by Will Emaus

Created on: September 19, 2009   Last Updated: September 23, 2009

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.

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