Dennis Tuuri

# SERMON TRANSCRIPT – REFORMATION COVENANT CHURCH
Pastor Dennis Tuuri

Our emphasis will be on verse 10. However, to put it in context, we’ll read verses 7-12. Psalm 97:7-12. Please stand for the reading of God’s word.

Let all be put to shame who serve carved images, who boast of idols. Worship him, all you gods. Zion hears and is glad, and the daughters of Judah rejoice because of your judgments, O Lord, for you, Lord, are most high above all the earth. You are exalted far above all gods.

You who love the Lord hate evil. He preserves the souls of his saints. He delivers them out of the hand of the wicked. Light is sown for the righteous and gladness for the upright in heart. Rejoice in the Lord, you righteous, and give thanks at the remembrance of his holy name.

Let’s pray. Father, we do give thanks at the remembrance of your holy name. We desire to be a holy people conformed by your word, transformed by the power of your spirit as he moves through this word to change us. Help us, Lord God, to deal with difficult topics today in a way that is consistent with your scriptures and might be used by your spirit to continue to mature us in our Savior. In his name we pray. Amen.

Please be seated. I just want to mention as we get started here that to try to help avoid congestion at the table where the orders of worship are, we put the outlines and also a children’s page on the inside of each pew. So hopefully your children will have one of the children’s pages with things for them to fill in from the sermon and you’ll have an outline as we begin. If not, others in your pew should have one or perhaps in the pew in front or behind you.

Last week we talked about continuing into the flow of our lives as we move into this new year. The movement from the Gloria in the opening chapter two of Luke to the Nunc Dimittis. These are historic songs of the church—the Gloria in Excelsis. I’m sorry, I have “glory” here. It’s actually the Gloria in Excelsis. My first error. All right. Gloria in Excelsis—Glory to God in the highest. The angels sing that when they greet the shepherds at the birth of the newborn Savior. And then, “Now let thy servant depart in peace”—Simeon’s song in the last half of Luke chapter 2, a historic song sung by the church.

And nestled between these two events was this account of the circumcision of our Savior, the purification of his mother, his name being given, and his redemption as a firstborn needing to be redeemed in the context of Mary’s life. And what we said here was that our life flows in this same pattern. We see in that section of Scripture a microcosm of the Christian life. And we see a microcosm of our worship service.

We come in here and the first phase of worship—confessing our sins and being purified for that worship—is the praise of God. Gloria to God in the highest sung in some form or another. And as we move to the last portion of our worship service, the Lord’s table, we move to, “Now let thy servant depart in peace, for my eyes have seen the salvation.” My eyes—you see, Simeon appropriates everything to himself personally. And when we come to the Lord’s table and we partake individually in the context of the church, we appropriate the saving work of the Lord Jesus Christ.

And in between those things is this circumcision, the beginning bloodletting of our Savior, so to speak, that says that this whole movement is made possible because of his redemption of us accomplished by the shedding of his precious blood on the cross. Mary is purified ultimately through the work of the one that she’s bringing, named Jesus, because he is God and he will save his people. Yahweh saves. Yeshua saves. Jesus. And so God is the one who will produce this purification.

The Lord Jesus Christ has come and on that eighth day of circumcision he prefigures to us our new creation. We move from praising him to then the application of his word. That whole middle section that we preached on last week—the word might be fulfilled. The word said this had to happen. The word said he had to be circumcised on the eighth day. The word said Mary had to be purified. The word said that Jesus had to be redeemed. The word of God is in the center of that movement, and it’s in the center of our worship day, is it not?

We move from the opening section of praise through the word. And we pray that God might circumcise our hearts, that he might circumcise our ears. That phrase is used in the Old Testament—he might open them up by his word. That he might both cut us and heal us by that word till the end that we can then move to the table and depart from this place in peace. And that’s what we want for our entire lives.

Our days move in that same pattern. We raise up at the beginning of the day and we praise God and thank him for the day and we try to see the day mediated to us by the word of Christ. And by the time we lay down at night, we pray that, you know, if we die in our sleep, may our soul depart in peace because we have seen, we have appropriated the saving work of the Lord Jesus Christ and we have purified ourselves from defilement on the basis of that word.

I mentioned when we first spoke on this text a month or two ago that this text also gives us a summary of the Christian life. “Ye that love the Lord hate evil.” This is the text that I pray God will circumcise our hearts with and purify our hearts with today.

You may not want to give your children the handout. There’s an objectionable question. I don’t even know—maybe it’s illegal to put on this handout what I put in our day and age. And what I’m going to have to do here is take great pains to help you to understand what I’m saying about hating evil and evildoers. Parents, I’ve given you more work by giving your children this little handout, because you’re going to have to explain to them why Pastor Tuuri says they should hate some people. And you’ve probably trained your little ones not to hate. So we have to talk about this and you have to talk with your children about this.

And as we do these things, we want to be governed not by our emotions, not by what we feel ultimately about this topic as we sit here in the pews. We want to be governed by the word of God so that our emotions and our thoughts are controlled by that word and directed by him. The word is central to this section, central section, and the word is what we pray God will help us with today.

Now for those of you who have not been here the last few years, this is a different sort of service. The confession was different at the beginning of our service. We call this our annual anti-abortion Day of the Lord service.

Language is very important. Jesus is the word. He is speech. We find our voice in the Lord Jesus Christ. And when the anti-abortion movement, so to speak, became “pro-life,” they really altered the sense of what we say about abortion. We live in a culture that does not want to speak in negations. We live in a culture that wants to make everything affirmative, everything pleasing, everything delightful. So we’re pro everything. We don’t ever want to be against something.

We had a discussion in our elders meeting, the worship team meeting about the use of creeds which we hope to reintroduce soon in our worship. And one of the men strongly advocated for doing the Athanasian Creed at least once a year because it’s the only creed that in addition to affirming the faith anathematizes those who don’t believe the faith, and that is proper. The historic confessions and creeds of the church, many of them did that very thing—to say, “Yes, we’re for this, but we are against this. We love the Lord, but we hate the evil of those who would twist and pervert the Scriptures and not affirm the confessions of the church.”

We need to do that. So we’re anti-abortion. We believe that infants in the womb are people and that it is murder to take their lives. Anti-abortion. And we believe that the Lord’s day—the modern euphemism for Sunday, the day of Christian worship—we’ve said that there’s no difference in the Greek between the Lord’s day and the day of the Lord. And if we understand a whole Bible perspective, it seems like what we want to think of is that this is the same day of the Lord prefigured in the Old Testament repeatedly.

And when we say “Lord’s Day,” we tend to think again of pro-life and everything’s delightful. But when we remind ourselves that the Lord’s day is a day of the Lord, it is an advent of the Lord Jesus Christ. Some get sick and die from this. Jesus draws near. We draw near to him in heaven. And God comes, judgment begins at the house of God. And then he moves it outward to the culture. But this is the day of the Lord every week in an intensified way.

The prayers of God’s people go up. He moves in relationship to those prayers, judging, transforming us, but then judging the world as well. The message goes forth from this place into where we go. So this is anti-abortion day of the Lord.

And the context for all of this is this text from Psalm 97: “You that love the Lord hate evil.” This command is the mission for today. I read a man who said that every time we come to church, we ought to ask ourselves, “What mission does this Scripture send me on?” That’s scriptural. Isaiah—he gets called into heaven to worship God. But then God says, “Who will go for me?” And Isaiah says, “Here am I. Send me.”

We’ve come to worship and praise God. And he gives us a word. That word is to transform our lives. We have a mission from this word. God’s word is always sure and it’s always relevant to our lives. What’s the mission today from this element of God’s word? The mission that God wishes to send us on is to hate evil. That’s the mission for today.

You children, you can begin to fill in these blanks on your page. The mission that God sends us on is to hate evil.

Now, this text—hate evil—let’s explain it a little bit. What is evil, first of all? Well, evil here is the Hebrew word “ra.” It’s always in opposition to good. Evil and good. Good and evil. So God determines good and evil. Garden of Eden. The basic sin of mankind is to determine for himself what’s good and evil.

And kids, that’s the first problem you have hating things: you almost always hate sinfully because your mind is not yet conformed to the wisdom of Scripture. Let his judgments, let what God says, determine what’s good and what’s bad. Do you think it’s good to eat so much candy that you get sick? God says that’s bad. You think it’s good to get hateful to a brother or sister when they do something you don’t like. God says that’s bad.

Nearly every time you kids get hateful or angry when you’re little, nearly every time it’s wrong. So what I’m telling you today is that there are some times when you children should hate things. But you’ve got to be very careful. We are only hating what God declares to be evil, not what we decide as evil. Because if we do that, now we’re doing the very thing that God hates. He hates it when we decide apart from his word what’s good and bad.

Now, in the context of Psalm 97, he’s told us who the evil are. “Let all be put to shame who serve carved images who boast of idols.” So people that are advanced in their idolatry—and I know that we can talk about practical application of idols in our lives and all that stuff, but remember there’s a continuum here. And some people get very self-conscious. They sit down and they worship and lie down in front of totem poles. They draw pentagrams on the floor and they try to summon demons.

Now, people that serve false idols are the specific object in the immediate context here in Psalm 97 of those that are evil. So we know that evil is things that are wicked and displeasing to the Lord because they’re contrary to his word. Things are evil when they are displeasing to the Lord and wicked because they’re contrary to him—his word that tells us what good and evil is.

Usually in the Bible, these “ra” evil things are hurtful. They’re either direct attacks on the church of God, or they’re attacks on the poor, the defenseless, the fatherless—which is what the babies in the wombs who are aborted or killed are. Both father and mother have forsaken them. The fatherless. When people strike against the fatherless or against the widow or against the stranger—that’s a great evil in God’s sight. And so that’s a particular component of this.

Now, we’re told that when we see this evil, we’re supposed to hate it. What does hate mean? I had someone tell me this last week that they were always taught that hate meant you wanted that thing killed. You wanted to kill that thing. No, that’s not really what hate means here. Hate means speaks of having a loathing and a disgust, to despise something—that’s what this word hate means. It means to loathe it, to really not like it at all. It makes you kind of react with horror.

And God says that there are things that make us react. Now, we hate things we’re not supposed to hate. We hate things like slugs and snakes. Well, there’s nothing loathsome about those things. Those are God’s creatures. But when we see the moral acts of men—if you’re driving down the street and you see two people beating up a helpless old man, really breaking his bones—you have a visceral response. Visceral, kids, is your stomach. You have a gut response of getting mad at those guys. That’s right and proper, you see. You’re supposed to hate the evil that these men are doing to this old man.

That’s the kind of thing we’re talking about, and our hatred is a loathing or a despising of it and a desire to see it come to an end. A desire to see it come to an end.

Now notice that this statement—hate evil—is a command. Have you loved the Lord today? Yeah. So what are you commanded to do? What does this word command you to do? It commands you to hate evil. It’s a command. If you don’t do it, you’re breaking God’s word. So we have to learn how to hate properly.

Well, the first thing we want to say about hating is that God hates people. God hates some things. Does God hate things? Yeah, he does. God certainly hates some people. Proverbs 6:16-19, we actually have a list. “These six things does the Lord hate. Yea, seven are an abomination to him: A proud look, a lying tongue, hands that shed innocent blood, a heart that devises wicked imaginations, feet that are swift to running to mischief, a false witness that speaks lies, and he that sows discord among the brethren.”

That wouldn’t be our list. What are the top ten things you hate? Abortionists, pornographers, homosexuals. We make up these lists. My brother when he gets mad at him, pastor when he preaches too long. We make up these lists. But God’s list is quite different, isn’t it? It actually tells us here what the things are that he hates. And notice that these things are very personal. These are not some kind of abstract conceptions. It says there are things that God hates. But what kind of things are they? They’re hands and hearts. They’re people. They’re people doing certain things.

Kids understand here: you have a revulsion when you see somebody really sinning, you see somebody swearing and taking Jesus’s name in vain. You don’t like that. You hate that. And you should hate that. You should want it to stop. But here, what God says is what you should want to stop in your life is the very first at the top of the list—a haughty look. Camel nose, head up in the air. “I’m better than you, brother who’s bugging me right now. I’m better than you.” A proud look.

Christians, this is the first thing that God says he hates on this list, and it had better hit our list as well. Pride—not pornography, not abortion. Pride. What’s the next thing he says? A lying tongue. God hates lies. Who’s the father of lies? The devil is the father of lies. Satan—he counterstates the truth to Adam and Eve. That’s the beginning of fallen humanity. The beginning principle for fallen humanity is the lie.

And when we lie, boys and girls, we are worshiping, serving Satan because he is the father of lies. You lie because you’re frightened. Don’t be frightened of your parents. Be frightened of God who hears your lies, who knows your mind, who knows your heart. Be frightened of him. Trust God, though. He loves you. You confess your sins. Your parents may still spank you. They may discipline you. They may make you stay in your room for a while. They’re doing it because they love you.

Children, the things that God hates is pride and lies. And he hates hands that shed innocent blood. Those guys beating up that old man—a heart that devises wicked imaginations. A heart that plans evil things to do, sitting around planning, “What am I going to do?” Premeditation of evil is a legitimate category in our civil law. It’s worse if you premeditate to kill somebody. And it should be because here it’s placed in the context of things God hates.

Feet that are swift in running to mischief. A false witness that speaks lies. The second citation of deception on the list of seven. The top is pride. Two of the others are lies and deceit and being a false witness. Lying about your brother or sister to get him in trouble. God hates it. You should hate it.

He that sows discord among the brethren taps the list. He that sows discord among the brethren. I think that in the first application that means that you’ve got somebody that stirs up other people. But I think that in terms of the secondary application it means when we create disunity with our brother, when we argue with our brothers and sisters, when we create an ungodly chaos between us by fighting or yelling or getting angry in a wrong way—which is most of the time—God hates that very thing.

You get mad and hate your brother and create disorder and problems with him. God hates that. He hates your actions at that point in time in terms of creating disorder to sow discord among the brethren is one of the seven things that God picks out that he hates.

Again, in Zechariah 8:16, he says, “Speak every man the truth to his neighbor. Let none of you imagine evil in your hearts against his neighbor, and love no false oath, for these things I hate, says the Lord God.” God hates these things.

Spurgeon said, “We should hate sin because God hates it. His fire consumes it. His lightnings blast it. His presence shakes it out of its place. His glory confounds rather all the lovers of it. We cannot love God without hating that which he hates. We are not only to avoid evil and to refuse to countenance it. We must be in arms against it and bear towards it a hearty indignation, a hatred of sin and evil.”

Now, that’s where I agree with Spurgeon, but I should probably tell you that where I disagree with Spurgeon is that he says we should love the sinner and hate the sin. But this does not seem to comport with what the Scriptures say.

See, hatred is linked here to God’s judgment. And in verse three of Psalm 97, we’re told that a fire goes before God and burns up all of his enemies. Doesn’t say that it burns up their sin. Sin is an abstraction. If we say, “Hey, you know, hate the sin but love the sinner” and turn all of these things into abstractions that aren’t personal, that aren’t human—oh, that’s a very easy way to deal with it. And that’s what our culture tends to want to do, both in the church and in our culture.

But listen to the words of Psalm 139. And I’m going to read a little bit of context here. “How precious also are your thoughts to me, O God. How great is the sum of them. If I should count them, they would be more in number than the sand. When I am awake, I am still with you.” Sounds like a nice chorus we would sing, right? Upbeat kind of thought. Very nice.

Very next verse after saying these nice things: “Oh, that you would slay the wicked, O God.” See, he has no problem—the psalmist here moving from, “Oh, I just delight myself in your thoughts and you’re with me all the time. Oh, I just can’t wait for you to kill your enemies.” That’s what he says.

“Depart from me, therefore, you bloodthirsty men, for they speak against you wickedly.” Not personal enemies—God’s enemies. Your enemies take your name in vain. Taking God’s name in vain. We should despise them.

“Do not I hate them, O Lord, who hate you? And do I not loathe those who rise up against you?”

And there’s where we have a little explanation of what the hating means. To loathe or despise—not just the sin. David the psalmist despises the sinner. God despises the sinner. God is angry with the wicked every day. Not with the wicked’s sins. He is certain with their sins, their actions. That list of seven things—it’s hearts and hands and things guys are doing that he hates.

“I hate them with perfect hatred. I count them my enemies. Search me, O God, and know my heart. Try me, know my anxieties, and see if there is any wicked way in me. And lead me in the way everlasting.”

You see, the man that hates with a perfect hatred seeks God to make sure that he’s hating in the right way. He wants God to try and purify his hatred so that it is indeed a proper godly hatred.

Should we hate people? Yes. Do we normally hate people for the wrong reasons or with sin mixed in? Yes. And so God wants us to have this attitude of hating those whom God hates. That’s why we pray for their judgments upon their head, that they would either repent or be taken out of the world if they’re going to kill babies.

He wants us to hate that and hate them. But he tells us that we have to be careful because there’s a godly hatred and then there’s a sinful anger and hatred which we usually, and you young kids almost always, are doing. Your parents have to train you in how to hate correctly. And that’s what we’re trying to start here today in our homes, or continue in some of our homes, teaching our kids to hate correctly—which is, you know, and again, here this Psalm 139 that tells us to hate people says that he hates those that God hates, that he hates those that strike out at God somehow.

Not his enemies but God’s enemies. Jesus says, “Pray for your enemies, love your enemies.” He didn’t say love my enemies; he says love your enemies. So the distinction of the psalm here is that those that hate God, that God hates in return, are those that we should hate—not our own enemies.

And then we should pray to God to be very careful that our hatred doesn’t become sinful. So this psalm helps us to see how to redirect that hatred in a more positive way.

2 Chronicles 19:2. Well, we won’t read that. Let’s just go to Psalm 15, which we just said and sang. One of the basic requirements that churches should have to get in the door of the church—that’s what Psalm 15 is. We call it an entrance liturgy. You know, in the books, there’s an entrance liturgy. What does that mean? Well, it just means at the door the elders are supposed to say, “Who gets to come in today?”

Let me ask you guys if you have met these requirements for coming in or not. See, it’s basic stuff. Now, you don’t do everything perfect, but your life should be characterized by basic obedience to the Ten Commandments and basic obedience to their application.

Psalm 15. It’s really basic stuff. It’s kindergarten stuff. And what does it say in verse four? “In whose eyes a vile person is despised.” Doesn’t say that you can get in the door if you despise the vile person’s sins but love him. No, it says in your eyes a vile person is supposed to be hated or despised or loathed. “But he honors those who fear the Lord, swears to his own hurt.”

He honors them. See, those things are put together. God wants—if we’re going to be honoring those that serve the Lord, we also have to hate those who are vile and wicked and have been given over to corruption, you know, that are engaged in these wicked vile actions.

In 2 Chronicles 19:2, Jehu the son of Hanani the seer went out to meet this guy, and he says to King Jehoshaphat, “Should you help the wicked and love those who hate the Lord? Therefore the wrath of the Lord is upon you.” And Jehu was right.

If we love those that hate the Lord by countenancing their actions, by refusing to tell them that they should stop killing babies, and if we should stop praying for God to bring judgments upon them and instead want to befriend them somehow and help the wicked, it says the wrath of God abides upon us. If we refuse to hate God’s enemies, God hates us—at least to some degree. His wrath above—you know, his wrath is variable. It increases with how much a person is sinful.

But to some degree, God’s anger rests upon us if we refuse to let this word circumcise our hearts and purify our actions. God hates things and he hates not just things. He hates people. Okay. Now, this is both a New Testament and an Old Testament commandment.

And I’m not going to spend a lot of time on this. We spent a lot of time on this in sermons on this topic in the past, but you know, in Revelation 2:6, for instance, God commends the church, the New Testament church at Ephesus. Why does he commend them? “You hate the deeds of the Nicolaitans which I also hate.” Now it says the deeds spoken of. But we’ve seen already that God correlates deeds and people.

So they hate the evil of the Nicolaitans as I also hate them. So God didn’t change somehow because of Christ’s work on the cross and he no longer hates evil. The New Testament is filled with God’s hatred of evil.

The capstone book of the New Testament goes from Revelation 6 with a perfected saints in heaven, not on earth. They’ve been purified of their sins. And what do they say to God? “How long before you avenge our blood on those wicked people’s heads?” They pray to God for him to send judgments upon them.

And that prayer is answered in Revelation 16 and 19. And when that prayer is answered, the angels sing praise to God because they deserve it. The angels say, “Those wicked people that you pour out wrath on deserve every bit of that wrath.”

Jerusalem deserved the destruction. All who rebelled against the Lord Jesus Christ put him to death in AD 30. Put his servants to death for forty years. Continued to put the servants to death as AD 70 approached. God said, “I’ve given you forty years. You haven’t repented. I sent multiple witnesses to you. I’m not quick to anger, but my anger comes.” And when the anger comes, it’s an answer to the prayers of glorified saints in heaven, and it is met with the praises of the angels and the saints in heaven.

They praise God because he hates evil. It’s a New Testament commandment to us. We’re to continue to hate the Nicolaitans, to hate false doctrine, to hate those that commit abortion on a regular basis. We’re to hate it. We’re to despise it. God from one end of the Scriptures to the other talks about this.

We are to actually meditate on God’s hatred. Romans 11:22 says we’re to consider, meditate on both the kindness and the severity of God. We know we’re supposed to meditate on the kindness. We don’t have to hear the emphasis that we’re to meditate or consider the severity of God, his anger, his judgments in the context of history.

James 4:12 says that God saves and destroys. He can create and he can destroy. That’s the paraphrase of James 4:12. God saves and he destroys. And Paul says in 2 Thessalonians 1:6, “God is just. And what’s his proof that we have a righteous God?”

From one end of the Scriptures to the other, it’s almost synonymous with God’s holiness as being a summation of the declaration that God is righteous. Why do we know that? Paul says, “What’s the proof? He will pay back trouble to those who trouble you. You’ll hate those people and he will give them just retribution—eye for eye, tooth for tooth—to those who strike out at Jesus by striking out at Jesus’s people.”

So this is not simply an Old Testament commandment. It is a New Testament commandment as well. We are to continue to hate evil as God hates evil.

See, today’s circumcision and purification via the word is this commandment. So I’ve said that already, but let me just make a point again that what we’re trying to do is apply the word of God to our hearts so that we might be purified from wrong thoughts about what God means.

The Holy Spirit speaks through the word of God. I’ve mentioned that last week. Next week we’re going to have more on this. We’re going to exhort you all to read your Bibles every day. We’re going to exhort you to know your Scriptures. I want you all to walk a spirit-filled walk. I want you to have spirit-filled lives. And you don’t become spirit-filled if you don’t become Bible-filled.

I made this point next last week, but I’ll say it again. Ephesians 5, Colossians 3. These are parallel texts. They talk about mutual submission. They talk about wives to husbands, husbands to wives, kids to parents, parents to kids. And the head of both of these sections are these verses.

In Ephesians: “Don’t be drunk with wine in which is dissipation, but be filled with the spirit, speaking to one another in praises, hymns, and spiritual songs.”

Colossians says, “Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly in all wisdom, teaching and admonishing one another in psalms, hymns, and spiritual songs.”

You see, it’s parallel. And in that parallelism, God is telling us a very important truth. And that is that the spirit is linked to the word. This was a Reformed distinctive. This was something the Reformers stressed—that the spirit moves by way of his word.

When the enthusiasts, the charismatics, or I mean the crazy charismatics, some charismatic but when the crazy, really out there, fringe charismatics came to Luther and howled about the spirit—”The spirit is apart from the word”—Luther said, “I slap your spirit on the snout.” Luther discerned in a spirit that doesn’t want to be bound by the word of God or to work through the word of God a foreign spirit at work in those people.

The Holy Spirit works through God’s holy word. This isn’t a new thing in Ephesians. As I were doing just a little reading in Proverbs 1, my boys and I this last week—Proverbs, a good book to begin to study with young princes because that’s what’s written to. And Proverbs 1:23 says in the beginning of the thing, this is wisdom’s first little speech. “In the beginning when wisdom says, ‘I’m here, you know, I’m not hard to find. Here I am.’” Verse 23 says:

“Turn you at my reproof. Behold, I’ll pour out my spirit upon you. I will make known my words unto you.”

See the parallelism? “I’ll pour out my spirit on you,” Jesus says, “and I’ll put my words unto you.” Parallelism. God’s spirit speaks through his word. And this word corrects our feelings about whether we should hate or not. The spirit of God works through the Bible. That’s how the spirit speaks to us. Okay?

This command needs to be given. All commands in Scripture are because we have a need to hear them. But in our particular context, we have a great need to hear this command to hate evil.

First, because of our culture. We live in the context of a culture that for the last ten years has enacted hate crimes legislation in which increasingly our culture is taught it is wrong, it is sinful, it is criminal to hate somebody. And the Scriptures say we’re supposed to hate somebody. We are at our trajectories—our culture and the trajectory of the Christian faith are moving in opposite directions.

You know, we’re happy we’ve got a president now who appears to be an evangelical Christian. We’re happy he nominates a guy like John Ashcroft, but it should just send shivers down our spine that Ashcroft was so attacked and vilified in these hearings that there was some open despising of evangelical or fundamentalist Christians thinly veiled. That’s awful—that there wasn’t that kind of response to vice president nom or man who would be vice president, Senator Lieberman, when he was openly speaking of his orthodox Judaism.

We didn’t see that problem. Remind me of that line from the old Bob Dylan song. You know, “You talk to me about Buddha, talk to me about Muhammad, but you never mentioned the man who died the criminal’s death.”

Every religion is okay except the Christian religion to those whose trajectory is away from Christ. And this culture is moving away from Christ and as a result it’s moving away from a proper sense of hatred in the right way. All hatred is now evil.

Secondly, this command is necessary, particularly for us, due to our sentimentalism. There are theological things going on in the context of the Christian faith. Our culture apart from Christ will always move one way or the other against God’s word, but the church is central to all of that, and the church has moved away from a proper theology of hatred.

Jeff Meyers did an interesting study of the lectionaries, couple of lectionaries that are used in many, you know, the great majority of historic communions across the country. He did a study of the Liturgy of the Hours, the lectionary, and also the Common Lectionary, and what he found was that three entire psalms have been expunged.

Now a lectionary is going through reading all of the Bible in three years. It’s a cyclic liturgical cycle that churches use. It’s the way they train people. People who grow up in a liturgical church hear the whole word of God all, you know, over the course of their lifetime many times. And the lectionary trains people in how to think biblically.

While the modern day lectionaries that are now being used by even some conservative churches totally expunge three psalms, including Psalm 83, the one we’re singing at the end of the service. Six psalms in the lectionaries have a single verse omitted. In four of these psalms in the lectionary, one and a half or two verses are excised or omitted. Six of these psalms have three to five verses censored out of them, and three of these psalms have big chunks cut out of them.

And in every one of these censored psalms, the only psalms that are missing from the lectionary are imprecatory portions of psalms—psalms in which the psalmist prays that God might judge temporal judgments upon the wicked and that we might hate the wicked. Those are being expunged from the church lectionaries.

And as a result, we have now a religion that, as many people have said, where Christians are supposed to be nicer than Jesus. Jesus hated sin. He overturned the temple. He overturned the people that were sinning in the context of the temple. He was angry. It says, “Zeal for my father’s house has consumed me.” I’m passionate about this. He said, but no—Christians aren’t supposed to be passionate. We’re supposed to be kind. Everybody supposed to be nice, supposed to be politically correct in the context of our theology.

Psalm 7:11. I you know, I’ve mentioned this to some of you before, but there was this wonderful publication when we first got started as a church. It had just come out. Hobby knows the guy that puts it out, and it was a big thick paper, about twenty pages, like a broadside like this. And it’s top it said, “Who told you God loves you?” And underneath it, it quotes Psalm 7:11.

“God hates the wicked every day.”

And then there was a cartoon, two frames drawn kind of Mad Magazine style if you remember that, some of you older folks. First panel got a guy saying, “God loves you and has a wonderful plan for your life” to another man. Next panel: “And if you don’t believe it, he’s going to send you straight to hell.”

You see the discontinuity of that? Our evangelism method in the evangelical church has been, “God loves you and has a wonderful plan for your life.” And it’s either a self-righteous lie or it really believes that God loves everybody and, you know, hell is just some kind of odd thing out there that we just don’t quite get. If God is appeased by the atonement of Christ, what’s happened? Hell’s going away in the preaching of the church.

Good evangelicals supposedly are now moving toward annihilationism where there isn’t any permanent torment of the wicked in hell. We live in the context of a sentimental Christianity.

We also live in the context of Christian stoicism. We’re not supposed to have emotions. And I’ve fallen into this trap myself, you know. Our culture is so emotional. Everybody’s feeling this and feeling that. And our reaction, our knee-jerk reaction, is we don’t want to talk about feelings. We want to talk about what we think.

See, the real Christian heart is not thinking or feeling really so much as it’s believing. And our belief restructures how we think and how we feel. But we have feelings. The situation I described—driving down the road and you see a couple of guys beating up an old man and ripping off his arm or something—you have a response to that. You’re supposed to.

If you went to an abortionist clinic and saw a partial birth abortion, you would respond with hatred. That is good and proper. And yet the church has tried to say, “You’re wrong for hating that. You’re wrong for hating those young men that are beating up the old man. You’re wrong for hating that guy taking the scalpel to the baby.”

But you’re not wrong. We’re taught that Christians are not supposed to have these big emotions. God says, “I am a jealous God visiting the iniquity of the fathers to the children of the third and fourth generation.” That word jealous could be translated zealous, like our Savior—”Zeal for my father’s house.” And what it means is I am passionate about this. I have feelings about this. Okay?

God has passions. He has emotions. He has what he describes to us at least as emotional states. He’s passionate about his people. He has an intensity of his emotions. And it is absolutely proper to have a righteous, perfect hatred that is emotional and that makes you want more than anything else for that guy to be stopped from hurting that baby or that old man or that woman or whatever it is. It’s proper.

We’re not supposed to—the opposite of love is not hatred. God is a God who loves and who hates the wicked. The opposite of love is apathy. The opposite of emotional state is a lack of emotional state. And that’s the problem with most of us today, because our culture is becoming more and more wicked. We become more and more accustomed to these things and we stop being sensitive to the proper need to exercise a godly hatred and loathing and despising of evil.

We need this command today because the church has become stoic. Because we are humans.

The church has always dealt with this problem. It hasn’t always dealt with stoicism or sentimentalism, but it has always dealt with this last problem. Why men will always need this command: We like people. Because we’re people. And if we see somebody else being judged or we pray for them, that worries us. See, because we always want to reverse the two commandments.

The first and great commandment is to love the neighbor, and then the second commandment is to love God as much as you love your neighbor. That’s wrong though, isn’t it, kids? The first and great commandment is to love God with all your heart, soul, and might. And secondly, to love your neighbor as yourself.

You see, the second is subject to the first. We are humanists. We want the well-being of all humanity. So we don’t like hating people. Okay? So we need this command.

Third, this command produces a joy in God’s judgment. That’s what this text says. Not only are we supposed to learn to hate evil—you know, there was a movie several years ago called Tombstone. Oh man, it’s going to try to go a week without a movie reference, but so Tombstone had some biblical themes going through it. The Bible was quoted at the first, and they’re really in a way it’s bad anyway. The scene is Val Kilmer playing Doc Holliday is confronted with Johnny Ringo who’s a real evil guy, and Val Kilmer looks at himself or his buddy or whoever, somebody next to him, and he says, “Shall we hate him?”

Well, that’s what you need to think. You need to realize that there are things that we should consider and then train ourselves to hate in terms of this evil. And at the end of the movie, by the way, Kilmer has decided to hate Johnny Ringo and ends up killing him by the end of the movie because he’s so wicked. Of course, Val Kilmer himself has a, you know, a fornication relationship with I think maybe a prostitute or something, and he’s a drunkard. So, you know, there’s not a good biblical picture.

But the point is, “Shall we hate him?” That’s what we should consider when we see evil and wickedness in our culture. Shall we hate abortionists? And I think the answer according to the Scriptures is yeah, we should. Doesn’t mean we want to take our own vengeance upon them. Doesn’t mean we want to take things into our own hands, that we hit them. No. But it does mean we want to pray for God to either convert them or stop them somehow—break their hands, put them six feet under, whatever it is—so that this abortion would stop.

And not only are we to train ourselves to do this, but the Scriptures say if you really want to look at a mature view of biblical anger or hatred against the wicked, a mature view says not only do we pray for the judgment, we rejoice when the judgment comes.

“Let all he put to shame who serve carved images, verse 7, who boast of idols, worship him, all you gods. Okay? Pray that they be put to shame. A Zion hears and is glad, and the daughters of Judah rejoice because of your judgments.”

Not only are we to pray for those judgments, but if you’re a daughter of Judah, if you’re a citizen of Zion—the New Testament worship, remember that’s what Zion prefigured, new what we’re doing today. If you belong in the worshiping assembly at Zion, you’re supposed to rejoice at the judgments of God. Rejoice. Why should we rejoice?

Well, judgment is grace. We think judgment is not grace, but judgment is grace. Judgment is grace first of all to those that are being killed. It is the grace of God to kill an abortionist if need be—not at all through our means, through his temporal judgments, through hopefully the civil magistrate eventually reinstituting capital punishment in terms of abortion. It is grace to the unborn if abortionists are stopped one way or the other—conversion, restrictions of laws, or in some cases if God actually causes them to come to physical trouble.

It’s the grace of God to those little babies who would otherwise be killed. Okay? It’s grace to the women of our culture to institute the biblical penalty for rape, for violent rape, which is death. Because that guy is not going to rape the next one. It is grace to her.

Judgments of God enacted by the civil magistrate or carried out in the providence of God supernaturally are grace to the culture. It’s grace to us. In the Scriptures, you almost always in these psalms see God’s judgment laid alongside of the deliverance of his people because that’s what’s going on. He’s moving to deliver his people. It’s grace to them.

But it’s also grace to the one who thinks that God doesn’t see him and continues on in his sin. Isaiah 26:10 says, “When your judgments are in the earth, the inhabitants of the world will learn righteousness.”

See, verse 9 of Isaiah 26 says God’s judgment, not his favor—I’m sorry I read that wrong. That is verse nine. Verse 10 says, “Let favor be showed to the wicked, yet will he not learn righteousness. How will the wicked become righteous? How will he be led to repentance? Not by being shown favor. Isaiah says, ‘Rather, when your judgments are in the earth, the inhabitants of the world will learn righteousness.’”

It is grace to the abortionist to have judgments declared against him, for him to hear them, and if necessary, the civil magistrate or God working in his divine providence.