Dennis Tuuri

# Sermon Transcript – Reformation Covenant Church

Again, we’re focusing on verse 10, but we will put it in context as we did last Lord’s Day by reading Psalm 97:1-2. Please stand for the reading of God’s word. The Lord reigns. Let the earth rejoice. Let the multitude of isles be glad. Clouds and darkness surround him. Righteousness and justice are the foundation of his throne. A fire goes before him and burns up his enemies round about. His lightnings light the world.

The earth shakes and trembles. The mountains melt like wax at the presence of the Lord, at the presence of the Lord of the whole earth. The heavens declare his righteousness, and all the peoples see his glory. 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 pray that your spirit would speak through your word to us and cause us to understand not simply intellectually but rather at the depth of our being the requirement we have—the joyful duty of loving you—and also the requirement, the joyful duty it should be, to hate evil.

We pray, Lord God, that you would help us to hate our own sins. In Christ’s name we ask it. Amen.

Please be seated. Children, I’ve provided you another worksheet. It looks a lot like last week and some of the questions are the same, so that you can see if you remember what we spoke about last week. But the first question is a little different. The answer—you’ll notice the spaces for the words are different.

We have a different mission or focus on this same word from Psalm 97: the requirement to hate evil. The primary focus for today’s sermon—although I’ll review the entire teaching as on the outline—but the primary focus today, our mission as we go forth from this place, is to hate our sins. To hate our sins. Our sins are evil in God’s sight, and they’re to be hated. We all too often learn to cooperate with our sins, think lightly of them, and learn to live with them.

But God would not have us to do that as we’ll see as we go through the word today. This word is the mission that God gives us to transform our lives. We spoke last week of this requirement that the Christian has to hate evil and not just to hate evil but to hate evil men as well, as the scriptures teach us. We said that God does indeed hate some people. The scriptures tell us very clearly that God hates evil actions and he also hates evil people.

He hates the wicked. His fires, after all, are said to burn up his enemies—not simply their deeds. And David in Psalm 139, a psalm of some great comfort to us—we didn’t refer to the first portion of Psalm 139 last week, but Psalm 139 is in the context of God’s great concern and providence over us while in the womb and then as we grow, that God is with us wherever we go. He is present with us. He made us. His creation of us is spoken of in the middle of this psalm, and it moves from those high considerations and a praising God and a pleasing admiration of God’s work in verses 17 and 18 to a requirement or a thought on the part of the psalmist that we would indeed hate the wicked.

Verse 19: “Oh, that you would slay the wicked, oh God. Depart from me, therefore, you bloodthirsty men, for they speak against you wickedly. Your enemies take your name in vain. Do not I—do I not—hate them, O Lord, who hate you. Do I not loathe those who rise up against you? I hate them with perfect hatred. I count them my enemies. Search me, oh God, and know my heart. Try me and know my anxiety.”

So we said that based on this psalm and other teachings of scripture, God hates certain people. Now, it’s very important that we put all of this in the context of the whole scriptures. We’re trying to correct a modern-day error of the church that we’re to hate the sin but love the sinner. Now, that way of phrasing things in a similar form is not new to the church today. We can actually cite churchmen going back to the beginning of the church that say something of that same thing. And there is an appropriateness to that.

So while we’re trying to correct modern-day thinking—nicer than Jesus—that whole error in theology today, a theology that doesn’t want to see God as a god of justice or wrath anymore, we’re trying to correct that. But we don’t want to overdo it. You children particularly—we urged you last week—not to go off thinking, “Well, I get to go hate people today.” No. That is not the idea.

Usually—I mean, nine times out of ten—children, in your lives when you hate somebody, maybe ten times out of ten, it is wrong and sinful on your part. And that’s part of the evil you’ve got to hate in your own heart.

God says that this is a volitional action. It’s not simply an emotion. Otherwise he wouldn’t command it of us. Hatred has an emotional component to it sometimes, but when the emotions are raging is not usually the place where we find our hatred under the control of the Holy Spirit. Emotions are good. We talked about that. But here we have a specific command to hate evil. And this hating of evil is an act of volition.

We choose to do that. Shall we hate this? As I watched some television this last week and glancing through about 10 or 15 movies that were then playing on the satellite: Click. Do we hate that movie? Yes. Click. Should we hate this movie? Yes. Click. Shall we hate this movie? Yes. Click. Shall we hate this movie? Maybe not.

Now, it was about that ratio. I mean, I think if we take self-consciously the requirement of this scripture—that we discern first of all evil in the context of our culture and then make a decision to see it removed, a hatred of it, that wants it not to be an offense in the world anymore—I think those are the kind of actions that we’re going to enter into. I don’t—I can’t answer all the obvious questions that come up from that. But what I can say is that God wants us to hate evil. And what he wants us to do is he wants us to have a great desire, a zeal for the Lord’s house that consumes us, as it were, using our Savior as our example.

And recognizing that this entire world is God’s house, to have a zeal and passion for this world that doesn’t want to see evil in it. We want to see it gone.

This has implications for our entertainment. Of course, now we don’t have that same hatred of men. What I mean is: if we look at a man, if we look at something evil going on—rape, an encouragement to covenant children to fornication, an encouragement to covenant children to be disrespectful toward authorities, an encouragement to steal, and a movie that promotes abortion and wants to get you to feel compassion for abortionists and see why they do what they do and it’s a good thing—these are evils that we don’t want to see. We don’t think they should be out there, and we want to do what we can. We’ll talk about that in a couple of minutes.

But when we see somebody—an abortionist—our desire first and foremost is not to see him gone. Our desire is to look at him as created in the image of God and to want to see him not do evil anymore. Now, you know, if he continues to do evil, then God wants us to understand that it’s proper to say, “Remove them, Lord God,” or remove them. But our first emphasis should always be their conversion, because this is man made in the image of God, and our great temptation in our fallen nature is to hate our fellow man. That’s what we do. We hate each other in our hearts.

So it’s a very—you know, people talk about predestination being a doctrine you have to be very careful of. I’m sure that’s true. But this is a doctrine that is dynamite if handled improperly. It’s an inducement. These kinds of verses are the verses that have been used to justify men that take the law into their own hands and kill abortionists. And that is the last thing I want our covenant children to be thinking of.

Let me quote from Augustine. Let’s go all the way back to Augustine to put this proper balance, I guess, on what we’re saying here. Augustine says: “Well, love your enemies. Is it because you said ‘yours’ and not God’s? Do good to them that hate you?”

He says: “Not you or who hate God.” So Augustine is wrestling with Psalm 139 and how it interacts with the sayings of our Savior to love your enemies and do good to them that hate you. And what he says is: it doesn’t say love God’s enemies, and it doesn’t say do good to those that hate God. So he follows the pattern and says: “Have not I hated those who hated thee, oh Lord?” Now, going back to Psalm 139, he says: “Not who have hated me.” See, you hate those that hate God, not those that hate you.

“And thine enemies did I waste away. Thine,” he said, “not mine. But those who hate us and are enemies unto us only because we serve Christ—what else do they but hate him and are his enemies? Ought we then to love such enemies as these? Or do they not suffer persecution for God’s sake, to whom it is said, ‘Pray for them that persecute you’?”

Observe then what follows: “With a perfect hatred did I hate them.” Which is with a perfect hatred—what is that? He says: “I hated in them their iniquities. I loved thy creation.” Augustine here is saying: “I loved the man and I hated the sin.”

I mean, you could say that’s what he’s saying here. “And it is kind of: I hated in them their iniquities. I love thy creation.” So he’s saying that when David says, “I hate the enemies of God in their person,” we want to be very careful to understand that David does not hate God’s creation of man as imaged in that person.

So that’s a proper—I think—and Augustine goes on to talk about this a little more. This is to hate with a perfect hatred that neither on account of the vices you hate the men, nor on account of the man love the vices. For see what he adds: “They became my enemies not only as God’s enemies but as his own too.” Does he now describe them? How then will he fulfill in them both his own saying, “Have not I hated those who hated the Lord,” and the Lord’s command, “Love your enemies”? How will he fulfill this save with that perfect hatred that he hate in them that they are wicked?

See, not wickedness abstracted from them—Augustine doesn’t do that, as so many today do. “I hate in them that they are wicked and love that they are men.” You see the distinction?

I mean, Augustine could probably say we should love the man, but he does not mean by that what we mean today so often. He’s saying we should love the fact that they are the creation of God, made in God’s image, and we should love that they are men. But we should hate their sin.

So what Augustine—you know, what the world today wants to do is abstract sin here, and the man is over here, and you hate this and you love this. And Augustine’s saying, really, you want to hate the sin that men do. See, so he personalizes the sin and he also reminds us that we do not want to fall into the sin of hating the image of God in that person, that they’re created as men.

So it may seem a nuance to you, and that’s okay. But I think it’s an important distinction to make. When we get to slogans, that’s when we get into trouble with theology.

So we’re trying to correct that, and the word of God is correcting us. For in the time even of the Old Testament, when the carnal people were restrained by visible punishments, how did Moses, the servant of God—who by understanding belonged to the New Testament—so Moses belonged, with his understanding of God himself, to the New Testament. How did he hate sinners when he prayed for them? Or how did he not hate them—which when he slew them—save that he hated them with a perfect hatred? For with such perfection did he hate the iniquity which he punished as to love the manhood for which he prayed.

Okay. So, children, yeah, we’re to hate certain men. God says that’s true. But what we do not mean by that is that our goal is the removal of these men in the first place. The hatred of evil is a loathing for what God declares is evil, a loathing that wants to see that evil ended in the context of the world and hopefully by conversion, or by the restraints of the civil magistrate to men’s evil, or at the end of the day, if there’s no other way to do it, that God would remove them from off the face of the earth.

So hopefully that puts a little bit of context to what we’re talking about here.

Should we hate some people? Yes. Do we usually hate in the right way? No.

So this is, as we said, a New Testament truth, and we could multiply passages about that. One interesting passage about this is found in Mark 3:5-6. Don’t bother turning there, but listen, please.

“When he had looked around about”—he’s going to heal somebody here. Jesus is, and they don’t like the fact that he’s going to heal on the Sabbath. “When he looks around about on them with anger, being grieved for their hardness of heart, he said unto the man, ‘Stretch forth thy hand.’ And he stretched it out. And his hand was restored whole as the others.” And then the Pharisees go out and take counsel to kill him.

See, so Jesus has an anger—a godly anger—at these men. But also, his anger, his perfect hatred of the enemies of God and the enemies of God’s people, who don’t want to see healed on the Lord’s day (which is a day of healing), his perfect hatred for them has this element of grief—the hardness of their hearts mixed with it.

Our Savior wept over Jerusalem. You know, he knew what was coming. So our hatred, to be this perfect hatred of the Savior—whose the psalms really are the reflection of his mind and heart—this hatred of ours must be properly mixed with a grief. Even when we hate the sinners, in the context of the way God is going to change things—is to remove them off the face of the earth—there’s still grief mixed with it, at their hardness of heart, at their rejection of their creation as God’s image-bearers.

And that’s one of the tests for our proper hatred. Is there a grief over the hardness or sin that these men have entered into?

So our Savior not only does the New Testament confirm all this stuff—it helps us to understand it by looking at some of these examples of our Savior’s anger and hatred against those who were obviously opposed to God, his enemies and the enemies of his people.

You know, Paul told the Galatians that if another man came and preached another gospel, let him be accursed. That’s what he said. See, that’s not the typical New Testament grace sort of thinking that a lot of evangelical churches tend to fall into today or liberal reformed churches. But that’s the word of God. That’s the New Testament version of the word of God.

So the New Testament certainly confirms this attitude of God towards sin—that it should be our attitude as well. And this is over not just moral depravity, this is over heretical teaching, this is over preaching of a different gospel, a different means of salvation in the context of the church. Heretics here are placed by Paul under a judicial judgment or curse from God. And as we said, the book of Revelation is replete with calling for the saints of God to rejoice in his judgment.

So we said that, and we said that what we are doing here as we consider the hatred of the evil is we are trying to reform ourselves by means of the word of God. We do not, as we look around our culture today and try to figure out the best way to fix it, look at our own hearts and try to fix it according to our own understanding. We seek the clarity and purity of God’s word.

We’ve said for three weeks now that the word of God is the means by which the spirit of God works in the context of your life. The clear implication of that is that if you do not know the word of God, you will not be led by the Spirit as you attempt to make decisions.

Lenski, speaking on the centrality of the word, says this: “The Spirit still speaks to men in his holy word. In every remembrance of it in our hearts, in every impelling influence which comes as the fruit of that word.”

So he teaches two ways the Spirit ministers his word to us. He brings us scriptures to mind as we look at particular situations, or he impels us with influences that are directed by that word that he has planted in the context of our heart. Outside and apart from the word—as Luther has said—there is nothing but the devil. Outside and apart from the word, Luther said, is nothing but the devil.

Now, we just sang about how the law of the Lord is perfect and how the law of the Lord, God’s judgments, his word, are to be desired more than gold—yea, than fine gold. Young man, I know you want gold. We all want gold. We all want money. How much do you want the word of God, which God says is to be valued above those things? Does this word mean a lot to you?

Well, yeah, absolutely. If the word of God is supposed to—yeah, I’m sure. I’m sure it does mean that to you, you say. And I say that. But you know what’s the proof of that? What’s the demonstration of how much this word means to you?

Do you understand your inability to discern good and evil apart from that word? And in fact, your moral bent apart from the influences of the Spirit and the word is to call evil good and good evil. That’s what Adam and Eve did when they rejected God’s word. And that’s what you will do apart from the knowledge of God’s word. You will be confused. You will not be able to discern good and evil. And you’ll end up doing the very things that God calls you to hate, and he calls us to hate when you do them.

The word of God must be central in our lives. And we must read these scriptures. We must understand these scriptures. It is not enough just to simply read them a lot. We must read them with understanding and study. We must read them in the context of a knowledge of the flow of the scriptures. But certainly, we won’t get any of that if we don’t simply read them every day.

Children, you know, I exhort you to read your Bibles every day. Young men growing up, we have an entire book of the Bible given by a king to his son to teach you how to be kings. Are you teenage men? You are now in the place of your life where you need to discern how to judge and correctly rule in the context of your life, your home, your vocation. And God has gone out of his way not to simply give you a general set of 66 books of the Bible to train you in that—that’s true enough. But he has given you a specific book written by a king to his son who is going to be a king, teaching him how to be a king.

That is—you don’t have to say at that point that it’s worth more than gold, do you? Because you recognize the value of it. Young man, apply yourself to this book of Proverbs. This is the way that God trains us how to make correct judgment. This is wisdom literature. And you’re to desire wisdom above all else. And we simply cannot attain to that wisdom that God tells us to without the word.

If it wasn’t for this word that told us to hate evil and to hate evil men, we wouldn’t do it right. If it wasn’t the word that tells us, “I hate them with a perfect hatred,” reminding us, “Oh, our hatred of the evil probably isn’t perfect. Probably needs correction.” You see, the Spirit of God works through this word to transform our lives and to move us and mature us in our homes.

How much do you attend to the word of God? Fathers, how well do your children—how—what patterns, habitual routines have they entered into to read those scriptures on a regular basis and to talk with Dad about what they find there? See, it’s not enough for us to tell the young people they should do it if the parents are not setting the example.

So I ask each of you to meditate in your own heart. Commune with yourself here in your own heart. What importance do you place on the word of God? We need to be reading the scriptures daily. We need to be ministering those scriptures to our soul. Nancy Wilson, in her book—what’s it called?—”Praise Her in the Gates.” Nancy will be at family camp and we’ll probably speak for a couple of those chapters. There’s a verse that apparently they sort of have kind of picked up on one from the Proverbs about nurturing souls.

We want to create fat souls, you know, healthy souls in the context of our children. Well, that nurture comes about through the application of the word. There’s no other way to do it. See, no other way to do it.

So, children, you should understand that the Holy Spirit speaks to us through the Bible. I saw the outline of one of the children at our church last week, and they tried to answer all the questions for the sermon. When it was done, the answer they put here—they saw the number of letters and very astutely came up with “brain.” Our brain is the way the Holy Spirit speaks to us.

Well, there’s some truth to that. But the Spirit of God and the word of God works at a level much deeper and more profound than just our intellectual understanding of what that word says. So, you know, we have to be very careful that we don’t substitute our ability to figure things out for the operation of the Holy Spirit. On one hand, rationalism, and we want to be careful, and I think we’ve done pretty good at avoiding the other end of the spectrum—that we don’t think the Holy Spirit moves in the context of our lives or directs primarily via our emotions.

Our emotions and our rationality are good things that God has given to us, but the word of God comes through to change us in both of those aspects—to put our emotions under the control of the Holy Spirit and discipline of the word, and in the intellectual arena, the same thing. Those things come together. The Holy Spirit speaks to us by the Bible.

The Bible—what is the only rule that God has given to us to direct us how we may glorify and enjoy him? The word of God which is contained in the scriptures of the Old and New Testament is the only rule to direct us how we may glorify and enjoy him. The only rule: the word of God. How well are you using that rule to train yourself up?

Providence of God. This first attempt here at RCC to memorize the Westminster Shorter Catechism focuses us right out of the gate on the word of God. As you go through the Westminster Confession, some of you young men trying to understand reformed doctrine—it’s all about. It doesn’t start with the doctrine of God. It starts with the doctrine of the word first. Why? Because that’s how God reveals himself to us. In a real sense, that word, and if you don’t have what the word is down, then God’s spirit has said, “I am working through that word to teach you about God and about who you are.”

The Bible is the way the Spirit speaks to us, and you should read your Bibles, young men and women, older men and women, boys and girls. We should read our Bibles every day. And if we read our Bible every day, then we find out that what these scriptures tell us is summed up in that Westminster Shorter Catechism’s first question: that to glorify God and enjoy him forever is our primary duty.

And Jesus says the first and great commandment is to love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength. And there’s a second like unto it: to love your neighbor as yourself. But it is secondary to that primary command to love God. Which is more important—to love God or to love our fellow man?

And now we’ve done a lot in this church to say you find out how well you love God by how well you love your fellow man. But again, the balance of that is that God says you must be dedicated to his glory, his honor, and loving him. Otherwise, if you think that there’s equal ultimacy between loving God and humanity, you’re going to want to love all humanity, include those who are wicked and hate God. And God tells you, “Don’t love them. Don’t love what they do. Hate it.”

Because your love for God—ye that love the Lord, hate evil. So God corrects our understanding by his word to tell us that.

So we’re circumcising our hearts. We’re opening up our ears as the Holy Spirit uses his word to change us and to transform us to hate our own sin, to hate evil.

Command needs to be given because of our culture, our theology. We talked about that last week. Let me read a quote here. There’s a book and I haven’t—I’ve got it on order. I haven’t received it yet. But I thought this quote is another example of why we need to hear sermons about hating evil and why every year here we have an anti-abortion day of the Lord as we did last Sunday. And we probably should more often than we do engage ourselves in prayer, seeking God’s punishments upon the wicked and evil in the context of our culture.

Why we should expose ourselves to not just the first half of Psalm 139 with all the beautiful and grand things that are said there, but with the second half as well. Why we need to avoid those hymnaries that have deleted the imprecatory psalms and elements of other psalms from the prayer books. Why we need to read and sing Psalm 83.

Here’s a book—a new book—a quote from a fellow named Eric Zenger. His book is called “The God of Vengeance: Understanding the Psalms of Divine Wrath,” and Zenger says this: “It may be that the directness of the challenge to God and the certainty it expresses that God must be at work in history and society form the real provocation of these psalms. For a Christianity whose belief in God has exhausted its historical potential in soteriology—or postponed it to an afterlife by a privatist and spiritualizing attitude—it may be that these psalms are a directness in their challenge to this kind of reality. Here the shrill tones of the psalms of enmity—Psalm 83, psalms of hatred—can serve to shock Christianity out of its well-regulated slumber, of its structural amnesia about God.”

So we have a structural amnesia. We have now in the structures of the churches an attempt to steal away from you a portion of God’s word to cause you to forget that, as Otto Scott says, God is no buttercup. You know, that is pleasing to our old man, isn’t it? To think that God is a buttercup. You know, we will cover it over because we don’t want to be mean and angry and sinful toward these wicked abortionists. But what we’re really saying is we don’t want him angry with us either. And if we can convince ourselves that he slumbers, then we can sin rather unabashedly.

Why is Clinton so popular? That’s that very reason. He justifies our own actions. Our leader can do it. We’re not quite as bad as him, so we’re okay. So we like him. He reminds us of those truths.

Well, Zenger is right. These psalms that we’ve talked on—Psalm 83, the last half of Psalm 139, et cetera—shock us out of that amnesia and slumberliness we have of the person and character of God. And it’s good for us. It’s very good for us. It would be interesting to get this book by Zenger. He thinks that the responses against such statements—that men are to hate evil—are part of an old heresy, and he is setting out to reclaim these texts for use in the context of the church.

And we find not only does the word tell us we’re to hate evil and hate evil men with a perfect hatred—a godly perfect hatred—but he actually tells us we’re to rejoice in the judgments of God upon such people. And we spoke about that, and we said that we’re to rejoice in the establishment of justice in the gates. We’re to hate the evil and do the good and see justice established in the gates according to the scriptures.

And part of the way we hate evil is by electing godly men. And we can rejoice that Mr. Clinton is no longer our president. Even as he leaves office, we have these evil actions of vandalism in the context of the White House—pornographic messages being left on telephone answering machines, things scrolled on the walls, et cetera, et cetera.

You know, it is one last reminder to the church of Jesus Christ to give thanks to God that a degree of evil has now been removed from the ruling sphere of our national government. And we praise God that President Bush, as one of his first actions as president, has reinstated the Mexico City Policy. The Mexico City Policy was put in place by Ronald Reagan, and it said that the United States will not fund overseas or foreign agencies that promote or encourage abortion.

President Clinton’s, as I understand it, first official act in office—I spoke about this last week—was to rescind that order and now permit funding of overseas foreign agencies to encourage abortion. The end result of which is more children die. And President Bush, one of his first official acts last Monday, announced he would indeed reinstate the Mexico City Policy.

“Oh, he’s not bringing the country together. Oh, you know, he has no mandate.” Well, Franklin Graham, who preached at the prayer service for President Bush, said that there’s a mandate for President Bush that comes not from the ballot box. It comes from the sovereign God who determines who’s going to fill the offices of the highest office in our land. So there’s a mandate that comes from God as a result of this election. And that mandate, as Reverend Graham said so articulately and well, is to seek the counsel of God in what he does as King David sought the counsel of God.

And I praise God that in spite of the opposition of the pro-abortionist crowd, President Bush moved to reinstate the executive order to try to reduce the effect of American funding on overseas abortions. Praise God. We have reason to rejoice that wickedness has been removed from the context of the White House, at least in part.

And we have—I think that we can say that appropriately—our hatred of evil this last election cycle motivated us to try to seek someone else being elected to that office. And as a result of this, God has blessed the efforts of Christians across this country and established more of a degree of judgment and justice in the gates in accordance with his word. So that we should praise God about that.

Should we be joyful when God hurts wicked people? Yep. Yes, we should. It’s an element of grief at their hardness of heart that requires these things. But God says to rejoice when the judgments come upon those who oppose Christ.

Now, what’s the first thing we should hate? And again, this one person I saw who was trying to answer the questions earlier that I gave the sermon—first things we should hate are wicked people. And I bring it up not to embarrass this person, but see, when you hear the first half of the sermon, that’s what you’re going to go away with—is the biggest thing we got to do is hate wicked people. But that’s not the first thing we hate.

To move toward a perfect hatred, we want to hate the evil in our own hearts. We want to hate our own sin. Westminster Confession of Faith—so in our outline we say that this command begins with the proper self-hatred. Now, here again, we’re as politically incorrect as we are when we say that we should hate evil men and saying we should have self-hatred, because of course the movement of our day is self-love.

Self-love is a perversion of a true biblical doctrine that we must appreciate and appropriate the fact that God has called us to be his sons. That is our central identity. Your central identity is not wickedness or sin anymore. You are—you know, if you’re a believer in the Lord Jesus Christ—then God has made you a new creature. You’ve been adopted into sonship. And that’s a very important truth.

And the secular perversion of that is this idea: you should never hate yourself. But the Westminster Confession of Faith puts this way, under repentance under life: “What is biblical repentance? By it a sinner out of the sight and sense not only of the danger, but also of the filthiness and odiousness of his sins, as contrary to the nature and righteous law of God, and upon the apprehension of God’s mercy in Christ to such as are penitent, so grieves for and hates his sins as to turn from them all unto God.”

Biblical repentance involves a proper hatred of our sins. And if we want to, you know, again, extend it out—we don’t hate our sins in the abstract. They’re not abstract things that just sort of bubble up on the surface of our skin or something. They’re things we do. So I think that we can imply from that, the Westminster Divine’s thought there, was a proper hatred of oneself in the context of sin.

So he’s to hate his own sins to turn from all unto God, “purposing and endeavoring to walk with him in all the ways of his commandments.”

Ezekiel 36:31 says this: “Then shall you remember your own evil ways and your doings that were not good, and you shall loathe yourselves in your own sight for your iniquities and for your abominations. You shall loathe yourselves for your iniquities and for your abominations.”

Christians, I know that there are certain things that you, if you engage in, will bring that degree of proper self-loathing. But I also know that the culture has so moved us to accept sin that those things probably are not very many. That there are probably many more sins and evil in the context of our own hearts that should be the proper recipients of our self-hatred or self-loathing of those actions that we engage in.

So I would ask you: what do you—how do you see your sins? Are you at peaceful coexistence with them? Are you attempting to—have you so papered over them through the years they no longer bother you?

I remember talking to one of you this last year or so, and I’ve been thanked since then by this particular person, because I told him, “You just got to stop doing that. You cannot engage in that sin. It is improper. You got to put the stake through the heart.” Children, that’s how God wants you to think of your sins—not just, you know, it’s not good enough just to be sorry every time they pop up and, oh yeah, I’m sorry.

No, you want to think of these sins that God hates: lying, sowing discord among brothers, stealing, cheating, bearing false witness, pride, being prideful. You want to think of these things as vampires living in the context of your heart. You want to drive that wooden stake through the heart of those sins that beset you. You don’t want to learn to coexist with them. You don’t want to learn to keep them just kind of under control so they don’t really flare up out of church.

You want to drive the stake through the heart through the application of this text: “Ye that love the Lord hate evil.” Hate the sins that you engage with and, according to Ezekiel, properly loathe yourself in your own sight because of your iniquities and for your abominations.

Jeremiah 31:18: “I have surely heard Ephraim bemoaning himself thus: ‘Thou hast chastised me and I was chastised as a bullock unaccustomed to the yoke. Turn thou me and I shall be turned, for thou art the Lord my God. Surely after that I was turned, I repented, and after that I was instructed. I smote upon my thigh. I was ashamed, yea, even confounded because I did bear the reproach of my youth.’”

See, it didn’t stop when he received the forgiveness of sins here. No, he says, “You turned me. After I was turned, I repented. You’re the one who sovereignly moves, not my will. I repented. After that, I was instructed—the word was brought to bear on me—and then I smote upon my thigh. I was ashamed, yet even confounded because I did bear the reproach of my youth because of my sins.”

Have you done that lately? Smote your breast, smote your thigh, hated the fact that you sinned and caused distress among brothers, hated the fact that you were angry with brother or sister, hated the fact that you were prideful toward your spouse? Have you—you know, it’s hard enough to just identify those things sometimes. But you understand what I’m saying: the Spirit of God wants you to be deeply moved by the offenses against Christ and against those you sin against.

You want to hate your sin. Shall we hate this movie? Yes, we shall. It is encouraging abortion. Shall we hate this movie? Yes, we shall. It’s encouraging covenant children to fornicate. Shall we hate this sin in my heart? Yes, we shall. And move to hate it. Move to hate it.

And again, hatred is a desire to see it removed in whatever means necessary. What did our Savior say? Cut off your hand if you need to. Now, we always want to say that’s not literal. That’s right. But the point is clear, is it not? We don’t want to take the example and soften it somehow by saying we’re not going to cut off our hand. The point of our Savior is: you should hate your sin enough to do whatever it takes to put the stake through the heart.

So may God grant us that as a people as we move into this new year—again, according to the circumcision of the Spirit of God upon our hearts—may we be a people that hate our sins that loathe them.

Psalm 119: “Therefore I esteem all thy precepts concerning all things to be right and I hate every false way.” Every false way in me I should hate and seek to put to death.

Romans 7:15: “I do not understand what I do. For what I want to do, I do not, but what I hate, I do.” Paul is saying that Christians should see their sins and hate them and say, “I hate these things that I do.”

Self-hatred is proper. To fear the Lord—Proverbs 8:13: “The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom, right?” Okay. So what is the fear of the Lord? Well, to fear the Lord is to hate evil. So what’s the beginning of wisdom? To hate evil. It’s the beginning of our sanctification.

He goes on to say: “I hate pride and arrogance, evil behavior, perverse speech. I hate these things. I hate them.”

In Acts 19, those that turned away from sorceries piled their books and articles of magic up and burned them in a fire. Now, again, you know that it isn’t what we typically do today. We want to talk about the mature Christian and liberty to do this and that and think about this and that, and those things are proper—but only in the context of a hatred of evil.

What is our response to our culture round about us as it manifests evilness? I think we need to think it through. Deuteronomy 7:26 says: “Do not bring a detestable thing into your house or you like it will be set apart for destruction.”

Now, we don’t want to have an unbiblical pietism, but we want to have a biblical pietism. We want to have a biblical love for the Lord that hates evil and its manifestations. We should know what our children are listening to. We should know what songs are entertaining our children, what movies we’re bringing into their midst. We should be warned in our homes of the danger of these things. We should be carefully observing the influences, and we should be training our children.

“Okay, this isn’t evil. We can learn from it. It’s redemptive in some way. Okay, this is evil. You hear these lyrics, they’re trying to get you to forsake Christ. You hear these lyrics, they’re trying to get you to think about the girl sitting next to you on the pew and what you could be doing this weekend.” Those sort of lyrics should be hated. We shouldn’t listen to them. We shouldn’t promote those kind of groups. We should remove ourselves from them.

I can’t give you a list, but I can say that every parent here and every young prince that’s growing up, that’s worth his salt in this church, has to think about the implications of hating evil in the context of our entertainments.

Okay, so we hate evil. And again, it doesn’t hurt to go over the list. Proverbs 6:16: What are the evil things that God hates? A proud look, a lying tongue, hands that shed innocent blood, a heart rather that deviseth wicked imaginations, feet that are swift in running to mischief, a false witness that speaks lies, and he that soweth discord among brothers. God hates these things. We should hate these things as well.

Why should we hate sin? Well, sin is our enemy. Sin is the actions that a person or an entity rather, Satan—that all those in league with Satan—want to use to weaken us. I talked about this with the French Revolution. The French Revolution came about because men’s sins weren’t hated. They were preyed upon by the enemy.

A Christian young man and woman, Christian little person here: sin weakens you. Sin makes you—literally, sin weakens your effectiveness in the world. Sin can make you literally sick, and sin has a debilitating effect on you. Would you drink poison? No, because you don’t want your body to feel sick. You’ve got a soul that’s to be nurtured and fattened for the Lord Jesus Christ. And sin robs your soul of that nurture.

Sin is your enemy. And if sin is your enemy, then you want to hate it. You want to avoid it. You want to hate those actions that you engage in and put them far away from you.