Inclined By Nature to Hate...My Neighbor

I am inclined by nature to hate God and my neighbor.

In that light we must now also consider the love for our neighbor.

Is there love for the neighbor outside of faith in Christ?
It is undeniable that such love shows in various ways that people without true faith are able to love one another dearly.
Moreover, it would certainly be unjust if we qualified such love as pure egoism, for a kind of altruism – a loving of the neighbor for his own sake – is possible.
That means however a love for that neighbor as one sees him and as he himself imagines the person to be.

Yet, without faith we always see our neighbor improperly,

for we do not see him as from God and for God.
We consistently need to maintain therefore that in such a case a person never really knows his neighbor
but has an erroneous and flawed picture of him.

Our neighbor truly becomes known to us only through faith in Christ.

From the enmity against God, hate for the neighbor begins immediately when the neighbor is viewed this way.

Therefore, in the most intense neighbor love there is a very strong enmity against God.
People tend to be strengthened together in their love for one another and against God.

If love for one another does not proceed from faith in Christ,

men not only have an incorrect understanding of each other,
but they make sort of an idol of each other,
and that mutual admiration pushes aside the worship of God.
They really have not truly discovered each other,
and thus they have not been delivered from their loneliness in the deepest sense.

The truth is that they have not discovered eternal fellowship,

for only in finding such communion in Christ men are set free from their lonely isolation.
The measure of their solitude will become evident in a terrifying manner when they appear in the judgment,
and letting go of each other, fall back exclusively on themselves.

In their hearts hate is found against their neighbor as he is from God and for God,

even if they suppress that hatred by the relationship to the neighbor as they suppose him to be –
a relationship that in fallen humanity is the result of the preserving work of the Spirit.

We must not forget that we confess this with respect to ourselves, namely that we are inclined by nature to hate God and our [my] neighbor.

That inclination, that ability to hate, which remains with us and is suppressed within us by a love for God and a love for our neighbor that is not genuine.
Frequently that love for God and the love for our neighbor as we have this from ourselves appear to be only weak means to suppress the hatred.

Not only in the unbelieving world but also in the believer enmity against God and hatred against the neighbor sometimes breaks out.

Everyone who knows himself well is not overly amazed at the hatred in the world.
The tendency toward hatred within us, however, is not overcome by that love from ourselves in the sense that it is rooted out.

That kind of victory is exclusively the result of love through faith.

When the Spirit of God creates love within us through faith, it is not a reason for us to boast.
In fact, the Spirit in producing that love could not make use of and connect to the love that we seemed to have from within ourselves.
On the contrary, the love through the Spirit condemns as sinful the love we produced by ourselves, and conquers it.

Under the law of the covenant there is just one judgment over ourselves possible,

namely that we have nothing with which we could stand before God.
This knowledge of our misery is therefore, as we noted at the beginning, faith knowledge.

Adapted Excerpt from The True Faith by Simon Gerrit De Graaf (1889-1955)

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