Abhor What Is Evil

Somewhere a man got the idea that the holiest thing he could do was to stop hating anything at all. To become so soft, so accepting, so endlessly understanding that nothing moved him to disgust anymore. And he wears that numbness like it is love.

It is not love. Real love hates. It has to. Read the command, because it puts the two together in one breath on purpose. "Let love be without hypocrisy. Abhor what is evil; cling to what is good" (Romans 12:9). Love without hypocrisy. And in the same sentence, abhor. Not tolerate. Not have a mild preference against. Abhor, which is the strongest word for hatred the language had, aimed at evil, and set right next to the command to love.

Because a love that cannot hate is a fraud. If you love your kids, you hate what would destroy them. If you love your wife, you hate the thing eating at her. A father who felt nothing at a threat to his children would not be gentle. He would be dead inside. The capacity to hate evil is not the opposite of love. It is the proof that the love is real, and a man who has lost it has not become more loving. He has become less alive.

Hate the evil, not the man

Now the line, and it is the whole game, and getting it wrong is how good men turn into bad ones.

You abhor what is evil. The evil. Not the person tangled up in it. The verse says abhor what is evil, and it is precise, because the second a man lets his hatred slide off the evil and onto the human being, he has become the thing he was fighting. This is the trap the enemy sets for zealous men, and zealous men walk into it constantly, because it feels righteous. It feels like taking sin seriously. It is not. It is the oldest bait there is.

The man across from you who is deep in something vile is not the evil. He is a man the evil is eating, the same way it has tried to eat you, and if you cannot hold both of those at once, fierce hatred of the sin and real compassion for the sinner, then you will do one of two cowardly things. You will go soft on the evil to stay kind to the man, or you will go hard on the man to feel like you are fighting the evil. Both are failures. Both are what happens when a man cannot aim.

Christ aimed perfectly. He was the fiercest enemy sin ever had and the gentlest friend a sinner ever found, at the same time, in the same body, without contradiction. He hated what was killing people enough to die over it, and he loved the people enough to die for them. Same cross. That is the aim you are after, and you will spend your life getting it right, but you have to know it is the target, or you will keep hitting the wrong thing.

The cost of feeling nothing

Here is what your numbness actually costs, because you have been told it makes you gracious and it does not.

A man who has stopped hating evil has stopped protecting anyone from it. His disgust was a wall, and he tore it down and called that maturity, and now the thing walks through his house unopposed because he trained himself to feel nothing when it comes. His kids learn from his calm that this thing is not worth fighting. His wife carries alone what he decided not to be bothered by. His tolerance, which he is proud of, is just an unguarded gate.

Get the disgust back. Not at people. Never at people. At the evil itself, the darkness, the sin, the thing that is coming for everyone you love. Let it move you the way it moved Christ, all the way to a cross, and keep it aimed dead at the evil and never once at the man the evil is eating. Abhor what is evil. Cling to what is good. Both, in one breath, is what a whole man sounds like.