Powerful Words: Hate and Love
Dr Terry Jones, October 18, 2009
Proverbs 10:12 “Hatred…” Hatred is a very strong word. It is of course a feeling, and every feeling stirs up a result, or a fruit. To really hate, something very bad has happened to you. You probably had a very bad experience with that person, that thing with that institution. Something grabbed hold of your heart. Something hit you.
The Bible says, here, "Hatred stirs up strife..." It causes arguments, division, within the family, the church, the organization, the job. So what are we are going to do if we are going to be a unit that is strong, bound together in unity? We have to be careful. We have to deal properly with the things that hit you. It may not be as strong as hate, but if you are in a family, a job, a church, sooner or later something is going to happen. Something is going to hit you and it stirs up some kind of feeling in your heart, in your mind. And if we do not deal with those things, it stirs up division, stirs up strife.
If we look at the teaching of Absalom, the betrayal of David, you see there something got him, something got hold of him so deep that he was willing to betray his own father, who was not only his father, which is good, but everybody can be a father, can have a child. But David was the chosen of God.
"Hatred stirs up strife, but love….” Here we can see in this verse how much love we have. “...but love covers all transgressions.” All! That means we are not running around like the newspapers looking for bad stories to print about somebody, looking for their weakness, their problem, their thing, their sin. In this verse particular verse, it says we are covered.
In the family, one of our jobs as parents is to support our children financially, emotionally, and to protect them as best we can. So also, one of our jobs in the church is to protect one another, cover one another’s backs, not stick a knife into it. So no matter what happens to you, love is so powerful that it will somehow cover it, somehow it makes it OK. Somehow it causes us to be in a state that we can go forward.
