Christ said in Matthew 24:9, “you shall be hated of all nations for my name’s sake.” And so it is. Disciples of Christ are hated, yet as Christians we are commanded to love one another as he loved us and as we love ourselves. This is an unconditional love. While many can argue that the one condition is acceptance of Christ, it can also be argued that God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son that whosoever believes in him should not perish, but have everlasting life—that Christ came not to condemn the world, but that through him the world might be saved. While the condition of being saved is to believe on Christ, the love of Christ is unconditional. There is also unconditional hate.
Unconditional hate, in my opinion, is the absence of God. It is the result of a spiritual condition where the darkness of evil roams as a principality over the hearts of men. Unconditional hate cannot be cured in the natural. It is the hate that cannot be abated through reasoning and logic. Christians and Jews are hated often unconditionally, without rational reason—at least in man’s understanding. Those called to love and to practice love to one another, their neighbors, their community might be rationally hated because of prejudice or fear (which can be reasoned out and set to rest), but unconditional hatred appears to have no reason and cannot be reasoned with. It’s the kind of hate that belies explanation. The example in the Bible of unconditional hate is found in the story of the grandson of Esau, Amalek, and the Amalekites.
In Deuteronomy 25:17-18, Moses addresses the Israelites, saying, “Remember what Amalek did to you by the way when you were coming out of Egypt. How he met you by the way, and smote the hindmost of you, even all that were feeble behind you, when you were faint and weary and he feared not God.” The Jewish Encyclopedia describes Amalek as “A kinsman of the Israelites, Amalek nevertheless displayed the most intense hatred toward them: he inherited Esau’s hostility to his brother Jacob. When other nations hesitated to harm God’s chosen ones, his evil example induced them to join him in the fray.” It is for this unconditional hatred that God causes his people to “blot out the remembrance of Amalek from under heaven.”
Applying this example to today, we can see the spirit of unconditional hate coming from the godless. They are the ones who say “Hate doesn’t live here,” but hate you if you disagree with them. They are those who say “We love the children,” but support killing them before birth and endangering them with sexual perversion. They are the ones who speak freedom, but demand tyranny. They are those of the godless who hate the light of God. The only cure is the unconditional love of God. Their only hope is unconditional love. Think about it. When unconditional hate meets unconditional love a condition will occur. The hate will continue or the love will prevail, giving testimony to the victory of God’s love over the irrationality of unconditional hate. Hate cannot be cured with hate. But God…And we are his ambassadors.
