Hello and welcome to another post on Renaissance Woman!

Psalm 139 is one of my favorite Psalms.  It is the first one I ever memorized in its entirety and I often use the verses contained within it as prayers and reminders.  However, there is a passage towards the end of the Psalm that does feel like it doesn’t belong.  It starts in verse 19 but, for the sake of this post, I want to focus on verses 21 and 22: “Do I not hate them, O Lord, who hate You?  And do I not loathe those who rise up against You?  I hate them with perfect hatred; I count them my enemies.”

There is an interesting story related in the Gospel of Luke Chapter 10.  Verse 25 states, “And behold, a certain lawyer stood up and tested Him, saying, ‘Teacher, what shall I do to inherit eternal life?’”  The complete Jewish study Bible begins this verse with; “An expert in Torah stood up to try and trap him by asking…” Jonathan Mitchell’s New Testament describes the man as “a certain man versed in the Law (a Lawyer and a legal theologian; a Torah expert)”.  Jesus replies, “What is written in the law?  What is your reading of it?”  The lawyer answers, “‘You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your strength, and with all your mind’ and ‘your neighbor as yourself’.”  Jesus says to him, “You have answered rightly; do this and you will live.”  But the lawyer, “wanting to justify himself, said to Jesus, ‘And who is my neighbor?’”

The story Jesus tells after the lawyer’s question is the one often called “The Good Samaritan.”  It is a fascinating story with many layers to it.  An important point to realize when reading it the deep and abiding hatred that existed between Jews and Samaritans.  For Jesus to use a Samaritan in His story, especially when speaking to an expert in Torah, was one of those times we must pay close attention because Jesus is making a crucial point.

Who is my neighbor?  As I carefully listen to the things being spoken today I do not think I stretch things if I rephrase this questions as, “who am I allowed to hate?”  The answer to that appears to be found in Psalm 139: we can hate those who hate God, loathe those who rise against Him, count them our enemies.  Of course, there is some difficulty in determining just who hates God.  There are times when it appears obvious who hates God but it gets trickier when we come across those who claim to be believers in Jesus but don’t quite believe the right things.  There are so many lines drawn and labels applied to people so we can distinguish our enemies from our friends.  If you belong to my denomination, if you look like me, sound like me, believe like me then you are safe but if you don’t then you are not only against me but against God.  The story of The Good Samaritan is a warning to take care because our neighbor is not who we might think.  After all we humans judge by the outward appearance but God looks at the heart (1 Samuel 16:7).  

And yet, we do live in a time where the heart seems to have been put on display.  The headlines have been full of behaviors where I think we could point a finger and say, “those people there are obviously against God so they are the ones I can hate” but then we come up against John 3:16 which says, “For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son, that whoever believes in Him should not perish but have everlasting life” and 1 John 2:2: “And He Himself is the propitiation for our sins, and not for ours only but also for the whole world.”  But then, there are passages like Psalm 11:5 “The Lord tests the righteous and the wicked, and the one who loves violence His soul hates” and Romans 9:13 where Paul quotes Malachi 1:2-3 saying, “as it is written, ‘Jacob I have loved, but Esau I have hated’.”  So; God hates but His commandment to us was “love your enemies, do good to those who hate you” (Luke 6:27-28).  Which is it?  Was David wrong in his Psalm or could it be we don’t have an understanding of what the Bible means by hate?

As I search for an answer to that, I have to wonder why “hate” was chosen in the first place by our English Translators.  My New World Dictionary defines hate as “to have strong dislike or ill will for; loathe; despise, to dislike or wish to avoid; shrink from (to hate arguments)”.  There’s a note under the definition that says “hate implies a feeling of great dislike or aversion and, with persons as the object, connotes the bearing of malice.”  Can this really describe our God as revealed in Jesus?

The Hebrew word used by David in his Psalm is sane (H8130, pronounced saw-nay) and is spelled Shin Nun Aleph (שנא).  The Strong’s concordance defines it as “to hate (personally) enemy, foe, odious” so isn’t all that helpful in trying to understand what sane means.  As I continued looking into the sane, I found articles that said “hate” was an incorrect translation of sane and “to love less” would be more accurate.  Others have said that the ancient pictograph of sane is a thorn and then a seed denoting something unsettling that would be turned away from.  One article says “the Hebrew view of hate was more about being hurt or wounded by something because of love being involved…When we feel pain, we want to withdraw; we are made in His image” (FirmIsrael).  Chaim Bentorah has an article devoted to Psalm 139:21 and the word sane and says his studies have suggested “reject” would be better than “hate” to translate the Hebrew.

I don’t disagree with anything I read in the articles linked below (and there are some wonderful points made about how God blessed Esau even though He supposedly “hated” him-worth reading) but I see something more in the picture formed by the Hebrew letters.  The Shin (ש) represents the totality of an entire process from beginning to end and means “whole, entire, intact” or “complete”.  It also carries the idea of repetition in that the process is completed over and over again.  Shin, with its three arms, also represents fire.  Nun (נ) means “emergence” but it also means “to sprout, spread, propagate, shine, flourish, blossom”.  The Aleph (א) is the letter that represents God but also is the letter that brings all of creation into unity with God.  Thus, in the Hebrew word sane, I see the picture of fire rooted in God.  His sane is the love of His Father’s heart that burns against anything that would keep His children from relationship with Him. 

What does the sane of God look like?  It does look like some harsh dealings as we read the Old Testament but each one of those instances describe the broken heart of God and His reluctance to act.  (I have touched on this in my studies on evil).  The fullness of the sane of God looks like Jesus coming to seek and save that which was lost.  It looks like the stories of Luke 15 where, when the precious lost sheep, coin, and son are restored to their rightful place, the call is “rejoice with me!”  United to Jesus Christ, One Spirit with Him, His sane burns in us.  The apostle Paul is a perfect example of the sane of God manifested in a human life.  As the zealous protector of the Temple, Paul hated the Christians in the dictionary definition of the world.  After His encounter with the living Jesus on the road to Damascus, Paul had sane against everything that sought to keep anyone from experiencing the fullness of God.  He became the one who wrote, “My little children, for whom I labor in birth again until Christ is formed in you” (Galatians 4:19).

There’s a quote that’s recently been shared a great deal and it has bothered me.  It’s from one of Billy Graham’s sermons and he says, “The closer you get to Christ, the more sinful you’re going to feel”.  The quote is taken out of context and I have not yet had an opportunity to hear it within the entire sermon but, as it stands, I don’t agree with it.  What I believe is the more the life of Christ is formed in you, the more you will sane.  That is not a bad thing.  Our God is a consuming fire and, as we are transformed into the image of Jesus Christ from glory to glory, the more His fire burns in us.  We live rooted in Jesus Christ and His life in us shines out of us and lights the entire world.  We sane anything that would seek to destroy the precious treasure of His life within us and, at the same time, that life in us is an irritant to the world. 

There is so much more to be said on this.  I believe understanding the sane of God is the first step toward understanding spiritual warfare and is a subject I will continue to look at in the upcoming weeks.

Until then, let us remember “that God was in Christ, reconciling the world to Himself, not imputing their trespasses unto them and has committed to us the word of reconciliation.  Now then, we are ambassadors for Christ, as though God were pleading through us; we implore you on Christ’s behalf, be reconciled to God (2 Corinthians 5:19-20).  

Unless noted otherwise, all Scriptures are quoted from The Holy Bible, New King James Version, Thomas Nelson Publishers, Nashville, Tennessee, 1982

References

Jacob I Loved, Esau I Hated – Hebrew Word for Hate — FIRM Israel

Sanay: To HATE – Hebrew Word Lessons

WORD STUDY – HATE – שׁנה | Chaim Bentorah

Did God Really Hate Esau? – Israel Bible Weekly (israelbiblecenter.com)

What Does The Word ‘Hate’ Mean In Hebrew and Greek? – Misfit Ministries

The Complete Jewish Study Bible, Hendrickson Publishers Marketing, LLC, Peabody, Massachusetts, 2016

Bentorah, Chaim, Hebrew Word Study: Beyond the Lexicon, Trafford Publishing, USA, 2014

Guralnik, David B., Webster’s New World Dictionary of the American Language, Second College Edition, William Collins + World Publishing Co., Inc., Cleveland • New York, 1972, 1976

Haralick, Robert M., The Inner Meaning of the Hebrew Letters, Jason Aronson Inc., Northvale, New Jersey, 1995

Mitchell, Jonathan, The New Testament, Harper Brown Publishing, 2019

Strong, James, LL.D., S.T.D., The New Strong’s Exhaustive Concordance of the Bible, Thomas Nelson Publishers, Nashville Tennessee, 1990