“But when his brothers saw that their father loved him more than all his brothers, they hated him and could not speak peacefully to him. Now Joseph had a dream, and when he told it to his brothers they hated him even more. He said to them, “Hear this dream that I have dreamed: Behold, we were binding sheaves in the field, and behold, my sheaf arose and stood upright. And behold, your sheaves gathered around it and bowed down to my sheaf.” His brothers said to him, “Are you indeed to reign over us? Or are you indeed to rule over us?” So they hated him even more for his dreams and for his words.”
Genesis 37:4-8 ESV
We see in today’s passage the source of Joseph’s upcoming debacle. His brothers, simply put, hated him. Hated him with, as they say, a hot passion. The Bible never shies away from recording what’s truly in the heart of mankind…sadly, tragically, what’s in all of our hearts.
His brothers already hated him because they knew their father loved him best. This means that the source of their antipathy was in the desire to have something they wanted but were denied – in this case, their father’s high esteem. It’s always this way. The world talks of hatred in a way that isn’t biblical. We hardly recognize that fact anymore. When the Scripture speaks of hate it reports the truth of the issue because it doesn’t, being God’s word, stand on the false premises of secular humanism.
If we may say that there’s a “doctrine” of hatred presented in the Bible (as a figure of speech anyway), we notice that it stems from the desire to gain something from others. The modern world teaches that hatred is disagreeing with others – or, more to the point, a select group of others. The woke movement has, because its origins are demonic, twisted the definition of many things and that’s especially true with hatred. The logic of the modern left is self-defeating at every turn. For example, if one disagrees with the LGBTQ movement, that’s an example of hatred. Even if the Christian believes, as we should, that all people, regardless of belief, by the command of God, deserve equal legal protection by the civil magistrate against force and fraud, that makes no difference. The very fact that a Christian won’t celebrate homosexuality or transgenderism is, to their mind, hatred. Equality before the law isn’t the point. It never was. What they want is moral approval from men because they know (Romans 1:32) God’s is off the table.
So, again, theology is at the root. If you refuse to agree with them, that’s hatred.
Of course, that’s an absurdity that’s easily demonstrable. If hatred is not celebrating another’s choice then that definition makes all differences of opinion hatred. It’s so preposterous and self-defeating that the only reason otherwise educated people don’t understand it straight away is because sin makes us so very stupid (Romans 1:22).
The truth is that, as usual, only the Bible’s definition of things holds up to the scrutiny of logic. God is the divine psychiatrist. He’s the One who created us, so He’s the only One capable of knowing us through and through. “Modern psychology” is always the greatest lie of any age. Man’s mind and emotions are what they have always been ever since Eve listened to the lies of the serpent and Adam stood by shuffling his feet, evading responsibility. Hatred is nothing new. Man’s moral state hasn’t changed and won’t change unless he comes to Christ and receives a new heart. There’s no new thing under the sun and, in truth, hatred of others is the necessary consequence of sin.
Let that sink in for a moment.
The first marital spat in history happened – surprise, surprise – right after Adam and Eve decided to judge the world according to their own minds rather than God’s infallible and perfect word. They had been clothed in light – the light of righteousness – and then they were “naked.” You see, the Devil is very good at what he does. He’s a liar (John 8:44) and the best liars are always able to use just enough truth to make the lie seem realistic. We recognize true madness often like we recognize a terrible disease…after the damage of the small, hidden lies have become so bad that all realism has fallen away. So, indeed, Lucifer was “correct” when he said that Adam would be “like” God in knowing good and evil. Ah…but he left out the context, didn’t he? Adam and Eve would be “like” God only in the sense that they’d be trying to play God, insisting upon being their own judge of reality. If being like God is the power to determine right and wrong, then mankind is like God in the way a thief is like the one who produces what was stolen. Man the sinner is an epistemological thief trying to make a living pawning off the beauties and righteousness he can’t produce.
Sin is the cosmic context dropper. And this is why so many false teachers of the modern age focus on controlling our thoughts…not “negative talking” ourselves and all that. The echoes from that great blast so long ago in the Garden ring in our spiritual ears and we know, deep down, that how we think about reality is a life or death issue. It is. We must all answer the question put to us by the serpent. Did God really say?
The context is always this and not anything else.
So, hatred for our neighbor is inevitable when we insist on judging the world according to our own standard. There’s no way out. The man who loves God and has faith in Christ alone cannot hate his neighbor because he no longer seeks his security from the world. The man who follows the Lord recognizes himself as the sinner, not his neighbor; he focuses on service rather than being served. Spurgeon said, “God takes more care of us than we take care of ourselves. You never heard of a man who numbered the hairs of his head.”
Hatred is the reaction of a man who can’t get his neighbor to give him what he wants. Hatred is the result of us not relying on God for our every need. The desire to manipulate, regulate, or force our neighbor/society to fulfill our wants is downstream of our rejection of God’s sovereign care of us. Every controversy on earth, every dispute, no matter how petty – all the way to the great wars – are results of men and women resisting the plainest fact of life: that God is sovereign and good. The hatred of Joseph wasn’t because of Joseph’s robe or his dream. Those were incidental to the primary thing. Someone who isn’t right with God, not truly walking in faith, will always find reasons for their hatred and their grumbling. The fact is that haters, true haters, do not come to Christ in humility and rest in the fact that all things work together for our good.
The person who hates his neighbor isn’t trusting God. He/she hates because his neighbor won’t give him something he/she can only get from the Lord. Cain killed Abel for that very reason…his war was with God and Abel was merely caught in the crossfire. True hatred is the outward manifestation of one’s refusal to trust in and rely on the Lord for our daily bread. Envy and covetousness are symptoms of the spiritual cancer of idolatry. Woke movements of “tolerance” and “diversity” are nothing more than demands to get others – especially Christians – to provide the sanction for sin that God won’t. We’re surprised by how ugly history and politics are simply because we refuse to look in that perfect mirror of Scripture. The great mystery of life in this fallen, God-rejecting world, isn’t the so-called problem of evil, but the mercy of God that keeps us from devouring each other forthwith.
Thus, the only antidote to man’s miserable hatred of each other is the reconciliation with God. And that will only happen through the grace of God and faith in the Lord Jesus Christ. Our modern crusade against “hate” is nothing more than tyranny in the name of love. In sin we crave God’s power and approval and are terrified of Him because we know deep down that He hates sin and we will be judged someday. But instead of coming to Him in humility and repentance, sin doubles down. If we won’t submit to Him, we’ll spend our life trying to get others to submit to us.
We must heed His call. If we hate others it’s because we hate Him. We despise the limits and fences around our lives. We demand to get our way and hate others we deem to be blocking our path. Again: to understand hatred is to see the theological reality of it.
“If you turn at my reproof, behold, I will pour out my spirit to you; I will make my words known to you. Because I have called and you refused to listen, have stretched out my hand and no one has heeded, because you have ignored all my counsel and would have none of my reproof, I also will laugh at your calamity; I will mock when terror strikes you, when terror strikes you like a storm and your calamity comes like a whirlwind, when distress and anguish come upon you. Then they will call upon me, but I will not answer; they will seek me diligently but will not find me. Because they hated knowledge and did not choose the fear of the Lord, would have none of my counsel and despised all my reproof, therefore they shall eat the fruit of their way, and have their fill of their own devices. For the simple are killed by their turning away, and the complacency of fools destroys them; but whoever listens to me will dwell secure and will be at ease, without dread of disaster.””
Proverbs 1:23-33 ESV
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