Friday, August 29, 2025

The God Who Mocks

Love and hatred are not necessarily exclusive, not in the sense that it is impossible to experience both at once towards the same person or situation, and not in the sense that if one is morally obligatory, the other is immoral.  The Biblical God loves people (Deuteronomy 10:19, Psalm 103:11-12, John 3:16) enough to not want any of the wicked to perish and to offer mercy to all of them (1 Timothy 2:3-6, 2 Peter 3:8-9).  He also hates plenty of them, a doctrine neglected or denied entirely by many so-called Christians because it makes them subjectively uncomfortable (Leviticus 20:23, Deuteronomy 25:16, Psalm 5:5-6, and so on).  More than this, God is described as actively mocking certain people in Psalm 2:4.

The first verses of this chapter speak of human leaders raging and rallying together as if they can overpower God, though the text also mentions an unspecified "anointed" figure aligned with God.  Acts 4:23-27 teaches that at least in part, the passage of Psalm 2 pertains to the collusion of Roman powers against Christ.  Unlike some New Testament descriptions of Messianic prophecies, this one is relatively more overt in the Old Testament, for it mentions words like "son" in reference to a figure connected with Yahweh.  However, there is more here than just Messianic language and a declaration of God's superiority to seething, arrogant, irrational human rulers who think they could overcome the uncaused cause.

Just as Psalms affirms more than once that God hates certain people (Psalm 5:5-6, 11:5) and sees David celebrate his own hatred of the wicked (Psalm 139:19-24), something that cannot itself be inherently evil if God himself hates them, verse 4 of its second chapter says that God scoffs at the aforementioned rebels against him, laughing at them.  The Biblical deity is not a being that harbors only unconditional affection for his enemies, but one that is also full of fury, loathing, and mockery.  Righteous people, once they are the only humans still in existence (Matthew 10:28, 2 Peter 2:6), are going to share in this rightful contempt towards the dead bodies (they are not animated by souls that suffer forever!) of Yahweh's enemies in the eschatological future (Isaiah 66:22-24).

It is only someone who disregards or mocks reason, truth, justice, or those aligned with them that could deserve condemnation or scorn for their mockery.  These are the kinds of people that Yahweh is said to despise.  According to Psalm 2:4, he scoffs at the immoral, or at a minimum the particular set of immoral people mentioned in the chapter.  Psalm 37:13 adds that he laughs at the wicked because of their future destiny, which many verses, including the one referenced at the start of the sentence, plainly say is one of cessation of life on a permanent, phenomenological level.

To mock such people makes one like God no less than loving them and showing persistent, deep mercy to them makes one like God.  The Bible teaches that God does all of these things.  Of course, there is nothing logically incompatible about these qualities independent of Biblical doctrine or whether the Bible is true in the first place.  There is nuance here in its philosophical positions, but it neither embraces contradictory ideas nor puts forward something too challenging to grasp for anyone who actually tries without making assumptions.  Yahweh loves, Yahweh hates, and Yahweh mocks, the latter two dispositions only being held towards the unrepentant wicked.  

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