Proverbs 8:13

To fear the LORD is to hate evil; I hate pride and arrogance, evil behavior and perverse speech.

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🎧 Hip-Hop History Break:

The day was September 8, 2012, during the Summer Madness 2 event organized by the Ultimate Rap League. In one of the most iconic rap battles in history, Loaded Lux vs. Calicoe and Lux dropped the now-legendary line:

"...you can read, everything in my bio has it

How did y’all disrespect God?

Ain’t it evil to live backwards?

Let me bring that back ‘cause I need y’all to grasp it

Ain’t it evil to live backwards?"

And just like that the crowd erupted Ahhhh!!!  Cause first of all, these were already lyric junkies anyway…And you could just see how the word picture formed and exploded in everyone’s mind at the same time. With his depth word-play Lux put out the word evil and we all in real-time realized that the word evil is actually the word ‘live’ (E-V-I-L…L-I-V-E) spelled BACKWARDS!!! AHHHH!!!!

This moment in Hip Hop History was brought to you by…Quicker Malt Liquor (just kidding) but that line hit true in more ways than one. Evil isn’t just darkness—it’s the capacity to live: twisted about, reversed, hijacked. It’s potential perverted.

When you grasp that, you gain a whole new way of looking at that which is evil. You start seeing evil as the product of broken love, misguided expectations and abandoned virtue—and you respond to those shipwrecked by evil with a higher love. Cause you're like, "But by the Grace of God...that could be me."

Now I’m about to get nerdy with this, but just stick with me for a bit. The verse said, “To fear the Lord is to hate evil…” and another Proverb teaches us that The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom (Proverbs 9:10).  Now, if fear is the very beginning of wisdom, here's the question, what's the end or the fulfillment of wisdom? I believe is love.

See I know for me, I got saved cause I ‘feared hell’ straight up. But that type of fear didn’t keep me…No, I stayed saved cause I fell in love with Jesus.

So FEAR starts the journey. But LOVE perfects or 'fulfills it'.

Fear, as I interpret it here, isn’t about terror or punishment—it’s about recognition. The recognition of God. That awe that commands awareness: that’s the beginning of wisdom, but to stay in fear is to stay in first grade. You may begin in reverence and trembling, but you graduate into resonance and love.

So when Proverbs 8:13 says, “To fear the Lord is to hate evil,” to me it’s describing that beginner’s posture: a visceral recoil, a gut-level rejection of what is distorted. But we can’t stop there. Hating evil without understanding it makes us mistake enemies for patients. It leaves us swinging swords where we should be mending wounds.

But:❤️ Love Doesn’t Hate Like You Think:

You may have to chew on this one: I don’t believe God hates the way we think about hate.

Why? Because:

“God is love, and God is light and in Him is no darkness at all.” – 1 John 4:8

If there’s no darkness in Him, there’s no hate-as-separation. Hate, in its raw human form, is the commitment to divide, to exclude, to destroy. But love? Love absorbs. Love unites. Love redeems.

Even Satan—yes, the personification of evil—was once an angel. A being created by God. Do I believe God hates Satan? I can't. Because to hate, in the divine sense, would be to deny God's own creative DNA. God may oppose evil. He may reject its ways. But He does not abandon what He’s made.

To truly fear God is to begin hating evil. To truly love God is to want to see evil set rightwards.

It’s a reversal of the reversal. If EVIL is LIVE spelled backwards—then love…reconciliation…renewal is what flips it forward.

You don’t beat darkness by cursing it. You transcend it by shining. That’s love’s role: To bring what's backward back into alignment.

This is why the greatest chapter on love ends with this:

"Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. Love never fails." – 1 Corinthians 13:7–8

So what does love do with evil? It confronts it with compassion, transforms it with truth, and rewrites the story.

🙏🏽 Prayer

Turn my fear into love–the kind that reverses curses.

💡 Today’s Challenge:

Think of something in your past or present you’ve labeled as evil or too far gone. Instead of just rejecting it, sit with it. Ask: What’s the reversed potential in this? What would it look like for God’s love to live in it again?

Imagine love reversing it into something beautiful.

About the Author

Fred Lynch is a creative communicator, author, and Christian Hip Hop pioneer. To learn more about Fred and what he’s up to now…click here or you can find him in all the socials by searching the handle: heyfredlynch

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Be Wise and Be Well...peace.

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