Articles
What God Hates
How do you feel about people who keep stuff stirred up in our community? What about people who may do so in the church? What about those people who lie? What about people who seem to love wicked things and wicked ways? What about people who are arrogant, conceited and snobbish in their view of everyone else? What about people who are quick to participate in these things?
Well, it does matter what you think, and it matters what I think too. But what really matters is what God thinks!
Proverbs 6:16-21 (NIV)
"There are six things the Lord hates,
seven that are detestable to him:
haughty eyes,
a lying tongue,
hands that shed innocent blood,
a heart that devises wicked schemes,
feet that are quick to rush into evil,
a false witness who pours out lies
and a person who stirs up conflict in the community."
God detests these things, God hates them! We should too.
We don't condone murder, very few human beings would, but we see 6 more things on God's list that sometimes people tend to accept, or at least tolerate for lack of the ability to effect change. Some people in fact, join forces with those who practice them. Stirring up conflict in the community doesn't rate the same on our scale as shedding innocent blood, but God detests it still. If the context of this is the community of believers, that's even worse isn't it? Dissension in the church is a dangerous thing, and to be the one who creates such issues is to be the one whose actions God detests.
What about lying, contemplating and participating in evil deeds and bearing false witness. We tend to tolerate many of these things as long as they don't directly affect or threaten us personally or as a church. If we can keep them at arms length, don't we usually just let them be? We see them as being outside of the church, so we just try and do good while we witness others doing evil. God does not tolerate them though.
I think it would do all us good, myself included, if we better understood WHY God detests these things. We would probably gain wisdom in knowing why haughty eyes are a problem, why being the community "pot stirrer" is bad, why people who conjure up wicked plans are a problem that directly and indirectly affects us all, and why those who pour out lies sometimes manage to pull us all down into the pit with them, even if we have distanced ourselves as best we can. We know we don't want to be the pot stirrer or community gossip, but do we comprehend how these people affect the rest of us? Do we understand all the cause and effect this evil has on us, even when we are not directly associated with it?
It is a cancer to our community and our society, a sickness that affects us all. God doesn't want people to be evil in the first place, nor does He want the evil perpetrated by people who chose to do evil to harm His people, or affect us in such a way as to lead us astray. God hates these things. He hates what they do to those who participate in them, and He hates what they do to the rest of us who have to live with the problems caused by this evil all around us.
May we view them as God does. May we teach others the pitfalls of these life styles, show them God's way, and do our best to pursue righteousness in our daily walk. We don't know but a fraction of what God knows, but for all the same reasons that He detests these and other evil things, we need to detest them too.
