Does God love some more than others?

Yes

1 of 6

by Will Emaus

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In 2006, I lived down the road from a bunch of Amish schoolchildren that were killed at the hands of a deranged gunman. I had moved from the area a couple of months before the incident but nonetheless it had a profound impact on me. I had moved to Lancaster Pa. for a job opportunity a few years earlier and when I took the job I went out there very quickly to work on a project, and didn't really have any time to find somewhere to live.

One day, not knowing anyone in the area I just took a drive and happened to go into the Amish country outside of Lancaster and saw a place so cool I knew I had to move there. This area was a complete treasure, I fell in love with this place, and to make a long story short, one of the reasons why, was that I was used to urban and suburban areas; I wasn't used to driving behind buggies on Sunday afternoons with kids hanging off the back that would touch your heart by smiling and waving. I wasn't used to driving past children on my way to work that would get off their scooters and wave at me just because they recognized my car. These were the same kids that wound up dying in October of 2006 and they were good and trusting kids.

Once this terrible event happened, a group showed up in Lancaster to "protest", the Westboro Baptist Church and Shirley Phelps Roper. This group, and their failure to properly discern scripture, made the most wonderful group of people and their children seem evil. Regardless of anyone's interpretation of whether the Amish follow Scripture implicitly, they are by no means bad people and as it applies to their children they simply trust and obey the rules laid out for them. The primary weapon that the WBC used, and they say it again and again, is the phrase "God hates you".

The advantage they have is the Scripture itself, and because people don't want to really engage the notion that God hates, the WBC gets some sort of leverage on everyone by throwing this topic at people who aren't always really armed to refute the charge, so they walk away and brandish the WBC as radicals or "hate mongerers" without ever really getting the real truth across back to this group.

God does hate, He primarily hates behaviors but He is capable of hating a person. When it says in Romans 9:13 that "Jacob I have loved but Esau I have hated", that is literal and it's the truth. That verse is framed by a chapter that tries to put this hatred into context however. I'd like to try and define what I believe this hate actually is.

First, it does not contradict John 3:16 which states "For God so loved the World". God does not show favoritism or partiality when it comes to Salvation. Or when it comes to the gift of Jesus Christ in your heart. However look at Jacob and Esau from the perspective of Esau. Esau was not denied the opportunity of Salvation. He wasn't even denied blessing as God did bless him in other ways. However he was treated worse than his brother on the topic of his birthright, and he was denied benefits that he should have been entitled to due to him being the Older and Jacob being the younger.

God clearly states that "The Older shall serve the Younger" to Rebekkah before he was born, and what makes the situation much worse is that Jacob clearly sinned in order to get Esau's birthright and his father's blessing...and God simply let it happen to accomplish what He had stated. That Isreal would come through Jacob, not Esau. From Esau's perspective, that's a pretty bitter pill to swallow.

God made a choice that Jacob would be the heir to Israel, not Esau, even though customs dictated that Esau should have been and not Jacob. From Esau's perspective, this is hatred and God seemingly agrees with this. God had a will that superseded the laws of man, and Esau's treatment became a necessary tool in accomplishing that will. As a result, God denied Esau something that he was rightfully entitled to, on Earth.

What could have infuriated Esau the most however is that God took steps after all of this to deal with Jacob's deceitful nature; if Esau had ever come to realize that God made a choice to refine Jacob's heart but waited to do so until after Jacob had received Esau's blessing, you can understand that Esau might be a little upset by that...by God acknowledging this by using the word "hate", he is actually agreeing with Esau's perspective but His will comes first and He certainly expects Esau to respect God's choice.

It is because of God's love that He acknowledges that He did hate Esau. Esau was blessed in other ways and certainly had the same opportunity of eternal life, but he had to get past the fact that God allowed for him to be treated with disrespect in comparison to what he was entitled to on Earth in order to accomplish something through Jacob.

It does not however mean that God randomly hates anyone or that "hate" is defined the way it would be on earth. He simply operates within His own will and there is the potential for a person to be "The least" in some way on earth in order for God to accomplish His necessary purposes, God in such cases asking those to put away worldly things and focus on the spiritual.

From God's perspective, this can be an issue of trusting in Him as well as an acknowledgement that in a world full of people that sometimes one has to be above another in some respect to accomplish His purposes. So rather than "hate" as we define it, God uses Romans 9 to teach that "hate" could happen in God's design for the world. It's up to the reader to discern why and how to respond...

God has a will and God has a personality, the problem with groups like the WBC is they try to "make" God hate people, but that isn't up to them and if God does "hate" someone on Earth in some fashion in order to accomplish His purposes, each of them still has the opportunities of Jesus Christ in their heart and Salvation.

This is the only "hatred" ever referred to in the Bible and as you can see, it has nothing to do with an intent for God to hate, he acknowledges because of his sense of justice that sometimes certain individuals get "the short end of the stick" in aspects of their life on earth; It is not inconsistent with God's Love which promises eternal life and God certainly has the right to use instances like that to refine hearts to focus on Heavenly things rather than earthly ones.

Even if a person doesn't get a treatment that they believe they are entitled to on Earth, God's hatred is still so much better than anyone else's love. And I believe if a person does experience being "hated" in some respect, God will love them all that much more in Heaven for what they have endured on Earth. "The Last shall be First".

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