God's Wrath & Hate: Does God Love the Sinner and Hate the Sin?

God is love but love is not God. To say that love is God is heresy. This would mean that as long as people are loving, then they will inherit eternal life; and it doesn’t matter what they believe, they will be saved. This idea is strongly rejected in both Old and New Testaments. Acts 4:12 says, “And there is salvation in no one else; for there is no other name under heaven that has been given among men by which we must be saved.” This name is Jesus. And then John 3:18 says, “He who believes in Him is not judged; he who does not believe has been judged already, because he has not believed in the name of the only begotten Son of God.” In Exodus 20:3-6 God says, “You shall have no other gods before Me. 4 You shall not make for yourself an idol, or any likeness of what is in heaven above or on the earth beneath or in the water under the earth. 5 You shall not worship them or serve them; for I, the Lord your God, am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers on the children, on the third and the fourth generations of those who hate Me, 6 but showing lovingkindness to thousands, to those who love Me and keep My commandments.” Who are those who hate God? Those who do not worship Him, those who worship other gods. Then God reveals to us the punishment for worshipping or serving other gods. In Deuteronomy 8:19 God says, “It shall come about if you ever forget the Lord your God and go after other gods and serve them and worship them, I testify against you today that you will surely perish.” By perish, God meant that they would be destroyed, wiped off the face of the earth because God’s anger would be kindled against them (Dt 6:13-16; 7:4).

God is not okay with other religions. Worship belongs to Jesus who is Yahweh and worship belongs to Yahweh alone. Idolatry is the breaking of the first and greatest commandment which Jesus quoted to Satan, saying, “You shall worship the Lord your God and serve Him only” (Mt 4:10). God’s punishment comes upon all those who do not worship and serve the One true God. But whoever calls upon the name of Yahweh shall be saved (Ro 10:13), and “faith comes from hearing, and hearing by the word of Christ” (Ro 10:17). Therefore, there is salvation in no one else. There is salvation in no other name. You cannot be saved by believing in Buddha, Allah, Hindu deities, Love, a divine consciousness, or other gods. There is only salvation in Jesus. Why? Because God is a jealous God and will not stand for idol worship. He will not even stand for mixed worship of Yahweh plus other gods. That is the number one thing that God hates. If you were married to someone who was polyamorous and had relations with multiple other lovers in addition to you, would you stand for it? Would you find that acceptable? You wouldn’t. In a similar way, God doesn’t accept mixed worship. Not only is it irreverent, it is despicable to Him. He is your creator. He is the One who made you and has gifted you with every good thing that you enjoy and so to worship some other god is inherently wrong.

In my study, I went through a concordance and went through every Bible passage that has the words, “wrath, anger, angry, hate, and abhor,” and I found a very common theme. Do you know what that is? Over and over again, the most frequent thing that the Bible mentions about God’s hatred for sin is when people worship idols. That’s the number one thing that God hates. That is the primary reason that God gets angry and He pours out His wrath. This is because behind every idol is a demon, a fallen angelic being, a principality, a lesser elohim, a false god, a real spiritual being who is stealing worship and allegiance from the One true God who created all things and from whom all good things come. Some people might think, “what’s the big deal?” The big deal is that they are feeding the power of demons, they are enabling them to spread their darkness and deception over the earth to corrupt and destroy humanity. By doing this, they make themselves an enemy of God and prevent more people from entering into God’s kingdom.

Even though God hates idolatry, the Bible says that God is slow to anger (Ex 34:6). Interestingly, God’s anger is never mentioned after Adam and Eve sinned, or Cain killed his brother, or during the days when every thought and intention of people’s hearts were only evil continually that God flooded the earth. God’s anger wasn’t even mentioned at the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah. Now, this is not to definitively say that God wasn’t angry at those sins. I’m just making an observation here. We know that from Deuteronomy 29:23 that God was angry at them.

However, the first time God’s anger is mentioned in the Bible is in Exodus 4:14 when Moses was stubbornly refusing God’s command to free the Israelites from slavery because he didn’t feel up to the task, even after God reassured Moses that He would be with him and give him the words to say to Pharoah. After that, Moses said no and then it says, “the anger of the Lord burned against Moses.” Like, who is Moses to say no to God? Here is the Creator of the universe who made Moses, who made man’s mouth, and who holds all the power; God appears to Moses in a burning bush but the bush is not being consumed and a voice is speaking to Him out of the bush and yet Moses has the audacity to so no to God. So, God is rightfully upset with Moses because of Moses’ stubbornness. Yet, God is still patient with him and doesn’t consume him in His wrath. We must also keep in mind here that Moses is the one recording the account of these events in the book of Exodus and so the experience and encounter that He had with God was that of God’s anger. This could mean that God raised His voice at Moses and maybe the flames of the bush stoked up. God wouldn’t take no for an answer. God’s plans were bigger and better than Moses’ fears. Out of this, we could say that God’s anger was purposeful in achieving His end goal like when children don’t listen to the voice of their parents but then the father raises his voice to let them know he’s serious and they better obey. In this way, God’s anger wasn’t personal—it was purposeful.

The next time God’s anger is recorded is in Exodus 15:7 which is a song of Moses about the Israelite escape from Egypt. This was right after the plagues on Egypt and the drowning of the Egyptians in the Red Sea because they wouldn’t let God’s people go and then when they did let them go, they chased after them to kill them. As a result from this, verse 7 says, “And in the greatness of Your excellence You overthrow those who rise up against You; You send forth Your burning anger, and it consumes them as chaff.” The Egyptians had cruelly enslaved the Israelites because they were growing large in number and Pharoah became afraid of them but then Pharoah didn’t want to let them go because he didn’t want to lose his slave task force that was building his empire. However, God made a promise to Abraham that his descendants would be as numerous as the stars of the heavens and would bless the whole world. God would therefore keep His promise to Abraham and free the Israelites from slavery. In Exodus 3, God hears the cry of His people and sees their affliction and harsh conditions of slavery. Out of compassion, He rescues them. It is God’s fierce love for them that His anger is against their enemies.

The next time God’s anger is mentioned is in Exodus 22:21-24 where Moses is giving God’s law to Israel in this covenant with God they had just entered into. God says, “You shall not wrong a stranger or oppress him, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt. 22 You shall not afflict any widow or orphan. 23 If you afflict him at all, and if he does cry out to Me, I will surely hear his cry; 24 and My anger will be kindled, and I will kill you with the sword, and your wives shall become widows and your children fatherless.” Again, we see that God’s anger is fierce against those who injure and oppress other people and this anger rises out of God’s great compassion.

The next event of God’s anger is in Exodus 32 where the Israelites make for themselves a golden calf to worship since Moses was taking a long time up on the mountain. This was right after they had been rescued from Egypt and miraculously crossed the Red Sea. They had seen amazing miracles through all the plagues striking Egypt and every false Egyptian god being humiliated by these plagues to show the people that there was only One true God and His name is Yahweh. It didn’t take long for Israel to turn aside from God’s command and for them to worship and sacrifice to this golden calf. God said to Moses that this is an obstinate people, “Now then let Me alone, that My anger may burn against them and that I may destroy them; and I will make of you a great nation” (v. 10). God was going to smite them all because of their sin but He relented and only smote some of them through bringing a plague upon them (v. 35). God was also angry with Aaron but wasn’t punished because Moses prayed for him (Dt 9:20). God’s anger with idolatry resulted in twenty-three thousand people dying in one day (1 Cor 10:8). Paul describes God’s anger with the Israelites in the wilderness by saying, “Nevertheless, with most of them God was not well-pleased; for they were laid low in the wilderness” (1 Cor 10:5). That is certainly a nicer way of putting it. From this passage, we could say that God’s anger is the absence of His pleasure or the antithesis of that which pleases Him. Incuring God’s anger is to do the opposite of what pleases God. Many times, His anger will also result in punishment and the punishment is the expression or purpose of His anger.

It is important for us to take a second here and recognize that God is not like us. God’s love is not like our love. His jealousy is not like our jealousy. And His anger and hatred are not like our anger and hatred. God has perfect self-control and so it would be wrong to think of God’s anger as Him somehow losing His temper and venting His emotions. When God is angry, He chooses to be angry. He doesn’t lose control of Himself. Because of all the earthly connotations we have with the word “anger,” it might be more theologically accurate to use the term, “God’s displeasure” instead. However, we might also want to use the term “anger” as well because displeasure typically isn’t moved to action whereas anger is; and what we know about God is that His anger towards sin moves Him to action to punish sin and rebellion.

Here, we come to a critical point in our discussion, which is this: Does God love the sinner and hate the sin? Or does God hate the sinner and the sin? Philosophically, we could argue that sin is a choice and not a substance, so in that sense, it’s not like God would hate something physically inside the sinner, He would hate the actions that the sinner does. But the actions do not happen all by themselves, they are decisions made by people. From this, we would have to ask, “is the action to blame? Or is the person who made the action to blame?” In a similar way, do we blame a gun for a mass shooting? Or do we blame the person who pulled the trigger? In this way, we could argue that just as it isn’t the gun’s fault for murdering people, it isn’t sin’s fault for sinning. Rather, it’s the person’s fault for pulling the trigger or for sinning. In another analogy, we could say that a parent is mad or upset with her children for disobeying her. She doesn’t compartmentalize the action her children did and then just get angry at the action. Rather, she gets angry at the children because the children are the ones who made the choice. Now for us, there can be a righteous anger and an unrighteous anger. An unrighteous anger is concerned about self and pride and how the offense personally impacted or hurt us; whereas, righteous anger is concerned for the well-being of the other person or other parties that are involved and doing what is right. A parent might be embarrassed or insecure about her ability to control the situation and because of that, may lash out in unrighteous anger. On the other hand, the parent may love her children, want the best for her children, desire them to be safe and to grow up as morally and civilly upright as they can be. The motive of love in this case, would result in righteous anger.

What we must understand about God is that He desires the best for us, wants us to succeed, wants all humanity to come to Him to receive blessings and eternal life. However, the rules of the universe are such that all those who worship and serve the devil belong to him but God is a good and jealous God, desiring that none should perish but that all should come to receive the life of God. But that cannot happen so long as people reject God, turn away from Him, and serve other gods. Therefore, God responds with anger and wrath to purify a people for Himself so that they can be saved and blessed. A God who doesn’t respond with anger at all is like having children with no father to discipline them and having a mother who can never say “no” to her kids. That combination will surely produce rebellious children who will grow up very likely to be a burden upon society.

Another thing we must understand about God’s anger is that God is a Trinity and so an offense against Himself is really an offense against another member of the Trinity and it would be the loving thing to do to defend and vindicate the righteousness of God against those who are defiant. If we used an analogy for this, we could say that the father desires his children to respect, honor, and love their mother just as much as they love him. It is for this reason that when the children are rebellious to their mom or speak disrespectfully, the father will discipline them for the offense not against himself but against their mother. Before the children are punished, the father sits down the children and says, “Now, don’t you speak to your mom like that…” In a similar way, we see Jesus getting angry and overturning tables at the temple because people made His Father’s house into a den of thieves. Jesus had a righteous indignation on behalf of the honor of His Father and then the disciples remembered that it was written, “Zeal for Your house will consume Me” (Jn 2:17). It is for these reasons that God’s anger comes from out of His love for the Trinity and His love for the good of all people.

When we ask the question, “Does God hate the sinner or does God hate the sin?” Or, “Is God angry at the sinner or is God angry at the sin?” We must understand that God’s hatred and anger is not arbitrary. It would be false to come to the conclusion that just because someone sinned, God is furiously angry with them so much that whenever the tiniest sin is committed, God just wants to smite you on the spot. This would be an overreaction and false understanding of God’s anger. God isn’t just sitting up in heaven eagerly looking and waiting for the next person to mess up so that He can smite them out of excitement, thrill, or pessimism. We are told that God takes no pleasure in the death of the wicked but rather that the wicked should turn from his evil ways so as to live (Ezek 33:11). For this reason, it would be false to have the idea that God hates your guts. God does love the sinner and wants to see the sinner live.

However, the Bible also says that God hates sinners like in Psalm 5:5-6 “The boastful shall not stand before Your eyes; You hate all who do iniquity. You destroy those who speak falsehood; The Lord abhors the man of bloodshed and deceit.” Psalm 11:5 “The Lord tests the righteous and the wicked, And the one who loves violence His soul hates.” For those who have followed after other gods, God says, “I have abhorred them,” and “My soul shall abhor you” (Lev 20:23; 26:30). Here are a few others (Jer 12:8; Ps 78:59; 106:40). God loves and hates at the same time but not in the same way. Think of it like this: Let’s say you’re fighting a war against a country that has become your enemy. Let’s say you’re a fighter pilot and you shoot down an enemy plane with much anger and vengeance yet at the same time, you are capable of having compassion towards the other pilot who parachuted out of his plane. You can value that person in your heart and let the pilot live even though just seconds ago you were fighting against him and he was fighting against you. Or what about an example of a mass murderer. You can have righteous indignation for his evil and heinous crime so that he receives a just punishment yet at the same time, you can value him as a person, desiring that he isn’t tortured for his prison sentence and receives basic needs and provisions. It’s not that you hate him inherently as a person yet it’s not as though you hate just the sin either. You understand that what he did is who he is in his character and yet at the same time not who he is because it was a bad choice that he made. It is possible then to hate the sinner yet not hate the sinner. Anger and hatred with a person then is not necessarily about all that they are but about what they have become and what they have done. God’s anger with people is not with who they are inherently but in who they have become; and those who have become God’s enemy, He is angry with. Can this anger be emotion? I would say that it can, even as Jesus expressed emotion, zeal for His Father’s house. Jesus was visibly upset in that situation. His zeal stirred Him to take action.

However, when the words, “wrath” and “hate” are mentioned, it would not be right for us to always see them with underlying emotions. Oftentimes, these words are used to express God’s position towards sinners and His outward actions coming against them. It may not be as personal as our western eyes tend to see it. Oftentimes, those words are used corporately about a group of people to express God’s position against them like in Romans 9:13 where God says, “Jacob I loved, but Esau I hated.” God chose one person to bring about His promise while He didn’t choose the other person. It’s not because God was showing favoritism because we know God doesn’t do that. The context also tells us that God chose Jacob before the twins were even born or anyone had opportunity to do anything good or bad. God was selecting a particular people group for His special purposes but it wasn’t because He personally hated the other person or a different people group. That is certainly not what the text is about.

There are a few other times in the New Testament where the word “hate” isn’t literal in every sense of the term like in John 12:25 which says, “He who loves his life loses it, and he who hates his life in this world will keep it to life eternal.” And Luke 14:26 which says, “If anyone comes to Me, and does not hate his own father and mother and wife and children and brothers and sisters, yes, and even his own life, he cannot be My disciple.” God tells us to love our enemies so He certainly isn’t telling us here to literally hate our own family and make them our enemies. However, we must love God so much that He is our first priority so that to our families and to the outside world, it may appear that we hate them because we have chosen to follow Jesus. This is more vividly displayed for those in Muslim families who convert to Christianity. Their family disowns them and they are often beaten and sometimes killed for leaving Islam. The relationship they will have with their family after leaving Islam is often never the same because they have chosen to follow Jesus.

It would be incorrect for us to think that God’s anger and wrath are the immediate result of some sin. I say this to dissuade some Christians who think that every time they sin, God is mad at them or God wants to destroy them. Remember, God is slow to anger. We must think precisely about what sins God is angry about and what kind of response they illicit from God. Sometimes it’s a sin which is very public or physical idolatry which God absolutely hates, but other times, the sin may not be quite to that level. If we look carefully, oftentimes the sin God shows His anger and wrath over are things that have developed gradually over time and have become worse and worse so that the people are in rebellion against God. It’s not just a moral failure—it’s a heart posture of obstinance toward God. It also must be noted that God’s wrath and anger are often expressed corporately over Israel not individualistically. When God says, “My soul shall abhor you” (Lev 26:30), it’s in the context of idolatry. It is a conscious, continual, rebellious state of the nation of Israel. The “you” is plural, and this is a state that Israel would reach after continually refusing to obey God and failing to turn away from their idolatry despite the continual warnings of the prophets. That’s important to recognize because God does not abhor people over minor infractions of the law. When Israel reached that state which Jeremiah and Ezekiel speak about, they were doing some pretty bad stuff like sacrificing their children in the fire to a false god.

Not all sins are equal. That is often a common misconception among Christians. However, James 2:10 says, “whoever keeps the whole law and yet stumbles in one point, he has become guilty of all.” And Jesus said, “whoever says, ‘You fool,’ shall be guilty enough to go into the fiery hell” (Mt 5:22). This means that one sin is enough to condemn you to hell because sin produces death because sin is the absence of God’s life. So, no matter how small the sin, it will condemn a person to die. But this doesn’t mean God hates lying or lust just as much as He hates physical adultery and murder. Clearly some sins are worse than others and a progression of sin is worse than the first instance of it. However, the Bible is clear that God hates child sacrifice (Dt 12:31), idolatry (Dt 16:22; Jer 44:4), hypocrisy and religious traditions apart from obedience (Isa 1:14; Am 5:21), robbery in the burnt offering (Isa 61:8), lawlessness (Heb 1:9), perjury and hearts that devise evil (Zech 8:17), divorce “and him who covers his garment with wrong” (Mal 2:16). Proverbs 6:16-19 says:

There are six things which the Lord hates,
Yes, seven which are an abomination to Him:
17 Haughty eyes, a lying tongue,
And hands that shed innocent blood,
18 A heart that devises wicked plans,
Feet that run rapidly to evil,
19 A false witness who utters lies,
And one who spreads strife among brothers.

I’m sure there are other sins God hates as well but those were the ones that I could find explicitly said in the Bible. Rebellion and idolatry are definitely the higher ones on the list though (1 Sam 15:23). We could even say that God hates all sin because it is so antithetical to His nature. The purity of His nature makes sin despicable to Him. God is most often angry at idolatry, rebellion, and unbelief (Num 25:11; Dt 1:34; 9:22-24; 29:22-29; 1 Kgs 11:9), those who do not follow the Lord fully (Num 32:10), and the iniquity of unjust gain (Isa 57:18).

Now that we have covered how God hates and is angry with sin, and what God is angry about, now we will discuss why God is angry from a few biblical examples. God gets angry because of Israel’s unbelief, because of their lack of faith. God did so much for them and performed so many miracles but they forgot and did not trust God. Psalm 78:22 specifically says the reason for God’s anger: “Because they did not believe in God and did not trust in His salvation.” Ezekiel 38:18 gives us another reason for God’s anger: “And they have defiled My holy name by their abominations which they have committed. So I have consumed them in My anger.” God cares about how people represent Him and what people think about Him. In 2 Samuel 6:7 the anger of the Lord burned against Uzzah and struck him down because of his “irreverence” because he touched the ark. This is given by the author of the book as the specific reason for which Uzzah died. Moses tells us that another reason for God’s anger is because God is a consuming fire, a jealous God (Dt 4:24). Divided loyalties to other gods is not acceptable to Him. The New Testament has much to say about God’s wrath (Jn 3:36; Ro 1:18; Ro 2:5, 8; 5:9; 12:19; Eph 5:6; Col 3:6; 1 Thess 1:10; 5:9), especially in the book of Revelation (Rev 6:16-17; 11:18; 14:10, 19; 15:1, 7; 16:1, 19; 19:15). Specifically, Romans 2:8 mentions that God’s wrath and indignation would await those who do not obey Him. Indignation is anger and it is also used for “wrath.” This is the Greek word thymos. The other word for wrath is orgē. In Revelation 19:15 it says, “From His mouth comes a sharp sword, so that with it He may strike down the nations, and He will rule them with a rod of iron; and He treads the wine press of the fierce [thymos] wrath [orgē] of God, the Almighty.” Those two words are used right next to each other to show God’s attitude towards sin and His action towards sin.

Ultimately, God’s anger should be seen as a positional attitude towards sin ready to take action when He deems necessary while God’s wrath is the impending punishment or the actionable result of God’s anger. Both words can be translated as either wrath or anger but what’s important is that we see God’s wrath and anger as different from how we humans express emotion, recognizing that God is not exactly like us. God gets upset with our sin and it grieves Him but we would be going overboard if we said that God absolutely hates our guts. God does not hate our very identity and the image that He created us in because He only creates that which is good; but if we turn away from Him, He hates what we have become and turned ourselves into and jealously desires that we turn back to Him.

In conclusion, God hates all sin but loves all sinners. The Bible also says that God hates particular sinners or His anger burns against those sinners but this should be more understood as God’s impending judgement being upon them rather than God’s personal attitude towards them personally. But even when God does express His extreme displeasure with sinners, it’s not because of one particular sin or minor infraction against God’s law, but rather, a continuous lifestyle and progression towards evil which is rebellion, idolatry, and unbelief, the three chief sins that are most often mentioned in the Bible as those things which God is angry over. This was a repeating theme for Israel and that’s why we constantly see God’s anger burning as we read the Old Testament. Hopefully though, most Christians aren’t living in those three sins if they’re living a lifestyle of repentance, so they don’t need to preoccupy their minds with the thought of God’s displeasure against them. But for those who aren’t saved, it is important for us to communicate God’s displeasure with people’s sins but in such a way that we speak in grace about God’s love toward them and desire for them. The emphasis should certainly be on God’s love because it is the kindness of the Lord that leads to repentance. But our message should not neglect speaking about sin either because it is sin that destroys us and keeps us from the life of God. A failure to repent will lead to death because of the inherent nature of sin and God’s perfect justice against sin. This means that one’s heart must be devoted in love to God so that they are led to keep God’s commands. If they don’t change their minds from following after the devil and the world to following after God, then they cannot be saved. Jesus will not unite His Spirit of salvation to those who don’t want Him.

Why does God hate Sin?

1. It is an offense against God and a rejection of His goodness

2. It is a crime and affliction against humanity

3. It leads to the destruction of ourselves

4. It destroys God’s purpose and creation