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| > Sermon Archive > Sermons by Author > Dr. Wes Bredenhof > God hates hatred and loves love and so should we | Previous Next Print |
| Order Of Worship (Liturgy) Hymn 6 Psalm 133 Psalm 119:65 Hymn 1 Hymn 78 Scripture reading: Genesis 4:1-16 Catechism lesson and text: Lord's Day 40 and 1 John 3:11-15 |
Beloved congregation of Christ,
A moment ago we sang from Psalm 133. It’s a vision for the love and unity of God’s people. But imagine for a moment if that Psalm was turned upside down. The first lines might sound something like this:
How awful it is when brothers are divided
With one’s another’s company unexcited
And live in constant agony…
Sadly, that’s the way life sometimes is. There can be divisions, strife, and even hatred between people who should be united. That can happen in churches, it can happen in families, and it can happen in other contexts too.
But God doesn’t want that for us. He wants us to have harmonious relationships with everyone, relationships where we can all flourish and live for his glory. He is the God of life and he’s against anything that tears life down. That’s why he’s given us the sixth commandment. At its most basic level, the sixth commandment is about murder. But probe a little deeper and we find that it goes much further than that.
The sixth commandment comes back in several places in the New Testament. Our Lord Jesus mentions it in the Sermon on the Mount. He shows how it goes beyond not just killing someone. And then it also comes back in our passage for this afternoon from 1 John 3. This passage and others like it demonstrate that our catechism is right when it says that God hates the root of murder in things like envy, anger, desire of revenge and hatred. On the flip side, the sixth commandment also teaches us how God loves to see us love one another. So I preach to you God’s Word this afternoon as we learn about how God hates hatred and loves love – and so should we.
We’ll see how:
- Hatred is produced by the children of Satan
- Love is produced by the children of God
The central theme of the first letter of John has to do with how we can know whether we are in Christ. What are some ways we can discern whether we’re truly united to him through faith and the Holy Spirit? Those who really are united to him are described in this letter as being children of God. Those who aren’t united to him, those who aren’t really Christians, are described as being children of the devil. So earlier in chapter 3, in verse 10, John writes, “By this it is evident who are the children of God, and who are the children of the devil: whoever does not practice righteousness is not of God, nor is the one who does not love his brother.”
In our passage, John then illustrates what he means by a child of the devil who doesn’t practice righteousness and who doesn’t love his brother. He gives the example of Cain from Genesis 4.
Cain is described here as being “of the evil one.” That means he was a child of Satan. He violently murdered his brother Abel. In Matthew 23:35, Jesus described him as “righteous Abel.” Abel was a believing man, he trusted in God and in his promises. He wanted to live in God’s ways. Hebrews 11:4 says that Abel offered to God “a more acceptable sacrifice than Cain.” Sometimes you’ll hear people chalking that up to a simple matter of Abel being more sincere than Cain. But it’s not that simple. There was also a crucial difference in the types of sacrifices they were offering.
Right after the fall into sin, Adam and Eve made fig leaves to cover their naked bodies. But after God had confronted them with their sin and given them the promise of salvation, he provided them with clothing made from animal skins. There had to be blood and death for Adam and Eve to be covered. From this it was already evident that where there was sin, there had to be blood and death to cover for sin. That was pointing ahead to Christ and his blood, his death on the cross.
Perhaps there were times when Abel hated Cain or others. The Bible doesn’t say Abel was perfect or sinless. He was a sinner like we are. Like we sometimes struggle with our feelings about others, you can be sure he did too. But he trusted God’s promises and he looked to God’s way of atonement to cover his sins.
So Abel was doing the right thing by offering an animal sacrifice, a lamb. God had regard for Abel’s offering because it was what he wanted. On the other hand, Cain brought an offering of vegetables. God didn’t want that, so he had no regard for Cain’s offering. Cain was doing the wrong thing. That’s why God says to him, “If you do well, will you not be accepted?” But Cain didn’t want to do well, he didn’t do the right thing and he hated it that his brother was doing the right thing. He hated his brother, because Abel’s deeds were righteous and his weren’t.
That hatred boiled over into murder. Cain violently ended the life of his own flesh and blood. Not all hatred ends up like this, but the potential is certainly there for it. If our hatred is coddled and we let it fester, the possibility is always there that we might allow it to spiral out of control.
And if we live in hatred of someone, the message of our text is that we should be questioning whether we are in fact united to Christ. Cain was a child of the devil and that’s why he hated his brother and killed him. Now even if your hatred doesn’t go all the way to literal murder, John says in verse 15 that it still counts as murder. It counts as sin against the sixth commandment.
That’s consistent with what Christ taught us in the Sermon on the Mount. He taught that the sixth commandment addresses not only our outward actions, but also the roots of those actions. The roots of murder are in anger and hatred. If we don’t see those as being problematic, we’re in trouble spiritually speaking. If you live with disdain, contempt, hatred in your heart and you’re not troubled by it, you’re in trouble. Only a child of the devil is content to co-exist with hatred.
I hope you noticed how I phrased what I just said. Sometimes I hear about situations where children or other vulnerable people have been abused in some way or another. It makes my blood boil. I get so angry about it, I really do. I don’t think there’s anything that makes me more angry. Now, it’s right to be angry about abuse because it’s so wicked and evil. But sometimes my heart goes further and I hate the abusers. I’m not even the one who has been abused, but sometimes I detest them for how they’ve hurt others and ruined lives. However, I know from the Bible that my hatred is wrong and when it happens, I’m not content to let it go on. I pray to God to forgive me for it because of what Christ has done. I ask God to help me with his Holy Spirit so that I don’t hate abusers. To help me see that “There but for the grace of God go I.”
Perhaps you can relate. Perhaps someone has abused you. Perhaps someone has betrayed you or taken advantage of you in some way. It wasn’t right and I’m not saying that we gloss it over and pretend it’s okay. But if we consider ourselves Christians, we have to take care that we don’t live in hatred for those who’ve hurt us or others. The Bible says we can’t do that if we’re in Christ. If we’re Christians, we can’t be living like we’re children of the devil. You can’t be Abel and live like Cain. Hatred for fellow human beings is something we have to resist in our hearts because God hates it and so should we, if we’re his children. We have to reflect our Father and the way he is.
Before we move on to the flip side of this with love, there’s one more thing to note about hatred. You might be listening to this and try to rationalize your feelings by saying, “It’s not hatred. I just don’t like him or her.” Or, “It’s not hatred. I just don’t get along with him or her.” And there are all kinds of other ways to put it. What you have to realize is that hatred exists on a spectrum. There’s the intense hatred of someone like Cain that can boil over into murder. But then there are also the less intense forms of hatred which can show themselves in things like impatience, gossip, contempt, lies, and cold shoulders. Don’t think that these less intense forms of hatred are any less sinful in God’s eyes. They’re still breaking the sixth commandment and God still hates them. So you should too, if you’re a child of God.
God’s intention for us isn’t that we just not hate. He doesn’t want us to end up in an emotional neutral zone, you know, not hating, but not loving either. There is a positive command for us to love one another. Verse 11 says this is the message we have heard from the beginning. It was there in the Old Testament already, but it was heard most clearly from our Lord Jesus himself. He said in John 13 that just as he has loved us, we’re to love one another. He showed us God’s love by loving us self-sacrificially, going to the cross to suffer and die for us. The gospel of his love is to be the foundation of our love for one another. His love motivates our love.
According to 1 John 3, it’s the children of God who love to love, just like he does. The world hates, he says in verse 13 and that shouldn’t be surprising. That’s like being surprised at a dog who barks. Dogs bark and the world hates. That’s just the nature of the world. But if we’re children of God, we’ve been given a new nature. We’ve passed from death into life through Jesus Christ and through the Holy Spirit who unites us to him in true faith. And we can see the evidence of this in that we love the people around us.
Now you might have noticed that verse 14 says, “because we love the brothers.” I want you to note a couple of things here. First of all, notice the footnote at the bottom of the page telling us that this could also be translated as “brothers and sisters.” That’s right – it’s meant to be gender-inclusive. The other thing is that it isn’t restricted to people in the church, as if John is simply telling us that we have to love our fellow church members, our church family, but as far as others go, we can be indifferent and not love them. John’s language here is drawing on the way Jesus spoke in the Sermon on the Mount. In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus speaks about “brothers.” For example, “Everyone who is angry with his brother will be liable to judgment…” Christ was using the word “brother” there in a universal way – it refers to any and every fellow human being. And it’s the same here in 1 John 3. God isn’t saying that you’re allowed to be indifferent to those who aren’t your brothers and sisters in the Lord.
So when we love whatever people God has put on our path, that shows we have passed from death to life. That shows we’re really Christians and that we’re really united to Christ. Christians are known by their love, and we can know ourselves to be Christians by our love.
What that looks like is worked out in the next few verses of 1 John 3. The Holy Spirit says we “ought to lay down our lives for the brothers.” The same self-sacrificial love that Christ showed on the cross is to be there in our lives. That might involve literally giving up your life for someone else, but here John seems to have in mind more of a self-sacrificial way of life. That’s seen in verse 17 where we see someone in need and we have the means to help, but we refuse. If you do that, how can you have love for God in your heart? That’s not the self-sacrificial love that’s been shown us in Christ.
Our catechism summarizes what the rest of Scripture says about how we are to love our fellow human beings. It refers to the Great Commandment of Jesus in Matthew 22 to love our neighbour as we love ourselves. That means that just as we instinctively take care of our own needs, so we should develop the instinct to take care of others too. We all normally have a drive for self-preservation. If I hold your head under water, you’re not just going to calmly take it and allow me to drown you. You’ll fight back because you want to live. If you’re thirsty on a hot summer, you’ll find water to drink, and so on. In the same way, we have to learn to love others by looking out for their needs too.
Our catechism also mentions showing these virtues of patience, peace, gentleness, mercy, and friendliness towards others. Let’s just take the last one for a moment. Friendliness. How do we show love through friendliness? Soon you’ll be standing around after church socializing. That’s great, it’s awesome to see brothers and sisters chatting. But what about the person who might be new to the church? Loving friendliness means keeping an open circle of discussion so that someone else can join in. A u-shape instead of a closed circle. If you’re in a closed huddle, that’s not friendly. That’s not loving. This is true for all of us, also for the young people and the kids. Try to include everyone – that’s what being friendly looks like. Being friendly also means that when someone leaves your discussion, you don’t start talking about them in a negative way. As if to their face you were friendly, but now they’re gone, now you can say what you really think of them and the way they were dressed, or what they said, or whatever. Being loving means being friendly, not being being a two-faced backstabber. Stabbing people in the back is still murder, even when it doesn’t involve a knife.
Loved ones, note well what it says in verse 14 of 1 John 3: “Whoever does not love abides in death.” The children of God can’t fit that description. So we can’t be satisfied to not love. There may be times when we struggle to love. Some people are easier to love than others. The way forward is to first be honest before God about the problem. If there’s someone you find hard to love, tell God about it in prayer. Say something like, “I know you want me to love that person, but I’m really struggling with it. Could you please help me with your Holy Spirit? Please fill me with your love.”
Not only that, but you can also pray for that person’s needs. Prayer is really interesting this way. It has a mysterious power to not only change circumstances, but to change us. As we pray for someone that we have difficulty loving, God softens our heart towards him or her. God works through our prayers to help us to grow in love.
I want to conclude by urging you to hate. Maybe that sounds funny, but hear me out. You’ve got to hate your hatred like God does. Don’t be content to sit in your hatred for someone, for anyone. Pray for God’s help to fight it. And I want to urge you to love to love. We’ve got to love to love, just like God does, just like he’s shown us in his Son Jesus Christ. In doing this, we’ll have greater confidence that we’re truly God’s children and we’ll be living for the fame of his Name. AMEN.
PRAYER
Heavenly Father, God of love and life,
We’re grateful for the teaching of your Word, showing us the right way with regard to hatred and love. Please work in our hearts with your Spirit so we hate hatred like you and love to love like you do. We thank you for our Saviour Jesus who perfectly loved us by giving himself for us on the cross. In him we see your love most beautifully revealed and it grips our hearts. Your love at the cross amazes us and leads us to adore you. We worship you for the invaluable sacrifice which has paid for all our sins, also our sins of hatred. We praise you that in Christ, we have been so deeply loved. Help us all to know that we are united to him by the Holy Spirit. We pray for a special measure of your grace for those who’ve been hurt, betrayed, or abused by others. Please help them not to be consumed by hatred. Please help us all to be filled with love for others and for you.
* As a matter of courtesy please advise Dr. Wes Bredenhof, if you plan to use this sermon in a worship service. Thank-you.
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