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.