Let’s do an exercise together. Try typing the word “hell” into your iPhone or perhaps the sentence “I’m dealing with my sin.” I’ve found that most times, your autocorrect will change the word “hell” to “he’ll” and “sin” to “son.”

Now, I can’t say for sure that Apple wants to eliminate those words from your vocabulary, but I would say more certainly that our culture does.

The question often goes, “How could a loving God hate?” Or, “How could a loving God send people to an eternal place of fire called hell? Doesn’t that make God hateful?”

However, this question not only presumes that we hold a better definition of love than an omniscient Creator, it also presumes that love eradicates hate. The idea is that love and hate are in diametric opposition to one another and cannot co-exist.

In Stevie Wonder’s song, “As,” he sings this beautiful display of words:

As around the sun the earth knows she's revolving

And the rosebuds know to bloom in early May

Just as hate knows love's the cure

You can rest your mind assure

That I'll be loving you always

In other words, Stevie says the cure to hate is love. It’s as if to say that in order to do away with hate you force it out with love, but God, in His perfect love, demonstrates that hate is absolutely necessary to truly love.

Linking Love and Hate

The late author and pastor Timothy Keller illustrates how love and hate must coexist by saying, “If you love your brother who’s an addict, you’ll have to hate the substance that’s destroying his life. If you love children you’ll have to hate child trafficking.” Keller’s examples can go on–and so could our own.

Now, one might make the valid argument that the hate used in Keller’s examples are attributed to objects rather than humans and that would be correct. We tend to believe that God could only hate the wrongdoing and not the doer of wrong. As it is often said in Christian circles, “God hates the sin and not the sinner.” But, what do we do with Psalm 5:5 which says, “you hate all evildoers” when referring to God’s hate for the actual doer?

The answer lies in understanding that Psalm 5:5 refers to the resolved evildoer who only God knows has resolved to continue in His ways for eternity. To see it any other way is to, again, find ourselves presuming upon the omniscience of God.

So, What Is the Opposite of Love?

All of this still leaves us with the standing question: “What does love really cast out?” Or, in Stevie’s terms, “What does love cure?”

The answer is that fear and shame recognize love as their cure.

Fear and Shame

Love casts out fear and shame. It is the cure–but only a supernatural, divine love can accomplish such a work.

On the Cross, what Jesus came to do is put away our shame and fear. Every human heart, at some point, experiences both.

In the first garden, mankind’s first response to rebellion (ultimately sin and evil) was shame. We covered it. The second response was fear. We hid from God.

And what was God’s response? He didn’t destroy us as we feared He would, but instead, He covered our shame—with flesh, no less.

Romans 2:4 reminds us, “…do you presume on the riches of his kindness and forbearance and patience, not knowing that God’s kindness is meant to lead you to repentance?”

In the same song from earlier, Stevie Wonder goes on to sing:

Just as kindness knows no shame

Know through all your joy and pain

That I'll be loving you always

Stevie may have misunderstood love as being something that drives out hate, inferring the two could never coexist. Yet, he certainly understood that loving-kindness shows no shame.

God’s love and kindness came to cover our shame and cast out fear. Although we faced shame and fear in the first garden, Jesus faced that fear for us in the second one. It was His hatred for what destroys our lives and His love for us that drove him to the Cross. He faced shame on the Cross, yet it was His own flesh that covered ours.

Ultimately, Jesus entered into the depths of hell so we wouldn’t have to. And while only His hate of evil can rest on the resolved evildoer forever–because of what Jesus did on that faithful Friday–He’s also the only One who can truly sing “I’ll be loving you always.”

This is the good news of Good Friday.