A Thought For The Week Of February 13, 2017

"Let those who love the Lord hate evil, for he guards the lives of his faithful ones and delivers them from the hand of the wicked." (Psalm 97:10) It's often said that there's a fine line between love and hate. Both are very passionate emotions and both can lead us to do irrational things. That may, of course, be one of our problems: we choose to think of love and hate as merely human emotions rather than as spiritual forces. They are human emotions, of course, but there are varying degrees and natures to love and hate - and both do have a spiritual component to them. They are not simply of this world, and they do not simply flow from our hearts. As spiritual forces both love and hate go beyond anything that we might simply "feel" and they take possession of us. They become not only our feelings but our thoughts and our actions as well. We also, of course, think of them as polar opposites: completely different things that simply don't work together. And, of course, from a Christian perspective we think of hate as abhorrent: the antithesis of everything that Jesus taught. But it's not necessarily so. This verse seems to point out that in at least one way love leads to hate quite naturally. In fact, love and hate can support and complement each other. "Let those who love the Lord hate evil ..." What occurs to me here is that the true polar opposites are not love and hate but rather God and evil. In fact, God and evil are such polar opposites that if one is loved then the other must be hated. It's inevitable. You cannot love both God and evil. Nor can you hate both, for that matter. In the New Testament this concept gets a bit reframed as "you cannot love both God and money" and "the love of money is the root of all evil." The point is that whatever we truly love controls our lives and whatever tries to draw us away from the thing that we love we inevitably hate. We hate evil if we love God, but on the other hand if we choose to love that which is evil, the result is to hate God. Love and hate both have the power to change not only our own lives, but also the entire world. We see enough of the influence that hate has. May those who love God reveal ever more powerfully the difference that their love can make.