The Beautiful Severity of God Text: Psalm 5:4-6
Introduction: The God We Need, Not the God We Want
We live in an age of therapeutic mush. Our generation has manufactured a god in its own image, a deity who is endlessly affirming, perpetually non-judgmental, and whose chief attribute is a sort of grandfatherly niceness. He is a god who would never use the word hate, a god who is pathologically tolerant, a god who makes no demands. The problem with this god is that he does not exist. He is an idol, fashioned from the sentimentalism of a culture that has lost its nerve. And a god who cannot hate evil is a god who cannot truly love good. A god who is indifferent to wickedness is a god who is indifferent to justice. Such a god is useless. He cannot save.
The God of Scripture, the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, is a consuming fire. He is holy, holy, holy. And because He is holy, He has a profound and settled opposition to all that is unholy. The modern church has become deeply embarrassed by this. We try to airbrush these difficult passages out of our Bibles. We perform exegetical gymnastics to explain away the plain meaning of the text. We have bought into the lie that God's love and God's hatred are somehow mutually exclusive opposites, like hot and cold. But the Bible presents them as two sides of the same coin. God's love for righteousness necessitates His hatred for unrighteousness. His love for His people necessitates His hatred for that which would destroy them, namely, their sin.
David, in this psalm, is not laboring under our modern delusions. He is praying to the true and living God, and he understands who this God is. He knows that access to this God is not a universal right. He knows that fellowship with this God has conditions, and those conditions are established by God's own character. What we find in these verses is a bracing, clarifying, and ultimately comforting portrait of the beautiful severity of God. It is a comfort because it assures us that the God we serve is not morally flabby. He is not a celestial pushover. He is a king who will, in the end, set all things right. And for those of us who have taken refuge in Christ, this is exceedingly good news.
The Text
For You are not a God who delights in wickedness;
Evil does not sojourn with You.
The boastful shall not stand before Your eyes;
You hate all workers of iniquity.
You destroy those who speak falsehood;
Yahweh abhors the man of bloodshed and deceit.
(Psalm 5:4-6 LSB)
The Divine Character (v. 4)
David begins by stating what God is not. This is a crucial starting point. Before we can understand what God does, we must understand who He is. His actions flow from His character.
"For You are not a God who delights in wickedness; Evil does not sojourn with You." (Psalm 5:4)
The first clause is a direct assault on every pagan conception of deity. The gods of the nations were capricious, lustful, and wicked. They delighted in the very things God abhors. But Yahweh is different. He takes no pleasure, no delight, in wickedness. This is not just a preference; it is essential to His nature. God's happiness, His divine pleasure, is found in righteousness, truth, and holiness. Wickedness is, to Him, a foul stench, an alien thing.
The second clause intensifies the first. "Evil does not sojourn with You." The word for sojourn means to dwell as a guest or a foreigner. Evil cannot even find temporary lodging in God's presence. It is not just that God doesn't like evil; it's that His very presence is inhospitable to it. His holiness is a holy fire that consumes all dross. Think of it this way: darkness cannot sojourn in the presence of a blazing light. The moment the light appears, the darkness is not merely asked to leave; it is annihilated. It ceases to be. So it is with God. His presence is the absolute negation of evil. This is why the prophet Habakkuk can say, "Your eyes are too pure to approve evil, And You can not look on wickedness with favor" (Hab. 1:13). This is the foundation. God and evil are antithetical. They cannot coexist.
The Divine Confrontation (v. 5)
From God's essential nature, David moves to how that nature manifests itself in relation to sinful men.
"The boastful shall not stand before Your eyes; You hate all workers of iniquity." (Psalm 5:5)
Who are the boastful? These are the arrogant, those whose lives are a monument to their own imagined glory. Pride is the root of all sin; it is the original rebellion that says, "I will be like the Most High." It is the creature attempting to usurp the Creator's throne. And David says they "shall not stand before Your eyes." This is a courtroom scene. The boastful man is summoned, he enters the presence of the King, and he cannot remain standing. His pride, which seemed so impressive in the company of men, evaporates under the gaze of God. He is exposed, weighed, and found wanting. His posture of self-importance collapses into the dust from which he was made.
Then comes the hammer blow, the verse our sentimental age cannot stomach: "You hate all workers of iniquity." Let us be very clear. The text does not say that God hates the sin but loves the sinner. That phrase, so popular in our pulpits, is not found in the Bible. Here, the object of God's hatred is not an abstract principle called "iniquity." The object of His hatred is the "workers of iniquity." God hates the man who does the evil thing. We must not blunt the force of this. This is not a fit of divine pique. It is the settled, judicial, holy revulsion of a righteous God against those who have set themselves in defiant rebellion against Him. His hatred is as pure as His love. To say that God does not hate workers of iniquity is to say that He is not perfectly holy.
Now, does this contradict the passages that speak of God's love for the world, like John 3:16? Not at all. We must hold these truths in tension. God's love for the world is a general, benevolent love that moved Him to provide a way of salvation for sinners. But for those who reject that provision, who persist in their rebellion, who identify themselves fully with their iniquity, what remains is the holy hatred of God. The only place where a sinner can be loved by God is in Christ. Outside of Christ, a sinner stands naked before the holy gaze of God, and what God sees, He hates.
The Divine Judgment (v. 6)
The psalm concludes this section by describing the ultimate end of the wicked. God's hatred is not a passive disposition; it is an active judgment.
"You destroy those who speak falsehood; Yahweh abhors the man of bloodshed and deceit." (Psalm 5:6)
Notice the specific sins highlighted: falsehood, bloodshed, and deceit. These are sins that tear at the fabric of a covenant community. Falsehood and deceit poison the well of truth, making trust and fellowship impossible. They are the native language of the devil, who is a liar and the father of lies (John 8:44). Bloodshed is the ultimate violation of the image of God in man. The man who practices these things is not just making a series of poor choices. He is a certain kind of man, "the man of bloodshed and deceit."
And God's response is twofold. First, He will "destroy" them. This is not reformation; it is ruin. The path of the liar leads to perdition. God's justice requires that what is fundamentally opposed to His reality be ultimately unmade. Second, Yahweh "abhors" them. This word is even stronger than hate. It carries the idea of loathing, of finding something utterly detestable and nauseating. This is how the holy God views the man whose life is built on lies and violence. He is an abomination.
The Cross as the Only Refuge
After reading a passage like this, our natural response should be, "Who then can be saved?" If God is this holy, if His hatred for workers of iniquity is this pure, what hope is there for any of us? For we are all, by nature, workers of iniquity. We are all boastful. We have all spoken falsehood. We are all shot through with deceit. We are the people described in this psalm.
The answer is that there is no hope in ourselves. If we stand before God on our own merits, we will not stand at all. We will be destroyed. We will be abhorred. The only hope is to find a place where the beautiful severity of God has been fully satisfied. And that place is the cross of Jesus Christ.
At the cross, we see the most profound expression of God's hatred for sin the world has ever known. All the hatred, all the abhorrence, all the destructive power of God's wrath that was due to us, to the workers of iniquity, was poured out upon His own Son. God did not wave a magic wand and ignore our sin. He did not compromise His holiness. He hated our sin so much that He crushed His Son in our place.
And in the very same act, we see the most profound expression of God's love. "God demonstrates His own love toward us, in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us" (Romans 5:8). He loves sinners enough to provide a substitute. He hates sin enough to require a sacrifice.
Therefore, we cannot take refuge in the flimsy notion that God just "loves everybody" unconditionally. He does not. He is a holy God who hates workers of iniquity. Our only refuge is to flee from our iniquity and run to the cross. We must be found "in Christ," clothed in His righteousness, washed in His blood. It is only there that God's hatred is turned away. It is only there that we, former workers of iniquity, can be called beloved children. It is only there that we can stand before His eyes, not in terror, but in the confidence of sons, and pray as David does in the very next verse, "But as for me, by Your great lovingkindness, I will enter Your house."
This is the gospel. It is not sentimental mush. It is terrifyingly holy, and gloriously good news.