The True Meaning of Hate

You are not signed in as a Premium user; you are viewing the free version of this program. Premium users have access to full-length programs with limited commercials and receive a 10% discount in the store! Sign up for only one day for the low cost of $1.99. Click the button below.

See All Plans

Conservative commentator Matt Walsh is getting pushback from students at Baylor University, a Christian university in Texas, for a speech he is scheduled to give Tuesday night defending the Christian values of protecting life, marriage, and gender.

Some Baylor students, however, are demanding Walsh's speech be shut down because of his "anti-LGBTQ" views, according to a Change.org petition that has garnered over 2,200 signatures as of Tuesday morning. ("Students at Baylor U. try to Shut Down Matt Walsh's talk")

These days, pastors of all denominations, including priests and other clerics of the Roman Catholic Church, like to pretend that when Christ Jesus walked the earth, He was all about compassion and never about rigorously doing whatever one has to do to save and be saved. Yet in the record of Holy Scripture, Christ speaks quite sternly about the priority that must be given to salvation, even when harsh measures and a tough disposition are required.

Woe to the world [cosmos, ordered existence] from scandals [i.e., things that cause us to stumble into sin]. Perforce, scandals come, but woe to the person through whom scandal comes. So, if your hand or your foot scandalize you, cut it off and cast it from you. It is more fitting [comely, fitting, beautiful, noble] for you to enter into life crippled or lame than to be cast into eternal fire with two hands and two feet. And if your eye scandalizes you, pluck it out and cast it away from you. It is more fitting for you to enter into life one-eyed than with two eyes to be cast into hellfire. (Matthew 18:7–9) [Translation mine, from Nestle Aland 26th Edition Greek New Testament]

Christ says of Himself, "I am the Way, the Truth and the Life: No one comes to the Father if not through me."

In light of this saying, salvation is again at stake when He speaks of the love we must bear for Him, albeit at the expense of the love we feel toward those we are supposed, by God's law for our nature, to hold dear:

Do not think I have come to bring peace on earth; I have not come to bring peace, but a sword. For I have come to set a man against his father, and a daughter against her mother, and a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law; and a man's foes will be those of his own household. He who loves father or mother more than me is not worthy of me, and he who loves son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me, and he who does not take his cross and follow me is not worthy of me. (Matthew 10:33)

Except we mistake our bodies for ourselves, Christ's admonition to discard offensive body parts betokens pain and even lifelong physical and emotional distress and difficulty. But His demand in regard to the primordial love we are to bear for Him seems likely to require that we rip the heart itself of love from our bodies.

This has to seem harsh and perhaps even utterly objectionable, not least because it sets the spirit of love that binds us to follow Christ against the natural law that inclines us to love our spouse as our own body and our offspring as ourselves renewed. Yet, Christ, as the Word Incarnate, is the very Word of creation, that is with God and is God, by and through whom all things come into existence.

On account of this identity with God, obedience to the first commandment of love requires that we love Christ with our whole heart, soul, mind, and strength; even as the true import of the second commandment of love has us loving Christ, our savior — the archetype and epitome of the Good Samaritan in the parable — as ourselves.

From this priority of love for God in Christ, placing it above the world and all things else, Jesus draws a consequence for His disciples that ought to startle the self-professing Christian preachers of care-free (dare I say gay?) love who are wittingly or unwittingly discomfiting their congregations in Satan's behalf. For Christ said unto them:

Truly, truly I say to you: Unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains alone; but if it dies, it bears much fruit. He who loves his life [soul] loses it, and he who hates his life [soul] in this world will keep [safeguard] it for [unto] eternal life. (John 12:24–25)

The living soul arises from the communion of God's spirit with such stuff as the world is made on. But the degradation of sin tainted and still taints that communion, so that in the world that results (the world in which we exist) the soul lives unto death, not life.

Christ's word's call upon His followers to hate that living death in order to safeguard the soul's true destiny — which the spirit of God eternally intends — wherein the soul's communion with God in Christ lives unto more abundant life, dying no more forever.

Preachers who encourage souls to cultivate and prolong identities self-made according to the passions and pleasures of this living death, though they seem to speak of love, forego the hatred of the fallen world that Christ recommends as the only way to live that safeguards life eternal.

They encourage souls to cling to the very life Christ says they ought to hate and cast away. Their supposedly loving preachment is producing, in the generations being scandalized by it, a false delusion of love that hates the primordial love of God Christ preached, and worships instead the occasions of scandal and death Christ sternly admonishes us to cast away.

Love is not love that rejects the life with God in Christ, that is to come. Love is not love that rejects and mutilates, in flesh and spirit, the image of God in us, to worship, instead of God, self-created persons who substituted their selfish wills for the wholesome will wherewith God informs our natural passions.

That selfish will, exalting the instrumental worship of sexual pleasures and emotional self-indulgence, rejects the life-giving vocation to preserve humanity, the vocation in whose service God arranged the pleasures that reward our willingness to participate in the glorious self-abnegation that fulfills His will and power of creation.

God prepares the pleasures for us. By sharing His heart of sacrifice with us, Christ prepares us for the abnegation. From that gift of our communion with Him, we gain the understanding to fulfill the vocation of life that sexual intimacy simply introduces, ornaments and serves. The greater joys lie beyond it, in this life and the life with God in Christ that is to come.

Preaching those joys, and Christ's way to attain them implements the meaning of love. But preaching, in the name of Christ, false, comfortable lies that encourage people to rejoice in an understanding of human sexuality barren of those joys, and replete with self-idolatry hateful to God — what else is this but the true meaning of hate and a ministry of hate toward human beings as well as our creator, God?

Have a news tip? Submit news to our tip line.

We rely on you to support our news reporting. Please donate today.