David trusts that God in his love will cause him to enter his house (Ps. 5:7) and so he is not afraid of God’s hatred of sin and sinners.
We need to learn to pray like David in this psalm. It’s not good if we exclusively meditate on God’s love. We also need to think about how holy the LORD is and how much he hates sin and evildoers who revel in sin. For then we will see the brightness of his love that saves undeserving sinners like us. Then we’ll also come to pray, “Holy God, I hate sin because you hate it.”
We can pray that because we know that Jesus Christ bore our sins in his body on the tree. And that will make us all the more hateful toward our own sins, wanting to hold fast to his love in Jesus Christ. Then we’ll want to warn evildoers about God’s holy hatred and to call them to take refuge in that amazing love of God in Christ.
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