Ensign: “I Don't Hate You 'Cause I'm Crazy ...

All ye inhabitants of the world, and dwellers on the earth, see ye, when he lifteth up an ensign on the mountains; and when he bloweth a trumpet, hear ye. Isaiah 18:3

AN ENSIGN ON THE MOUNTAINS 8 February 2013

… I'm crazy 'cause I hate you!” A recent Batman storyline had the Caped Crusader saving his archenemy the Joker – you know, the lunatic and mass murderer who dresses as a clown and is probably responsible for so many of us when younger and some older being petrified of clowns (and the ten-dollar word for that fear is coulrophobia) – from death at the hands of another villain. But the Joker, and about ninety-five percent of Batman's villains don't go to jail they go to an asylum 'cause either they're really good actors or they really are insane.

So Batman comes to face down the Joker in confinement and the “Clown Prince of Crime” is on enough antidepressants, tranquilizers, etc. for Batman who IS sane to have a … normal conversation with him. When the Joker wonders aloud why Batman didn't just let him die, Batman infers that because someone close to him died (his parents when he was a kid, inspiring him to become Batman) he vowed that no one else would die again if he could help it. And the Joker is actually saddened to hear this. But then he says as simply as he can why he and Batman – to him or at least the writer for this story – have been at odds with each other for three quarters of a century, our time.

(Comic books operate on a sliding timescale so despite you and I the readers aging our favorite characters don't as much.) Hence our title today. But it makes me wonder, when we hate ANYBODY, are we crazy? For let's be honest with ourselves, we do and have hated someone so much at some point in our lives that we don't see anything except for what this other person has done to us color our reactions to them and too others. In the last couple of years, even I have to admit to dark moods in which I've thought to myself how to kill someone and make it look like an accident ... because I hated them.

If I hate somebody, even if I hate what they do or have done, am I crazy for doing that?

Some derivative of hate (including hate, hatred, hater, etc.) appears two hundred eleven times in the Bible; you can go through the listing yourself with a fine-toothed comb (I used a King James Version concordance) but even when Scripture refers to God hating or Jesus hating it doesn't refer to a specific person – yes, there's Malachi 1:3's “I hate Esau” and Romans 9:13's “Esau have I hated” but those refer to the nation with him as their ancestor, and even then it's hatred of what they have done, not of who they are.

And wait a sec … from what I'm reading, Jesus never calls for His disciples or anybody to hate others. So my “big” question is, are we supposed to hate Satan, the Devil, the Adversary? I believe – and I know I'll get disagreed with on this – that nothing in God's Word supports that. Like all of us, Satan is a created being; we can (and should) hate what he does, yes, coming to steal, kill, and destroy (as Jesus characterizes the thief, Satan, in John 10:10), we can and are supposed to hate sin (and mean it) but to hate an individual … as I type this at one twelve pm central standard time on the seventh of February in the year of our Lord two thousand thirteen, I'm seeing this as setting them outside of us all but guarantees they'll never want to come back. Even though he won't; I have read the back of the book, and he doesn't.

Remember the second half of John 10:10? “I am come that they might have life, and have it more abundantly.” Jesus is speaking there, and I imagine even to His audience there were and still are people who thought (think) He was (is) crazy, this man who made crippled people walk and blind people see and talked about God as though He was their Father – that word in the New Testament more closely translates “Daddy” – and you didn't need a high priest to clear your sacrifice before you could talk to Him, you can just do it yourself! What's that steakhouse that used to have a slogan on its commercials, “No rules, just right”? Well, that's not QUITE accurate, but let's figure out how to rule ourselves first, And not be so crazy.

That's where God comes in,

David

P.S. I write this weekly devotional to keep in touch with all of you in my address book, and I hope to be an encourager to action too! If you find that I’m not or you want me to get lost, just let me know – thank you!

Thank You, Lord, that we can come to you in prayer and that You provide for all our needs, even when we don’t know what they are. We pray for the peace of Jerusalem on both sides of the fence there and around the world.

Thank You, Lord, for everyone in leadership and service, both here and abroad. Thank You for the opportunities we have and the promise of new life through You. I pray that we all seek and have a blessed week! Amen.