Exodus 20:5 You shall not bow down to them or serve them, for I the Lord your God am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers on the children to the third and the fourth generation of those who hate me,

Hate is not the opposite of love. Indifference is the opposite of love. We will not find that in any of our dictionaries. Why I can say that is because while God is love, which I believe, He is also a jealous God. What we have a problem with is in how He treats those who hate Him.

Merriam Webster defines hate as intense hostility. Why is left up to the hater.

In order to hate God one must believe there is a God. Unbelief is indifference to the possibility of God’s existence. If love is believing God then unbelief is indifference, the opposite of love.

Now we are left with the issue of how anyone could possibly hate a God they know exists.

Perhaps it is easier to understand from the concept of His first commandment. You shall not have any gods before me. Putting anything before God is not an act of rebellion. We have to swear our allegiance to God before we can rebel against Him. So perhaps, and I leave room here for other thoughts, that hating God is refusing to swear allegiance to Him after He has made Himself known to us.

A prime example of this thought is Satan. The raw definition of the name Satan is adversary. He is the opposition party to put it in broader terms, He opposes everything that is true, the liar. He opposes everything that is righteous, the Anti-christ.

We see Satan first in the garden tempting Eve with a lie, “you can be as God.” Because of this act, God cast Satan out into the world, away from God’s Glory. Why?

If we look at Satan’s first official act of rebellion, it was against mankind. We can reason amongst ourselves in human terms but Satan was not human, he was created eternal.

Was it jealousy? God came to seek out man in the garden every morning. Satan had to come to God. Reference Job 1:6 Satan might have said to himself that God was lowering Himself to the level of man, but not so with Satan. I say might but that is only a possibility from a human perspective. Satan was an Archangel, one of the named, but he was not God.

If Satan loved God why would he not honor God’s expression of love?

That thought comes to me via the parable of the prodigal son where his brother did not rejoice with the father in his brother’s return. In Luke 15:29 he sounds like Satan.

Hebrews 4:12 For the word of God is living and active, sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing to the division of soul and of spirit, of joints and of marrow, and discerning the thoughts and intentions of the heart.

Do we feel pierced?

One of our human problems is translating spiritual matters into feeling. So many times in scriptures Jesus compares spiritual matters with human experiences. “This is my body, take eat.” “He who drinks the water I give will never thirst again.” “My sheep know my voice.”

All these things we know in the flesh, experienced before we came to Christ. There is little that anyone can say to convince us we are not feeling our way through this life of faith. Feelings are what caused us to seek Him in the first place.

• Psalm 51:17 The sacrifices of God are a broken spirit; a broken and contrite heart, O God, you will not despise.
• Isaiah 57:15 For thus says the One who is high and lifted up, who inhabits eternity, whose name is Holy: “I dwell in the high and holy place, and also with him who is of a contrite and lowly spirit, to revive the spirit of the lowly, and to revive the heart of the contrite.

A contrite heart is a broken heart, tell me that isn’t emotional. We are created emotional beings. Love is after all an emotion. How we express that love is as vast as the many ways love is defined. Passion, friend, family, even the mistaken sense of appetites. “I love coffee ice cream.”

Then God comes along and we discover agape love. God’s love is perfect love. Love is patient and kind; love does not envy or boast; it is not arrogant or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice at wrongdoing, but rejoices with the truth. Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.

Love never ends.

And that is where we differ from God. We can be fickled in how we express love. We can even deny the love that captures us.

2 Timothy 2:13 If we are faithless, he remains faithful— for he cannot deny himself.

The KJV uses the words if we stop believing. We can stop believing in love. Some kinds of love can hurt, but not Agape.