GOD IS OUR FORTRESS, AN EVER PRESENT HELP IN TIME OF NEED

  47  To the choirmaster. A Psalm of the Sons of Korah. 1  Clap your hands, all peoples! Shout to God with loud songs of joy! 2  For the Lord, the Most High, is to be feared, a great king over all the earth. 3  He subdued peoples under us, and nations under our feet. 4  He chose our heritage for us, the pride of Jacob whom he loves. Selah 5  God has gone up with a shout, the Lord with the sound of a trumpet. 6  Sing praises to God, sing praises! Sing praises to our King, sing praises! 7  For God is the King of all the earth; sing praises with a psalm! 8  God reigns over the nations; God sits on his holy throne. 9  The princes of the peoples gather as the people of the God of Abraham. For the shields of the earth belong to God; he is highly exalted!  ( Psalm 47 )
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Is It True That God Does Not Love Everyone?

From time to time, Hyper-Calvinists & others will point to Romans 9 & Malachi 1:2 - 3 “ Jacob I loved, but Esau I hated.”  (Romans 9:13, ESV)  & allege that these two texts and similar texts (like Psalm 5:5) teach that God literally hates either all sinners or the Elect but not the Reprobate.

Is that at all true? 

No, it most certainly is not true. How so?

But when the Pharisees heard that he had silenced the Sadducees, they gathered together. 35 And one of them, a lawyer, asked him a question to test him. 36 “Teacher, which is the great commandment in the Law?” 37 And he said to him, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. 38 This is the great and first commandment. 39 And a second is like it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself. 40 On these two commandments depend all the Law and the Prophets.”  (Matthew 22:34–40, ESV)


God is a Spirit, infinite, eternal, and unchangeable, in his being, wisdom, power, justice, holiness, goodness, and truth who summarizes/encapsulates His Moral Law via 2 overarching principles that conduce to infinitely exhaustive, perfect love for God first, then everyone & everything else, & then one’s own self. 


God’s Moral Law commands us to love the same way He Himself loves.   God loves Himself first (because God alone is God); then God loves everyone & everything else next, & then God loves Himself.   


Therefore, God doesn’t hate anyone (as in an absolute privation of love).  Rather, these passages mean that God’s love when set upon those He has redeemed/intends to redeem is so very vast in comparison to His righteousness indignation & wrath that as to the targets of His indignation & wrath, it is as though God truly hates those He wraths, especially those who persist in wickedness like Edom (ie Esau). 


O LORD, Hear our prayer(s)!




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