A Time to Hate
A sermon by Michael Spangler preached on September 7, 2025
The original sermon video can be seen here.
I’ll read tonight from Ecclesiastes 3:1-8. “To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven: A time to be born, and a time to die; a time to plant, and a time to pluck up that which is planted; A time to kill, and a time to heal; a time to break down, and a time to build up; A time to weep, and a time to laugh; a time to mourn, and a time to dance; A time to cast away stones, and a time to gather stones together; a time to embrace, and a time to refrain from embracing; A time to get, and a time to lose; a time to keep, and a time to cast away; A time to rend, and a time to sew; a time to keep silence, and a time to speak; A time to love, and a time to hate; a time of war, and a time of peace.”
The sermon text tonight is from Ecclesiastes 3:8, “a time to hate.” The wise man knows what time it is. Today, wise men, it is a time to hate. A beautiful White woman, Iryna Zarutska, an innocent sojourner in our land, was recently stabbed by a monstrous black repeat offender as she sat silently on her train seat here in our own state of North Carolina. Then just today, a well-known White Christian conservative commentator, Charlie Kirk, was shot in front of thousands at a gathering in Utah. Both bled out and died shortly thereafter. In Iryna’s case, after callous bystanders, also black, refused to give her aid.
As we turn to our text, what comes before it makes it clear there is a time to love. In one respect, that’s every time, because love is the fulfilling of the law. It’s the fulfilling of God’s law, and God’s law is always to be fulfilled at all times. But not all affections and degrees and acts of love are fitting for every time. And not all things are worthy of love, because not all things are lovely. Indeed, when it comes to hateful things like sin, no love is warranted, only irreconcilable hatred.
This also shows that when our text declares there is a time to hate, it does not deny that some things deserve to be hated at all times without relenting. Those things that are hateful to God, He hates, and He does not change. And we ought to be as like Him as we can. But even with those things, God’s acts of hatred, as well as our own affections and actions of hatred, do ebb and flow. They have their times and seasons which wisdom appoints. Thus the message tonight will help us know when we should hate and by extension how, that God might be glorified by our response to these most hateful crimes.
We’ll consider first what hatred is, then the object of hatred, then the time of hatred.
Hatred, to define it simply, is the affection of despising, contemning, looking down on, thinking lowly of, abominating, finding distasteful, or disgusting. It’s an affection of despising, which tends toward the action of destroying. So properly, it’s an affection in the heart of despising, which tends toward the action of destroying.
Just to give one proof of this usage, Leviticus 20 verse 23. God speaks this way regarding the Canaanites. These evil men who were to be destroyed by the Israelites He says in Leviticus 20:23, “And ye shall not walk in the manners of the nation which I cast out before you, for they committed all these things, and therefore I abhorred them.” Abhorring here is a synonym for hatred, but it’s a very strong form of it. God utterly hated them, and how did he show it? By casting them out, by working for their destruction, requiring that they would be destroyed by Israel. So hatred is an affection of despising which tends toward the action of destroying.
What then second is the object of such hatred? Well first and absolutely speaking, we ought to hate sin. Sin, as we heard recently, is the transgression of the law, the breaking of the law of God, the raising of the fist against the Almighty Creator. We ought to hate sin. First, because God does, and God is our chief example. Psalm 5:4: “For thou art not a God that hath pleasure in wickedness.” By using this understatement, it’s making it very clear, he despises wickedness. “Neither shall evil dwell with thee.” Or Habakkuk 1:13, where it says that he is of purer eyes than to behold evil, and he cannot look. God can’t even stand to look at it, that is with any pleasure. Of course, he knows sin, he knows all things, but he doesn’t know it with any delight, quite the opposite.
And because God is this way, so all men of God ought to be and are this way, if they’re sincere. So Psalm 97:10 says, “Ye that love the Lord, hate evil.” You’re to be like God. Romans 12:9 uses a similar term as what we heard in Leviticus 20:23 when he says, “Abhor that which is evil.” And all the more, the more sinful the sin is, for example, the heinous public crimes I mentioned. Naturally, because the sin is more sinful, it’s therefore also more hateful. All sin is worthy of hatred, but some sins being more sinful are more worthy of hatred.
That’s because of what the [Westminster; ed.] Larger Catechism calls aggravations. I want to just open up briefly for you from question 151 some relevant aggravations to current events. For example, from parties offended when they are against any of the saints, like Charlie Kirk, a professing Christian, or when they’re against the common good of all or many, such as this racially motivated murder, as confessed by the murderer’s own lips in the case of Iryna Zarutska. This was an attack not only against a woman, but against a race, against a whole people, which includes our people. It’s a direct attack on Americans as such, not just on a particular Ukrainian woman, because it was an attack on her as a means to attack the whole White race.
The nature and quality of the offense is aggravated, if it breaks forth not only from thoughts and feelings, but into words and actions. It’s sinful enough for men to harbor murderous hatred in their hearts, but murder becomes far worse when it leaves the heart and comes into the mouth, and then far worse than that when it comes to the hands and results in actual killing, and when they admit of no reparation, such as murder which cannot be repaired. The life is gone. It’s never coming back. Likewise, when the offense is done deliberately, willfully, presumptuously, impudently, boastingly. That applies from what we can tell to the first crime, and it seems very likely to the second, though we don’t know the shooter and the motive totally. Yet, maliciously, obstinately, and with delight, so many leftists are celebrating the murder of Charlie Kirk publicly online. The offense can be aggravated from circumstances, if sin is done in public or in the presence of others, it makes it worse because it is more scandalous.
Do you understand then that certain sins require more hatred than other sins because they are more hateful? So first, the object of hatred is sin. The second object is, not absolutely speaking, but in a limited respect, sinners, the men who commit sin, they ought to be hated too.
I say in a limited respect because though sin is to be hated totally, and without any exception and absolutely speaking as totally evil, that’s not true for men. There are respects in which they’re not to be hated.
Men are not to be hated as they are creatures because as they came from the hand of God, they’re good. God does not make evil. But we can’t say that about sin because God didn’t make sin. Its origin properly is from the will of man, not God. But creatures come from God. We certainly ought not hate them as they are men, that is our own flesh, created in God’s image, and though that image has been terribly destroyed, it still retains some remnants of it, some more than others. But nonetheless, we do not hate our own flesh.
Nor do we hate men as they are possible objects of salvation. We don’t know who are elect and who are reprobate. As far as we know, anyone we know, even the most wicked man, could be saved as the Apostle Paul was. And so we hold out a general hope that God will save some, even from our enemies. And for that reason, we do exercise a sort of love toward even the worst of them. And that love is in part motivated by the fact that they might be saved. We even will pray appropriately for their conversion under that hope. And we certainly do not hate anyone as he is a Christian. We don’t hate our own brothers in Christ as they are Christians, if they are.
But we do hate men, and we hate them in the limited respect as they are sinners. And we ought not minimize this respect by calling it limited, because it is in fact all-encompassing in their life. God calls them sinners and wicked men, not just because they do this and that evil deed, but because they are slaves to sin, haters of God by nature, corrupt, dead in sins, even as Christ said to the Jews, sons of their father, the devil. So there is a great extent to which sin has been identified with sinners, and this by their own choice. They do not sin because they’re forced to; they love it. It’s their very life to sin, and so it was for all of us who are Christians before we were converted. That’s why Titus 3:3 calls them hateful; not calling their deeds hateful, but calling them hateful because of their deeds, because of their corrupt nature.
God therefore hates sinners too. It is not accurate, though it is a phrase that sometimes can be used well, to say “God loves the sinner and hates the sin.” No, throughout the scripture God speaks of himself as hating sinners, not just their sin. Turn with me back to Psalm 5. We heard from it that evil cannot stand in his sight, but then it goes from abstract to concrete, speaking of evil men. “The foolish shall not stand in thy sight. Thou hatest all workers of iniquity. Thou shalt destroy them that speak leasing,” which means lying. “The Lord will abhor the bloody and deceitful man.” God doesn’t just hate sin. God hates sinners for their sin, and that’s why we do too. Men should be like God in this way too.
And David speaks of his sincerity before God by declaring this very hatred. Psalm 139:21: “Do not I hate them, O Lord, that hate thee? And am not I grieved with those that rise up against thee? I hate them with perfect hatred. I count them mine enemies.” This hatred can apply to individuals, and it often does, particularly evil men whom we come to know; the “sons of Belial,” which is a biblical term for worthless or vile men. In 1 Samuel 2:12, Eli’s sons, Hophni and Phinehas, for example. Those men are to be hated by the righteous. Psalm 15 verse 4, in fact, tells us plainly that a righteous man is discerned precisely by this hatred of vile men. Psalm 15:4, amidst all the qualifications of what it means to be a righteous man who will abide in the Lord’s tabernacle, says, “In whose eyes a vile person is contemned.” Not condemned, though that can flow from being contemned, but contemned meaning despised, hated. God praises righteous men for hating the unrighteous.
But it’s not just about individuals. It also applies to groups. And so we hear Paul exposing in general the sins of the Cretians in Titus 1:12, a whole class of vile men, indeed a vile nation. He says they’re lazy beasts. And so as we have seen, Paul has God behind him in such hatred of whole nations. God expresses his strong hatred above others of certain nations, for example, the Canaanites who were to be utterly annihilated, and with them the whole race of Canaan’s father, Ham, who was cursed in the name of Canaan for his dishonor to his father Noah. God, in distinction from his brothers Japheth and Shem, pronounced on him a curse in Genesis 9:25, which showed that God condemned him: “A servant of servants shall he be unto his brethren.”
God in this, we must be clear, is just and fair. For of all these men whom he hates and whom he calls us to hate, every single one of those men are at fault for God’s hatred. They deserve it. They hated him first. The second commandment makes that clear. Upon whom does he visit the father’s sins unto the third and the fourth generation? It’s them that hate him. God is just and right. And here’s the key: so are men when they mimic God in this way, despising men and nations insofar as they are worthy of being despised, condemning them as they are contemptible, looking down upon them as they are vile. This is a duty of any man that would follow God.
Christ speaks regarding God’s love that we ought to be perfect as our heavenly Father is perfect. But we heard from David, he told God of his perfect hatred, and this should remind us too that we ought to be perfect in hatred, as well as our Heavenly Father is so perfect. Thus the object of hatred: sin, and sinners for their sin.
Third then, the time of hatred. As I said, hateful things in themselves deserve to be hated at all times. But there must be variation in that hatred at various times, because first, the hatred of the heart, where it properly lives as an affection, can ebb and flow. Indeed it must, because we cannot have every affection, even good ones, at a fever pitch at all times. We can’t live continually on a high mountain of hatred, and love, and sorrow, and delight at all times. Typically, one time is marked by one or two, and then another time is marked by another. That’s just part of being a finite creature. Especially when it comes to the actions that flow from those affections, again being finite, we can only do one thing at once, maybe two; don’t try too many more, you’ll fail. And so we have a limited time in which to act. Therefore, hatred must be moderated by discretion, wisdom, prudence, yet, hear this, in such a way that it is not diffused and made ineffectual, but rather applied with great and powerful effect and usefulness.
So when is the time to hate? Three times.
One, when we have knowledge. Many hateful things we have no responsibility to hate because we’ve never heard about them. We don’t know them. We can’t know everything, and to understand that is just honest, and it’s a mercy of God that he doesn’t expect us to know all things. Now in principle, we hate all that is hateful, but we don’t know all hateful things, and so we depend on knowledge, and naturally hatred will not be stirred up unless the objects of hatred come before us and are made more present to us than they were at other times.
The second time is when we have a calling to hate. I speak here of the calling of the magistrate. We can say that he is God’s professional hater in that he has been given, in the terms of Romans 13:4, the sword into his hands in order to execute vengeance on wicked men. He is to be an agent, though a creature, of God’s hatred against hateful men for their hateful sins, and so the magistrate is an excellent example of a man with a calling to hate in a way above and beyond others.
Consider Moses, the chief magistrate of Israel in his day, how he called the Levites, deputized them we could say, to perform a great act of hatred. We heard it preached not long ago in this pulpit. Exodus 32:27, “And he said unto them, Thus saith the Lord God of Israel, Put every man his sword by his side, and go in and out from gate to gate throughout the camp, and slay every man his brother, and every man his companion, and every man his neighbor.” So it was when various magistrates rose, as it appears in an extraordinary way in the time of Judges, men like Gideon and Samson, and they, upon receiving their calling, exercised it with extraordinary acts of violence for the sake of justice.
And so it is with all the more regular civil magistrates that we know—presidents, vice presidents, governors, and all those at different levels and different distributions of the particular powers of government. They are given the sword and they are to use it. Romans 13, as I said, says this. Another example is Genesis 9:6 where God, as a help to Noah, in a world that had just been destroyed because it was filled with violence, says to him that, “Whoso sheddeth man’s blood, by man shall his blood be shed: for in the image of God made he man.” This presumes the office of the civil magistrate given the sword to destroy, and this is a permanent rule for all mankind, given well before the time of the Mosaic civil law, intended for the father of our race to be applied in all lands, at all times, in all places, because it’s a matter of simple equity and justice. You kill, you must be killed.
And in this killing, because of the sinful heart of man, and in particular, the deceitful heart of man, God has to tell magistrates fairly often in the Bible, don’t show pity. Deuteronomy 19:13, speaking of the murderer: “Thine eye shall not pity him, but thou shalt put away the guilt of innocent blood from Israel, that it may go well with thee.” When the duty is to hate, to love is sin. When it’s a time to hate and you make it a time to love, you don’t know the times. You are not being wise. And so especially for the magistrate.
But then we come to the third and final time to hate. The first is when we have knowledge; the second, when we have the calling; the third is when we have opportunity. This is a larger and more broad category. I don’t have time to spend much on it. But I can give one example of how opportunity arises to show hatred, and that’s when you are called by providence to take up the sword yourself, though not a magistrate, to defend innocent life, whether your own or another’s.
This is a duty of the Sixth Commandment. It’s a duty Christ enjoined upon his disciples when he, knowing the violence that may come upon them when he departed, said it’s time to sell your cloak and buy a sword. This is something that prudent men have always done. They’re ready, when needed, to kill. And in a society, sadly as it appears, like ours, where being killed is in some places not as small a likelihood as we would prefer, then there is more need to take the advice of Christ: to sell your cloak and buy a sword, and even carry it around with you. You don’t want there to be an opportunity to exercise righteous hatred that you cannot take because you do not have the means of it.
Now I don’t mean to counsel you particularly on all the means and everything involved with it. But I speak especially to men. You ought to be ready to do violence. There is a time and place. There is, as we read in the passage Ecclesiastes 3:3, a time even to kill. And I ask you, are you ready? When the opportunity comes, would you kill? Would you kill for your own life? Would you kill for the life of your wife and your children? Would you kill for the good of your nation and your race when opportunity arises? When it does, that is a time to hate and hatred is your duty.
So we’ve seen the nature of hatred, its definition, the object, and then the time. And I’ll conclude with three applications. First, does this not all bind us powerfully to learn to hate? I trust that you as a Christian would confess you have much to grow in your love. Well, this is the other side of the coin. We have much hatred yet to learn. We ought to love what God loves, we ought to hate what he hates. And this is a continual lesson in this life.
I’ll give you two helps in learning it. One is the Word with its explicit calls, such as we heard, to hate both sin and sinners for their sin, to abhor that which is evil Romans 12:9; to hate evil Psalm 97:10; to contemn [to despise; ed.] the vile man Psalm 15:4; to hate God’s enemies with perfect hatred Psalm 139:21–22. And the Word is full of examples of such hatred, as we saw with the Levites under Moses strapping on their swords and justly, though quite soberly, killing their own family members to punish them for their adultery with the golden calf.
But especially in all things, as I’ve said now many times, the example of God Himself is the one we need to follow most of all, the God who hates, indeed, whose hatred against sin, and for the sake of sin against sinners, is irreconcilable, absolute, and is eternal. And if you want a proof of this, then you should think of hell, because hell is incontrovertible evidence of God’s hatred of sin. It will do you no small help in stirring up your own hatred against sin by meditating upon God’s, that he created a place where he will send billions of souls to suffer justly forever for their sins and demonstrate for all eternity how much the holy God hates sin. If you think, “Well, perhaps I’ve learned to hate enough,” that meditation should set you right.
Second, having learned it, you need to exercise it. You need to exercise hatred first and foremost against your sin. It’s notable that David, after proclaiming his hatred of the wicked, he turns inward and says, “Search me, O God, and know my heart.” We hear of the righteous in Ezekiel 36:31, that they loathe themselves. We hear of Job, that he says, “I despise myself, and repent in dust and ashes.” We hear of Paul crying out in Romans 7:24, “O wretched man that I am,” because of this hateful law of sin within me. It has to start here or else we’re hypocrites and our hatred is just a show. We can’t be partial to ourselves or against others. It has to start at home, but then from there you have to hate others’ sins.
There are various means of this. One is exposing it. “Have nothing to do with the unfruitful works of darkness, but instead reprove them,” by opposing them, even publicly if they’re in public, and so always opposing sin in proportion to its sinfulness. I do not say this to diminish your opposition to it, but rather to stir you up. This argument from proportion is so often used to shut people up. “You’re making mountains out of molehills.” No! In most cases people make molehills out of mountains when it comes to sin, and they speak so softly against things which by their nature are so terrible. Don’t get this wrong. You have to speak appropriately.
But then third, by avenging it. As we discussed, if it is your calling, then you have opportunity. In doing so, not only against individuals, as the government ought to do tomorrow with Decarlos Brown, or with Charlie Kirk’s shooter, as soon as they catch him, but also against groups that have proven themselves vile and hateful. And against blacks, insofar as they for decades have been disproportionately murderers and violators of our own people. They are worthy of our hatred for that. Jews and other leftists, who have also shown for decades their murderous intent against White Christians, including today, by the actual murder of a White Christian. They have been, for all this time, turning the engines of law and of opinion toward the wicked end of the destruction of our people and of our religion.
If you don’t think this is worthy of your intense hatred and anger, then I ask you, do you have a soul? Do you not, at least, have feeling for your fellow White Christians, if you don’t have any love for your own self? Do you love your own family? But most of all, do you love God? And do you hate to see these groups of men living in rebellion against him and hating other men precisely as a part of their hatred of the living God? White men, my people, my fellow Americans, you have to hate those who hate you, and who hate your God. It is a time to hate. Indeed, as our verse goes on to say, it is a time for war.
You also then have to oppose those who refuse to hate, those who come and say to a sermon like this, “It’s a time for love. Didn’t you just read it? Hatred is never right. Or God can hate, but we ought not.” All that I’ve said demolishes those arguments. But there are always those who, as in Jeremiah’s day, say, “Peace, peace,” and that’s all they say. They have used Christ’s teaching as an example of turning the other cheek. They have used God’s own love. But a simple question destroys all their arguments. Does the loving God send men to hell? That often shuts their mouths. Because even the wicked know and tremble that hell is proof God hates both sin and the sinners who commit it.
You have to oppose those as well who think violence, which we could call active or kinetic hatred, is entirely the problem and never the solution. If that were so, why would God have told the civil magistrate to shed the blood of man who sheds the blood of man? They cannot and ought not try to be more loving and more peaceful than God himself.
Third and finally, we have to cry out for righteous hatred. We need to appeal to our own people that they would stir up their souls and cease their self-hating lukewarmness toward their mortal enemies. It is a great sin of our people that they will look and see, even on their own phones and TVs, the slaughter in broad daylight of their fellow White men, and be cold toward it, be callous, be indifferent. That needs to be rebuked. And we need to serve according to our place and calling in stirring up our friends, our family, not to be indifferent toward these crying evils.
And we need to appeal to our own government because they have been given by God the sword, an instrument of hatred to enact his vengeance. And if they refuse, then vengeance still must be done. And we ought not be content that justice is not swiftly and appropriately administered.
But finally, we cry out for hatred not just from men but from God. And this is why, especially in the Psalms, he has given us so many prayers we could call prayers of hatred, or imprecations. Have you noticed in our psalm singing how frequent these are in the Psalter? How often we are calling upon God to judge his enemies and ours, and with David, as we heard, declaring our own hatred of the wicked? You need to use these with hope that even if men, even if our government, even if our people will not hear our pleas, God will. The God of vengeance shall shine forth. So continue to call on Him to do so, calling Him to arise and let His enemies be scattered.