Does God love everyone, or does he hate some people?

Both are true, but ‘love’ and ‘hate’ do not mean the same thing in every passage. First, God’s love reaches everyone. He is “good to all” (Psalm 145:9). He sends sun and rain on the evil and the good, and Jesus makes that the reason why his followers must love their enemies (Matthew 5:44–45). In John’s Gospel ‘the world’ usually means mankind turned against God, and that is what God loved in John 3:16. Paul says the same: “while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us” (Romans 5:8). “God is love” (1 John 4:8) describes what God is; it does not mean that he approves of everything.

Second, the Psalms speak of God’s settled opposition to evil and to those who give themselves to it. The Hebrew sane’ (H8130) covers more than a feeling: it is the stance of a judge who will not accept or shelter wrongdoing. Psalm 5:5 speaks of those who cannot ‘stand’ in God’s presence, and the next verse says he “will abhor the bloody and deceitful man”. Nearly everything Proverbs 6:16–19 says God hates is a deed: lying, shedding innocent blood, sowing discord. Leviticus 20:23 says God abhorred the Canaanites “for they committed all these things”, the practices just listed, such as giving children to Molech. A love that did not oppose cruelty would not be love. Nor does God’s hatred of the wicked cancel his patience with them: he still pleads, “turn ye, turn ye from your evil ways” (Ezekiel 33:11).

Third, some of these passages use covenant language. In Hosea 9:15 God says he will drive Israel “out of mine house”; Keil and Delitzsch compare Sarah’s demand that Hagar be driven out (Genesis 21:10), and explain that to be driven from God’s ‘house’ is to lose the fellowship and blessings of the covenant people. Yet Hosea ends with God saying, “I will love them freely” (Hosea 14:4). In Malachi 1:2–3 and Romans 9:13, ‘loved’ and ‘hated’ is a Hebrew way of saying ‘chose’ and ‘passed over’, as Leah is said to be ‘hated’ when Jacob loved her less than Rachel (Genesis 29:30–31); see the entry on whether God is impartial. So God loves all people as his creatures, sinners and enemies included; he hates evil and stands against those who persist in it; and he has chosen some for a particular place in his purposes.

‘Hate the sin, love the sinner’

Many Christians sum the matter up this way. It is true to John 3:16, but the Psalms say more: God’s displeasure falls on people who persist in evil, not only on their deeds. Most commentators therefore say that God can love someone as his creature and wish his good, while standing against him as an unrepentant wrongdoer, as a judge may pity the man he must sentence.

General and special love

Reformed writers such as Gill distinguish God’s goodness to all his creatures from the special, saving love he has for his chosen people, and many of them, Calvin and Gill among them, read Romans 9:13 as God’s choice of individuals for salvation. Arminian writers hold that God’s saving love is offered to every person alike, and read Romans 9:13 of God’s choice of peoples and their roles, as Malachi uses it of Israel and Edom. Both agree that God is good to all.

Christians differ on whether John 3:16 speaks of a saving love for every person or of God’s love for mankind as a whole, and on whether God’s ‘hatred’ in the Psalms is best seen as his judicial rejection of the wicked or as holy anger at them. This belongs to the wider debate between Calvinist and Arminian Christians.