In case you are befuddled by the title, it’s popular shorthand for the expression, “haters gonna hate”. It means that narrow-minded, intolerant, bigoted people are hard-wired that way, and nothing is going to change them. Ironically, anti-hatred propagators are often implicated by their own slogans. While professing to be open-minded, tolerant and unbiased they habitually ignore or malign opinions contrary to their own.
If Jesus walked this earth today, I have no doubt that he would make the haters list. He exposed sin in outwardly righteous people (Matthew 5), and laid out God’s humanly unattainable standard of righteousness: “You therefore must be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect” (Matthew 5:41, ESV).
He had the audacity to claim that the only way to escape God’s judgment for sin was to be born again (John 3:3) through faith in his substitutionary death on the cross (John 3:14-20). Oh, and he claimed that he could say all these things because he was God (John 8:58)! In so doing he offended liberal and conservative alike, to the extent that leaders of the Pharisees, the Sadducees, the Herodians, the Zealots and the Romans joined forces to crucify him.
Jesus implicated the whole human race (the world) of sin against Almighty God. What kind of press would that get him in our society? Jesus knew what was inside people’s hearts and he wasn’t impressed (John 2:25). No political philosophy, grassroots movement or awareness campaign could remedy the situation. The solution he offered was eternal life, forgiveness of sin and peace with God through faith in his death, burial and resurrection. It wasn’t a matter of people proving themselves morally superior others; it was a matter of each person seeing themselves as hopelessly lost, apart from Christ’s intervention.
Jesus said to his disciples, “If the world hates you, know that it has hated me before it hated you. If you were of the world, the world would love you as its own; but because you are not of the world, but I chose you out of the world, therefore the world hates you” (John 15:18, ESV).
He wasn’t telling them to go out and do hateful things; he was telling them that the loving act of proclaiming eternal life and forgiveness of sin in Jesus’ name would ensure the world’s hatred.
We are all haters by nature. We are so hateful that we can’t even see the hatred in our own hearts. But “God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life” (John 3:16, ESV). If you believe that, don’t be surprised if people hate you. Just keep loving them enough to tell them the truth.
