Does God love everyone?

What follows is one scholar’s way of reading this disagreement — a critical-historical view that often concludes the texts genuinely disagree. It draws on the peer-reviewed sources listed below and stands as one position among the answers above, presented for transparency, not as GEBible’s position.

How critical scholarship weighs this: Genuinely disputed among scholars

This summarizes where critical scholarship tends to land on this tension — a report on the field’s center of gravity, not GEBible’s own ruling.

The entry sets the New Testament's most absolute statements of divine love — John 3:16 ("God so loved the world"), 1 John 4:8 and 4:16 ("God is love") — against a substantial Hebrew Bible stream in which YHWH hates: nations (Leviticus 20:23, "I abhorred them"), workers of iniquity (Psalm 5:5), the wicked and the lover of violence (Psalm 11:5), Israel itself (Hosea 9:15, "I hated them"), the disobedient (Leviticus 26:14-30, "my soul shall abhor you"), and Esau by name (Malachi 1:3), with Romans 9:13 importing that last one into NT theology ("Jacob have I loved, but Esau have I hated").

Two harmonizations dominate. The Reformed version, developed at length in D. A. Carson's *The Difficult Doctrine of the Love of God*, distinguishes multiple senses of divine love and argues that God can hold a general, providential benevolence toward all creation (John 3:16) while reserving a special elective love for the elect; "hating" Esau then means preterition — passing him over for covenant love — not emotional malice. The second, the Semitic-comparative reading favored by Walter Kaiser and others, treats "hate" (Hebrew sanēʾ, Greek miseō) in Malachi 1:3 and Romans 9:13 as "love less" or "reject as covenant heir," the same idiom seen in Genesis 29:30-31 (Leah "hated" = less-loved) and Deuteronomy 21:15-17 (the law of the "hated" wife's firstborn). Both moves have real warrant for the texts they fit. The comparative use of sanēʾ is well documented, and James Dunn's WBC *Romans 9-16* together with Douglas Moo's NICNT *Romans* both read Romans 9:13 as a statement about the election of Jacob/Israel over Esau/Edom as peoples — note Malachi addresses Edom as a nation, not Esau the individual — not about God's emotional disposition toward a man.

The difficulty is that these mechanisms do not cover the full evidentiary base. The categorical Psalms are not elective contrasts: Psalm 5:5 says God hates "all workers of iniquity," Psalm 11:5 that his soul hates "the wicked" and "him that loveth violence," Hosea 9:15 that YHWH came to hate Israel "for the wickedness of their doings." These are straightforward declarations of divine antipathy toward classes of people, with no Jacob-over-Esau comparative structure to relativize them. Patrick Miller's *Interpreting the Psalms* treats this divine-hatred language as morally charged judgment, not relational shorthand. The comparative reading simply does not reach them.

Not all of the cited proof-texts are equally strong, and intellectual honesty requires saying so. Job 16:9 ("He teareth me in his wrath, who hateth me") is the weakest of the lot: it is not a divine self-declaration nor a narrator's assertion but a line of Job's own complaint within the poetic dialogue, a sufferer's accusatory description of how God seems to be treating him. The book's own framing (Job 1:1, 8; 42:7) explicitly denies that God hates Job; the prologue presents him as blameless and the epilogue vindicates him against the friends. So Job 16:9 reports a character's anguished perception, not the text's theological claim, and a critic should not lean on it. The core of the tension does not need it.

Meanwhile 1 John 4:8 is not one mode of love among several but an ontological predication — "God is love" (ho theos agapē estin) — which Raymond Brown's Anchor Bible *Epistles of John* reads as identifying love with the divine nature itself, not merely describing one of God's activities. The Reformed harmonization preserves both poles, but at the cost of asserting that God simultaneously loves and hates the same persons in different senses, which is coherent only inside the prior dogmatic framework and is not self-evident from the texts. Jon Levenson's *The Death and Resurrection of the Beloved Son* situates the Jacob-over-Esau motif within the wider biblical pattern of the chosen and rejected son, which lends weight to the elective reading of Malachi/Romans precisely by showing it is about lineage and inheritance rather than affect.

One of the entry's proof-texts lies outside the Protestant canon: "Wisdom 14:9" is from the Wisdom of Solomon, a deuterocanonical book, so a Protestant reader may set it aside without touching the argument. The core tension rests entirely on protocanonical material — Psalm 5:5, Psalm 11:5, Hosea 9:15, Malachi 1:3, Romans 9:13 — and survives that subtraction intact.

Where the critical reading lands: disputed, leaning genuine at the level of biblical-theological coherence. The texts reflect distinct theological streams — a Deuteronomic-Wisdom tradition of divine hatred toward the wicked and a Johannine identification of God with love — that must be harmonized by an external dogmatic scheme rather than read together as a single, natural voice. The comparative reading resolves Romans 9:13 but not the categorical Psalms; the elective-love reading resolves the whole only for those who already grant its framework.