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Why Biblical Love Offends… And Biblical Hate Scares Our Culture
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“Love” Becomes A Weapon And “Hate” Becomes A Crime
Most people think they already understand love and hate. After all, we hear those words all day long… on the news, in sermons, in political speeches, and all over social media. “Love” is held up like the highest virtue imaginable.
“Hate” is treated like the worst sin a person can commit. But here’s the problem: almost nobody bothers to ask what those words actually mean anymore. We’re using them constantly… while quietly redefining them beyond recognition.
And that’s where things start to go sideways. Because once you detach love and hate from God, from Scripture, and from any fixed moral standard, they stop being moral truths and start becoming cultural weapons.
Suddenly “love” doesn’t mean seeking what is good and true from a biblical standard… it means approving whatever the existential moment demands. Meanwhile, “hate” no longer means a principled rejection of what God declares as evil… it becomes a label slapped on anyone who refuses to go along. In that kind of world, the person insisting on truth looks cruel, while the person “blessing” death and destruction gets called compassionate.
So it shouldn’t surprise us that biblical love now offends people… and biblical hate scares them. Not because Scripture is harsh, but because it refuses to play by humanistic rules. It refuses to call darkness light. It refuses to bless what destroys. And in a culture built on sentimental slogans and selective outrage, that kind of clarity doesn’t just feel uncomfortable… it feels threatening.
When Our Words Lose Their Weight
When ‘love’ becomes a to‑do list, there is no rest—but at the feet of Christ, even love and hate find their Sabbath.
Biblical love and biblical hate have almost vanished from our public vocabulary. We still use the words constantly. We chant “love” like a slogan. We fling “hate” like an accusation. But rarely are either anchored in the character of God, the cross of Christ, or the demands of His law.
And once that anchor is gone, the whole ship drifts.
Then “love” becomes sentimental permission for evil. “Hate” becomes the one unforgivable sin. All the while, Scripture calmly commands both love and hate… sometimes in the same breath. When we forget that, we don’t become kinder. We become confused.
When Love Loses Its Bible
Today, “love” is preached as a cure-all. It’s described as a vague, universal benevolence toward everyone and everything. We’re told that if we truly love, we will never judge, never exclude, never say “no,” and certainly never call anything sin. Love becomes a mood. A tone. A soft glow of approval.
But Scripture does not treat love as a free-floating emotion. Instead, it ties love to covenant. It defines it. It fences it in. “If ye love me, keep my commandments,” Christ says. That’s not abstract or sentimental. That’s concrete.
To love God is to submit to His Word. It is to delight in His law. It is to bend heart and life toward His righteousness. Likewise, to love neighbor is not to affirm rebellion, but to seek their good as God defines good… even when that requires rebuke, confrontation, or discipline.
In other words, biblical love has backbone.
The truth is, when we detach love from God’s commandments, we don’t get a higher, purer love. We get something thin and unstable. Worse still, we get a weapon. We begin to demand “love” as sentimental approval, and then we brand anyone who resists evil as a “hater.”
And just like that, love becomes a tool for silencing truth.
The Modern Gospel of Loving and Hating the Right Things
At the same time, because modern man has rejected the God who saves, he must invent some substitute salvation. One powerful substitute in our age is what R. J. Rushdoony called “salvation by love and hate.” In this counterfeit gospel, you are justified—not by Christ’s blood—but by loving the approved causes and hating the approved enemies.
Look around. It’s everywhere.
For many on the left, the “good person” loves humanity in the abstract and hates whoever is labeled the current obstacle to progress… borders, ICE, or whatever the moment demands.
For many on the right, the “good person” loves capitalism and hates socialism. Personal sins… lies, grifts, sexual immorality, foreign and corporate payoffs… are excused so long as the man is “on our side.”
Meanwhile, for revolutionaries and totalitarians alike, ritual hatred becomes a kind of secular liturgy. Public denunciations provide a rush of moral cleansing. People feel emancipated through outrage. Hitler, Stalin, and Mao all created an enemy class to officially hate.
This is Phariseeism in modern clothes.
In Luke 18, the Pharisee stood in the temple and prayed “with himself,” listing his virtues and thanking God he was not like other men. By social standards, he looked exemplary. Yet Jesus says he went home unjustified. The tax collector… the broken man who beat his chest and pleaded for mercy… went home right with God.
Why? Because the Pharisee sought sociological justification: “I am good for society.” The “system” depended on him and his order. The publican sought theological justification: mercy before a holy God.
Modern salvation by love and hate does the same thing. It asks, “Are you useful to the cause? Do you hate the right people?” rather than, “Have you bowed before the sovereign God and sought mercy in Christ?” Example: Go on X, and you’ll quickly see that folks define themselves by either hating Nick Fuentes or Ben Shapiro. On and on. Fascinating, right?
“All They That Hate Me Love Death”
Now, biblical love and biblical hate are not neutral moods. They are life-and-death stances toward God Himself.
Proverbs 8 presents Wisdom… ultimately Christ… calling out to mankind: “He that sinneth against me wrongeth his own soul: all they that hate me love death.” That is not poetic exaggeration. It is a diagnosis.
To hate God is to embrace a will to death.
Consider the atheist who demands order, meaning, and morality while denying God. He lives on borrowed capital. Every appeal to justice, logic, or human dignity testifies against his unbelief.
Consider Dostoevsky’s Kirilov, who reasoned that if affirming life implies affirming God, then the ultimate denial of God must be self-destruction.
Consider Nietzsche, who proclaimed the death of God and the rise of the superman, yet discovered that any stable affirmation of life pointed back to divine order. His philosophy drifted toward despair and eventually insanity.
Yet loving death does not always look dramatic. Sometimes it looks ordinary:
A quiet contempt for the means of life—food, rest, family, health.
A habit of self-sabotage, constant crisis, and courting danger.
A politics of death, where nations use their intelligence to engineer their own cultural suicide.
Humanistic education, as Rushdoony further notes, becomes “the institutionalized love of death,” because once Christ is excluded, sin must be domesticated and normalized. To deny the God who is life is, in the end, to choose death… no matter what language we wrap around it.
What God Commands Us to Hate
Because love is bound to righteousness, Scripture does not apologize for hatred of evil. Jesus commended the church at Ephesus because they hated the deeds of the Nicolaitans. The Messianic King is praised because He “loves righteousness and hates wickedness.”
Again, Rushdoony put it bluntly:
Hate is wrong when we hate righteousness.
Love is wrong when we love evil.
By that measure, much of what passes for compassion today is hatred masquerading as love. When we are commanded to “love” what God calls abomination, we are being asked to approve what destroys souls. A universal, undiscriminating love ends up normalizing evil and punishing those who refuse to bless it.
Our culture even manufactures new sins to protect its idols. Any principled moral objection can be labeled hateful by definition. But if evil must be loved, then righteousness must be hated. You cannot bless the serpent without cursing the Seed of the woman.
Even the slogan “Love the sinner, hate the sin” collapses in practice. It is not Scripture, and when used loosely it turns sin into a fog detached from the sinner. But sin is not abstract. It is what a man is and does before God… his unbelief, his adultery, his lies, his violence. Christian love does not sentimentalize rebellion. It calls sinners to repentance at the cross and warns that apart from Christ, they stand as enemies of God.
Why the World Hates Christ… And His People
In John 15, Jesus warned His disciples: “If the world hate you, ye know that it hated me before it hated you.” The “world” here is fallen humanity organized in rebellion.
Christ draws a clear line. If His followers belonged to the world’s system, they would be embraced by it. Because they belong to Him, they will often be resented.
Notice the pattern:
The world’s hatred flows from its prior hatred of Christ and the Father.
The more clearly Christians live under His Word, the sharper the contrast becomes.
Even religious leaders often participate in that hatred when confronted by truth.
Sometimes that hatred is loud and violent. Other times it is quiet… polite exclusion, professional penalties, whispered slander. But whether subtle or bloody, the root is the same: “He that hateth me hateth my Father also.”
The True Sabbath: Rest from Man-Centered Love and Hate
Here’s the problem: When man makes himself ultimate, he cannot rest. If everything depends on human planning, human love, and human hate, then there is no Sabbath. No deep exhale. “There is no rest, saith my God, unto the wicked.”
The humanist must constantly find an enemy to hate. He divides the world endlessly… party against party, race against race, generation against generation, class against class. Frankly, even his “Sabbaths” are counterfeit forms of rest: chemicals, rituals, entertainments that promise escape but leave him more restless than before.
By contrast, the biblical Sabbath rests on this truth: “the government shall be upon his shoulder.” The salvation of the world does not depend on our campaigns or our outrage. “Known unto God are all his works from the foundation of the world.”
For the Christian, that means:
We should work hard, fight evil, and endure hatred… but as servants, not saviors.
We can set down our work, our anxieties, even our enemies, trusting Christ to complete His purposes.
We do not need a constant ritual of loving and hating the approved things to prove we are righteous. Our justification rests in Christ alone.
Loving What God Loves, Hating What God Hates
We live in a generation that has weaponized love and demonized hate. “Love” is used to bless what God forbids. “Hate” is used to condemn obedience. Even within the church, love is often reduced to emotion, hate treated as always suspect, and law quietly set against grace.
But the biblical picture is straightforward:
God’s law is a loving gift given “that ye might live.”
Christ, Wisdom incarnate, calls us to choose life over death.
True love is covenant faithfulness according to God’s commandments.
True hate is a principled rejection of what God calls evil—starting with our own sin.
We are not saved by our love or our hate. We are saved by the crucified and risen Lord, who loved righteousness and hated wickedness perfectly, who bore the curse our rebellion deserved, and who now calls us to share in His holy loves and holy hatreds.
In a culture that sentimentalizes love and anathematizes all hate, Christians must recover the plain, embracing clarity of Scripture: “All they that hate me love death.”
Our task is not to join the shouting matches. It is to live and speak another way… life in Christ, where love and hate are no longer ideological weapons, but the fruit of hearts reconciled to God.
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