Paul is saying that God has been very patient with the wicked, specifically to make the riches of his glory known to the saints when he pours out his full wrath upon his enemies. We absolutely do not deserve the mercy of God, as we also “were alienated and hostile in mind, doing evil deeds” (Col 1:21). We have obtained it by grace alone, through the free gift of faith in Christ, who came to save sinners. As a result, we will not boast, but we will be awestruck at the depth of his love toward us when we see the glory of God specifically in the destruction of the wicked.

The goal of every Christian is to love what God loves, and hate what God hates. Most often, this means to love doing good and to hate when we do evil. This is as it should be. However, Christians are often unprepared to know how to think about others.
We know that we are supposed to love all people in some way, as it says in Lev 19:18: “Love your neighbor as yourself!” Jesus says this the second great commandment, and the corollary to the greatest commandment to, “Love the Lord your God with all your heart and soul and might.” He also says to, “Love your enemies and do good to those who hate you” (Lk 6:27).
However, this is only one side of the way we are taught to think about enemies. The other side can be seen in Luke 10:13–15:
13 “Woe to you, Chorazin! Woe to you, Bethsaida! For if the mighty works done in you had been done in Tyre and Sidon, they would have repented long ago, sitting in sackcloth and ashes. 14 But it will be more bearable in the judgment for Tyre and Sidon than for you. 15 And you, Capernaum, will you be exalted to heaven? You shall be brought down to Hades.”
Here Jesus is speaking words that do not fit our normal definition of love. Surely, he has loved the people in these cities, because he preached and did mighty works there. In fact, most of the twelve disciples were from these cities. But what he says to them here is better captured by the word “hate.” He hates that they have not repented. He hates them for rejecting him. He says the evil Gentile cities on the Mediterranean coast will be better off in the judgment than Chorazin and Bethsaida. Then he taunts Capernaum, which was his home base for ministry, and says they will be brought down to Hades.
To Hate The Wicked
What we are looking at is the other side of the way we are supposed to think about enemies. The Bible is very clear on this point: we are supposed to hate the enemies of God.
I first noticed this when I memorized Psalm 139 in a Bible memorization program with my church. We went through a couple of verses each week, and after a few months we had memorized the whole thing. Well, almost the whole thing. We memorized Psalm 139:1–18, and 23–24, but we skipped four verses. I wondered about it at the time, but it wasn’t until later that I realized what a mistake it was.
Psalm 139 is a glorious prayer to God about how intimately involved he is in our lives. In it, we confess with David that God knows us in every last detail (vv. 1–4). Even if we were to run to the opposite end of the earth, he would be there (vv. 9–10). In fact, he even knew every one of our days before we were born, because he authored them all (v. 16). Then we contemplate how great God’s thoughts are (vv. 17–18), and finally we ask him to search us out and see if there is anything evil in us, so that he can lead us in the way everlasting (vv. 23–24).
But there’s a glaring omission in that overview, because right before we ask God to examine us the Psalm says this:
19 Oh that you would slay the wicked, O God! O men of blood, depart from me! 20 They speak against you with malicious intent; your enemies take your name in vain. 21 Do I not hate those who hate you, O Lord? And do I not loathe those who rise up against you? 22 I hate them with complete hatred; I count them my enemies.
These are the words we did not memorize in our memorization program. They seem completely out of step with the rest of the Psalm. They’re like a mysterious pothole on an otherwise pristine road. But whenever the Bible says something that seems wrong, the proper thing to for us to do is figure out why it seems wrong and correct our own thinking.
In this case, the whole force of the Psalm depends upon it. Immediately after David confesses his vitriolic hatred of the wicked (vv. 19–22) he asks God to make sure he’s on the right path. Sure enough, he didn’t go back and scratch out those vicious verses. They are right there in the Bible, as the Holy Word of God.
Whatever you may feel about these sentiments, the Bible is very clear at this point: We are right to hate the wicked. In fact, we are supposed to hate the wicked. If we do not hate the wicked with a complete hatred, and long for them to be slain by God, then we do not love what God loves and hate what God hates.
Another example comes from the great Psalm 104, which is primarily about God’s amazing care for his creation. After marveling for 34 verses about God’s majesty and love, it ends with v. 35: “Let sinners be consumed from the earth, and let the wicked be no more! Bless the Lord, O my soul! Praise the Lord!” Again, the thirst for God’s destruction of the wicked is injected into a Psalm where we would think it has no place.
This happens over and over again in the Bible.
Hatred In the New Testament
Consider Romans 12, where Paul reminds us to love our enemies:
14 Bless those who persecute you; bless and do not curse them. 15 Rejoice with those who rejoice, weep with those who weep. 16 Live in harmony with one another. Do not be haughty, but associate with the lowly. Never be wise in your own sight. 17 Repay no one evil for evil, but give thought to do what is honorable in the sight of all. 18 If possible, so far as it depends on you, live peaceably with all.
We love these verses. They fit perfectly with our understanding of the first side of the Christian attitude toward others: that we are to love all people. But then Paul reminds us why we must never repay evil for evil:
19 Beloved, never avenge yourselves, but leave it to the wrath of God, for it is written, “Vengeance is mine, I will repay, says the Lord.”
He is saying, “You must not take vengeance, because God will avenge on your behalf.” For Paul, the ability to bless and love our enemies is a direct outgrowth of the fact that God will repay them in full with wrath.
20 To the contrary, “if your enemy is hungry, feed him; if he is thirsty, give him something to drink; for by so doing you will heap burning coals on his head.” 21 Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good.
It is specifically because of the wrath of God that we can and must show love to people.
This doctrine is not limited to Romans 12. Paul comforts the Thessalonian church by reminding them, in 2 Thessalonians 1:6–9:
…God considers it just to repay with affliction those who afflict you, 7 and to grant relief to you who are afflicted as well as to us, when the Lord Jesus is revealed from heaven with his mighty angels 8 in flaming fire, inflicting vengeance on those who do not know God and on those who do not obey the gospel of our Lord Jesus. 9 They will suffer the punishment of eternal destruction, away from the presence of the Lord and from the glory of his might…
He goes into such detail that it is hard to avoid the conclusion that he intends the church to derive some amount of comfort from imagining the future punishment of their persecutors.
Revelation depicts exactly this principle in 6:9–10:
…I saw under the altar the souls of those who had been slain for the word of God and for the witness they had borne. 10 They cried out with a loud voice, “O Sovereign Lord, holy and true, how long before you will judge and avenge our blood on those who dwell on the earth?”
We often think that the saints in Heaven have given up caring about the problems of the earth, or at least thinking about their own suffering. But here we see the opposite. Of course, they are worshiping God, and giving him the glory, but their prayer to him is that he would avenge their blood.
In the end, when Babylon the great is destroyed in a sea of blood, it says (Rev 18:19–20):
“Alas, alas, for the great city where all who had ships at sea grew rich by her wealth! For in a single hour she has been laid waste. 20 Rejoice over her, O heaven, and you saints and apostles and prophets, for God has given judgment for you against her!”
The message is clear: The citizens of heaven will be radiant with joy when the wicked of the earth receive their just desserts. In fact, God will command them to rejoice over the destruction of Babylon.
What It Means Today
This realization changes everything about the way we think about life. When we see the tyrants of our day cravenly consolidating power and spurning every form of decency, we are right to hate them. We must also pray for them (1 Tim 2:1–2), and do good to them (Lk 6:27), but we can and should look forward to the day when they will receive the just reward for their evil.
If we do evil, we must hate that as well. We cannot for a moment imagine that we are constitutionally incapable of committing the same evil as our enemies. But that fact does not permit us to overlook their evil, or to hate it any less.
It strikes me that a great part of the schism of the church today has to do with the loss of this core doctrine of Christian love and hate. I have not seen an argument for hating God’s enemies in recent literature, which is why I am taking it upon myself to write it. However, there are many arguments from Christians scolding other Christians for rejoicing over the downfall of the wicked.
It also seems to me that much of the argument about how to treat sexual deviance in the church would be far simpler if we understood that we are to hate the wicked and all their ways and do good to our enemies. I cannot imagine that the Apostle Paul would be interested in adding some lines in 1 Tim 3 about how it’s okay for a church officer to identify as a homosexual as long as he doesn’t act on it. More likely, he would say, “repent and never speak of those vile desires again” (cf. Eph 5:3).
I furthermore suspect, that Paul’s warning in 1 Tim 4:1–2 about “liars whose consciences are seared” applies to a growing number of pastors in the American church who have learned that as long as they express the requirement of Christian love in terms of what the world calls “tolerance” and “niceness” they can be praised by the world, and simultaneously trump any Christian who is attempting to “strengthen what remains” (Rev 3:2).
The Glory of God
I conclude with a reminder that if we have no appetite to hate the wicked, then we will never appreciate the riches of God’s glory that he has prepared for us:
22 What if God, desiring to show his wrath and to make known his power, has endured with much patience vessels of wrath prepared for destruction, 23 in order to make known the riches of his glory for vessels of mercy, which he has prepared beforehand for glory… (Rom 9:22–23)
Here we see the principle in its fullest expression. Paul is saying that God has been very patient with the wicked, specifically to make the riches of his glory known to the saints when he pours out his full wrath upon his enemies.
We absolutely do not deserve the mercy of God, as we also “were alienated and hostile in mind, doing evil deeds” (Col 1:21). We have obtained it by grace alone, through the free gift of faith in Christ, who came to save sinners. As a result, we will not boast, but we will be awestruck at the depth of his love toward us when we see the glory of God specifically in the destruction of the wicked.
If we do not desire their destruction, then we will be completely lost in that moment. We will think it’s time to weep for their poor souls, when in fact it is time to rejoice and glorify God.
Therefore, it is right to hate the wicked, and good to love our enemies.
Mike Littell is a Minister in the Presbyterian Church in America and is Pastor of South Dayton PCA in Centerville, Ohio.

The way we teach children the stories of Scripture can help provide a much-needed roadmap and big-picture understanding for them of how the whole Bible fits together as “the Word of Christ” (Romans 10:17). Since the “gospel is the power of God for salvation for all who believe” (Romans 1:16–17), may we never hinder the children from coming to Jesus by failing to show them Jesus as the fulfillment of each story.

Isn’t it wonderful to teach the stories in Scripture to children? Many of us who are parents, Sunday school teachers, VBS leaders, or elementary school teachers know that the accounts of David and Goliath and Israel Crossing the Red Sea is more exciting for eight-year-olds than teaching them justification by faith alone from Romans 3:21–28 (as vital as the latter is). My ten-year-old finds a vivid telling of Ezekiel’s vision of the valley of dry bones more exhilarating than a treatise on the doctrine of the resurrection from 1 Corinthians 15! Most kids’ imaginations are more captivated by the thought of Noah and his family being rescued through the cataclysmic flood waters of judgment than learning abstract (yet essential) truths like sanctification. After all, most of the Bible is written in narrative story form, as the drama and plot of salvation history unfolds from Genesis to the Gospels and the book of Acts.
Did you notice what I called biblical history in the prior sentence? It is salvation history, also called redemptive history, because it is the infallible record of God’s one unfolding story of salvation fulfilled and accomplished by the Lord Jesus Christ.
It is safe to say that the resurrected Christ taught his disciples to understand that the stories of the Old Testament find their ultimate meaning in the person and work of Jesus (see Luke 24:27, 44). After all, Jesus told the Pharisees, “Moses wrote about me” (John 5:46). It’s no wonder then, that when Moses and Elijah appeared on the Mount of Transfiguration, they were speaking with Jesus about the exodus he was about to accomplish in Jerusalem (Luke 9:31), referring to his death and resurrection that would set his people free from sin, death, and Satan.
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Written by Ben C. Dunson |
Monday, September 25, 2023
One reason Rufo’s book is so helpful is that it collects information that otherwise is so scattered as to make it hard to get a good, overall picture of the radical changes taking place in American society. By doing so it shows average Americans that they’re not crazy. Things really are headed off the rails in many ways. Rufo provides copious amounts of documentation for the claims he makes. Rufo’s history is a clear, engaging, and enlightening history of the cultural revolution unleashed on America by radical leftist activists over the last half-century.

Apocalyptic Floydianism
George Floyd’s death was an apocalypse.
It was an apocalypse, not in the sense of “chaos” (though there was plenty of that), but in the real meaning of the word: it was a revelation.
Despite the lawlessness, violence, and anarchy that was unleashed by Floyd’s death, America did not fundamentally change on that day. What had been there under the surface for quite some time, however, was revealed in all of its ferocious malice. May 25th, 2020 was, as it were, the storming of the Bastille of the American left’s cultural revolution. It is a revolution still underway, though there are some encouraging signs that a counter-revolution has begun.
America’s Cultural Revolution by Christopher Rufo tells the story of how America arrived where it is today. In short, it is an exposé of the ideologies that were steadily gaining ground for many decades prior to the Floydian Apocalypse.
It is often difficult to realize how much one’s culture and nation have been altered when you are living through the change. The transformation doesn’t happen all at once; our memories fail us regarding last year’s news, and we tend to become desensitized as we are forced to live with the “new normal.” Many Americans are probably no longer shocked that police in major U.S. cities will not even attempt to stop thefts in the range of $700-800, that self-defense against violent crime is increasingly likely itself to be punished (while those perpetuating the crimes get off lightly), that vast crime- and drug-infested tent cities of the homeless have taken over urban centers, and so on.
But then you look back ten or twenty years and it all becomes blindingly obvious: America is a fundamentally different nation than it once was. Rufo begins his book with a striking example. Angela Davis, a figure now nearly universally lauded in mainstream academia and the press, was in the 1970s the darling of Soviet Russia. On a 1972 publicity tour of the Soviet Union, Davis, as Rufo recounts, “praised her hosts for their treatment of minorities and denounced the United States for its oppression of ‘political prisoners’” (1). When approached by a group of Czech dissidents who were struggling against the Soviet regime with a plea to publicize their plight, “Davis responded with ice: ‘They deserve what they get. Let them remain in prison’” (1). In the 1970s such unabashed sympathy with Soviet oppression, while popular in radical enclaves, remained on the fringes of mainstream society. It is on the fringes no more:
After the death of George Floyd . . . All of a sudden the old Angela Davis narrative appeared everywhere: America was an irredeemably racist nation; whites constituted a permanent oppressor class; the country could be saved only through the performance of elaborate guilt rituals and the wholesale overturning of its founding principles. (2)
Rufo’s book is an attempt to explain how this great reversal came about.
Viva La Revolución
America’s Cultural Revolution is divided into four parts: first, a history of the cultural revolution; then a separate section on the outworking of the revolution in the areas of race, education, and power (by which Rufo is referring to the undermining of America’s founding political order through the implementation of CRT, DEI programs, and the like). At the head of each section is a biographical sketch of founding figures in the cultural revolution: Herbert Marcuse, Angela Davis, Paulo Freire, and Derrick Bell, names that will be known to those who are familiar with the various offshoots of critical theory, but that will be less well known to many. And yet, as the saying goes, ideas have consequences, even the ideas of seemingly obscure and irrelevant academics tucked away in the dark nooks of musty university libraries. The ideas of these four have fundamentally altered nearly every aspect of modern American life. The success of the “long march through the institutions” of thinkers inspired by such ideas has been staggering. However, “the capture of America’s institutions was so gradual and bureaucratic, it largely escaped the notice of the American public, until it burst into consciousness following the death of George Floyd” (4).
Rufo’s narrative framing makes the ideological movements he describes easier to understand than a densely argued philosophical critique. Though he certainly delves into the content of these ideologies he never gets bogged down in overly technical or academic language. Some will inevitably fault him for this, but he is very clear that his book is not an academic exercise for the purpose of nuanced conversation. It is, instead, a powerful warning and a call to action. In Rufo’s adept telling of the story, it is easy to follow how all of these radical ideas have come to infect our society, and it is easy to see how devastating they are.
Put differently, the narrative approach makes it easier for non-academics to understand the origins of the complex ideas of the radical left and how they have led us to the present moment. Reading Rufo we can see that radical assaults on America’s past are not attempts to be honest about the messiness of history, or the fallenness of man, but are in fact attempts to undermine, scorn, and reject the entirety of the American project (apart from the ideology, stories, and heroes of the radical left). Today’s radicals will not be content until they have remade America wholly in their own image. Thus, founding figures in our history–whether Jonathan Edwards, John Witherspoon, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, or Abraham Lincoln–all must go. We must tear down their statues, we must rename buildings named in their honor, we must erase them from our cultural memory. Consider how they talk about Rufo himself: He is a “shrill ideological bully” who engages in “militant fascist rhetoric” as part of a “reactionary impulse bent on the radical transformation — if not the outright destruction — of America’s leading institutions.” All of this is written about someone whose stated goal is merely to return America to the founding philosophy embodied in the Declaration of Independence and Constitution. The goal of radical leftists is not nuanced historical understanding. It is total control of all levers of power, with no dissent allowed.
In a short review only the briefest of outlines can be sketched as to the detailed historical information Rufo highlights. He begins his story with Herbert Marcuse, whom he calls the “Father of the Revolution.” Marcuse’s chief insight was that class-based efforts at overturning the “bourgeois order” had failed in Western nations (especially America) due to the fact that the working class in a society that allows for upward mobility almost always remain socially and economically conservative. Absent the restrictions of feudalism or absolutist monarchies the working class would rather rise up to greater levels of wealth and social prestige than burn the system down. Marcuse, therefore, realized that the key to social revolution was convincing other groups to fight against the supposedly oppressive conditions holding them down. Race became the key at first, though other “categories of oppression” were eventually added (gender, sexual orientation, etc.). If you can convince someone with an immutable characteristic (skin color, for example) that he can be nothing other than the target of societal oppression then you are well on your way to creating the conditions of permanent revolution.
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