Psalm 11 is a bold confession of faith in the face of impending military threats. The psalmist declares God’s love and commitment to his people on the one hand, and God’s hatred of their enemies on the other. This is the basis of the psalmist’s confidence in this situation. You may find it perplexing to read the psalmist declaring God’s hatred of a group of people in such a positive way. Doesn’t the Bible teach that God is love? How can we say that he hates people? The Bible does say that God hates people as in Malachi 1:3: “But Esau I have hated” (talking about the Edomites). The psalmists saw it as a mark of piety to also hate evil doers (Psalm 15:4; 139:21). Because God loves people, he also in a sense ‘hates’ those who harm others. This hatred is a ‘formal hatred’ rather than a personal hatred. To give you an example of formal hatred think about an allied soldier in World War II. He would have hated the Nazi enemy and shot to kill enemy soldiers. But the hatred was not personal. It was a hatred for what those soldiers stood for in that formal context. The hatred of God and that of the psalmists was this kind of hatred. It is a hatred that is the flip-side of covenant commitment. In Psalm 11 the psalmist is comforted by the fact that God hates his enemies. He sees this as part of God’s love-commitment to his people. God is committed to his people and sets himself against those who harm them. Such is his zealous protective love for us.
Thank God for his love and his constant protection.
Read Psalm 11
