Abhor What Is Evil: Romans 12:9 on Loving Good
Short answer: To abhor what is evil is to reject it with settled loathing, not merely to avoid it politely. Romans 12:9 says, "Let love be without hypocrisy. Abhor that which is evil. Cling to that which is good." The command sits between sincere love and wholehearted loyalty to good because the two cannot be separated. Abhorrence here is not angry venting at people; it is a moral recoil from sin itself, joined to a deliberate embrace of what God calls good. Paul writes it as the hinge of a chapter about renewed minds and ordinary obedience, so it belongs to daily life: what we watch, excuse, tolerate in ourselves, and praise in others. Hating evil and loving good are one movement of a heart that God has reshaped.
What abhor means in Romans 12:9
The word Paul uses carries the sense of shrinking back from something with horror. It is not mild disapproval or a shrug at wrongdoing; it is the reaction a person has toward something repulsive. Yet the command is not aimed at people. It is aimed at evil itself. Paul does not say to abhor the person who sins. He says to abhor that which is evil, meaning the thing itself, the action, the pattern, the principle. This distinction matters enormously in practice, because many believers either excuse sin to avoid seeming harsh or turn their hatred of sin onto sinners and call it zeal. Romans 12:9 keeps the target on the evil, not the neighbour.
Notice also that the command is positive as well as negative. Paul joins abhorrence of evil to clinging to good in the same breath. A person cannot simply empty their life of what is wrong and leave it vacant. The Christian response to evil is not withdrawal into a blank neutrality. It is replacement. Where the old pattern is torn out, a good pattern must be planted. This is why the verse makes a poor slogan for mere outrage. It calls for a whole posture of the heart, turned away from one thing and fastened to another. Abhorrence without attachment to good becomes grimness; attachment to good without abhorrence becomes compromise.
The context of Romans 12 makes the command even more concrete. The chapter opens with a plea for bodies offered as a living sacrifice and minds renewed so that believers may prove what the will of God is. Then Paul lists ordinary duties: genuine love, brotherly affection, diligence, prayer, hospitality, blessing persecutors, rejoicing with those who rejoice. Holiness here is not a mystical state but a way of treating people. Abhorring evil is what makes that love honest. If love tolerates what destroys people, it is not love. If love hates the destroyer more than the people being destroyed, it is not love either. Verse 9 names the balance.
Some translations render the phrase as hating what is evil. The supplied World English Bible uses abhor, which captures the emotional force well. This is not a cool assessment that evil is technically suboptimal. It is a visceral rejection, the kind a person feels toward spoiled food or a spreading fire. That said, the feeling is not the point by itself. The command is an imperative, something to be done. Feelings follow obedience over time. A believer who begins by refusing to entertain evil, refusing to laugh at it, refusing to defend it, often finds that the settled hatred grows. The verse tells us to act in line with God's own hatred of evil, and the affections are gradually conformed.
Love without hypocrisy sets the tone
The command to abhor evil does not stand alone; it follows immediately after a call for love without hypocrisy. That order is deliberate. Paul is not adding a harsh clause to soften love or a loving clause to soften harshness. He is describing one integrated life. Hypocritical love says the right things while winking at what harms the beloved. Genuine love refuses to do that. When a parent truly loves a child, the parent does not celebrate the child's self-destruction as authenticity. Love and abhorrence of evil are allies, not rivals. The person who claims to love people while never opposing what ruins them has not yet understood what love is in Scripture.
Yet the opposite error is just as common. Some believers treat a sharp eye for evil as proof of spiritual maturity, and their love grows cold. They become known for what they are against, and the people around them feel only the edge. Paul's word order guards against that too. Genuine love comes first, and it stays. The abhorrence is part of love, not a replacement for it. A church can be doctrinally precise about sin and still fail this verse if the precision is not carried by sincere affection for the people in front of them. Romans 12 later commands blessing those who persecute and refusing to repay evil for evil, which proves the point.
This means the Christian life involves honest self-examination about motive. Why do I recoil from this particular sin? Is it because it dishonours God, or because it embarrasses me, threatens my reputation, or belongs to a group I dislike? Genuine abhorrence of evil is not tribal. It grieves over the sins of one's own circle as much as the sins of outsiders. It is quicker to repent than to accuse. When Paul writes in the same chapter about not thinking more highly of oneself than one ought, he is addressing the very pride that can masquerade as zeal for holiness. The heart that hates evil truly will hate its own evil first.
Practically, love without hypocrisy means that our opposition to sin takes a cruciform shape. We speak truth, but we speak it in a way that aims at restoration rather than humiliation. We refuse to participate in evil, but we do not refuse to sit with the person caught in it. We are willing to be wronged rather than to win an argument. This is not weakness. It is the strength that Paul describes when he says, later in the passage, to overcome evil with good. Abhorrence and kindness are not contradictory when both flow from a heart that has been remade by the gospel. The cross is the place where God's hatred of sin and His love for sinners meet, and we are being conformed to that pattern.
Hating evil is a mark of fearing God
Proverbs 8:13 says, "The fear of Yahweh is to hate evil. I hate pride, arrogance, the evil way, and the perverse mouth." This is striking because it defines the fear of the Lord not primarily as dread or nervousness but as moral alignment with God's own hatreds. To fear God is to take His side against what He opposes. The verse then lists specific things: pride, arrogance, the evil way, the perverse mouth. These are not abstract categories. They are the sins that live in religious communities, the sins of the respectable. Hating evil begins with hating the evil that is closest to home, including the self-important tongue and the crooked path we justify to ourselves.
Psalm 97:10 picks up the same theme with a promise attached: "You who love Yahweh, hate evil! He preserves the souls of his saints. He delivers them out of the hand of the wicked." Here hating evil is the natural posture of those who love God, and God responds by preserving His people. The psalm does not promise that the righteous will never face opposition; it promises deliverance out of the hand of the wicked. So abhorrence of evil is not a strategy for avoiding trouble but a way of belonging to God in the middle of it. The believer who refuses to bend toward evil can trust that God watches over the soul, even when the pressure is real.
Amos 5:14-15 adds a corporate dimension. The prophet cries, "Seek good, and not evil, that you may live; and so Yahweh, the God of Armies, will be with you, as you say." Israel was confident of God's presence while tolerating injustice. Amos tells them that the presence they claimed depended on the direction they pursued. Hating evil is not merely private piety; it is a public choosing of good in how a community treats the vulnerable. The verse ends by calling for hatred of evil and love of good, and for justice to be established. A church that sings about God's presence while ignoring the evil practices around and within it is exactly what Amos was confronting.
Hebrews 1:9 applies this language to the Son: "You have loved righteousness and hated iniquity; therefore God, your God, has anointed you with the oil of gladness above your fellows." The Messiah Himself is characterised by this twin devotion, and His gladness is tied to it. That should stop us from imagining that hating evil produces gloom. In Christ, the hatred of iniquity and the love of righteousness are the soil of joy, not its enemy. The person who has stopped making peace with what God opposes is free to be genuinely glad, because they are no longer divided. The anointing with the oil of gladness belongs to the one whose heart is undivided, and His Spirit is at work to shape the same heart in us.
Clinging to good is the other half of the command
Paul does not leave us with a negative only. He says, "Cling to that which is good." The word suggests being glued to something, holding on and not letting go. This is active, sustained attachment. It is not enough to admire good from a distance or to approve of it in theory. We are to fasten ourselves to it. This means putting ourselves in the path of good things: faithful teaching, honest work, prayer, fellowship, acts of mercy, and the ordinary obedience that shapes character. Abhorrence of evil clears the ground; clinging to good fills it. A life that only knows what to avoid will be hollow, and hollow lives drift back toward what they once left.
First Thessalonians 5:21-22 says, as 1 Thessalonians 5:21-22 says, "Test all things, and hold firmly that which is good." Again the pattern is discernment followed by attachment. Believers are not told to swallow everything uncritically or to reject everything suspiciously. They are told to test, and then to hold firmly to what passes the test. This is a helpful correction to both naivety and cynicism. Some people accept whatever is presented with a warm feeling attached; others treat every unfamiliar thing as a threat. Paul calls for testing, which requires a standard, and the standard is God's revealed will. Then, once good is identified, it is to be grasped firmly, not sampled and released.
Testing all things also implies that evil is not always obvious. Scripture often describes sin as deceptive, and Paul warns elsewhere about the appearance of evil. Some things are clearly wrong and need only to be refused. Others are mixed, and require wisdom, counsel, and prayer to sort out. This is where a mature community helps. Christians who read Scripture together, who know each other's lives, and who are willing to ask hard questions are better equipped to test what they encounter. Clinging to good, in practice, is often a corporate activity. We help one another hold on when our grip weakens and when the cost of standing firm begins to feel heavy.
There is also a warning here about the direction of our attachments. What we cling to shapes us. If we cling to comfort, approval, or a particular political identity more tightly than we cling to good, then our abhorrence of evil will be selective and our love will be hypocritical. The verse calls for a single-minded grip on what is genuinely good, defined by God rather than by our preferences. This is why Romans 12 begins with the renewed mind. Only a mind transformed by God's mercy can see good and evil as He sees them and hold on accordingly. The command is simple; the formation it requires is a lifetime.
Abhorring evil in a culture of outrage
Many people today are fluent in the language of outrage. Social media rewards fury, and it is easy to feel that we are doing something righteous when we are merely expressing disgust. Romans 12:9 is easily recruited into that culture if we read only half the verse. But Paul does not command outrage at enemies; he commands abhorrence of evil and allegiance to good, and then in the same chapter he commands blessing for persecutors and refusing to repay evil for evil. The person who abhors evil biblically will not be known mainly for their anger. They will be known for their refusal to participate in evil and their steady pursuit of what is good, even toward those who oppose them.
This also means that abhorrence of evil cannot be outsourced to a crowd. It is not enough to denounce a sin that happens to be unpopular in our circle while tolerating the fashionable sins of our own group. Scripture is full of warnings about partial obedience. Amos condemned injustice while Israel felt secure in its religious observances. Proverbs names pride and arrogance alongside the evil way. If we hate only the sins that our community already dislikes, we have not yet begun to hate evil as God does. The test is whether we are willing to name and forsake the sin that is respectable in our own setting, the one that costs us something to abandon.
At the same time, believers should be careful not to confuse cultural preferences with moral commands. Not everything that irritates us is evil, and not everything unfamiliar is wrong. Wisdom distinguishes between what God has clearly forbidden, what is a matter of Christian freedom, and what is merely a difference of taste or tradition. When we treat preferences as if they were commandments, we damage our credibility and burden consciences. The verse calls us to abhor what is genuinely evil, not to multiply rules. A community that majors on disputable matters while ignoring real sin is not more holy; it is merely more scrupulous about the wrong things.
The constructive alternative is to become people who are known for what they love and hold fast. A believer who abhors evil will avoid the entertainment, speech, and habits that dishonour God, but they will also be visibly devoted to prayer, hospitality, honesty, generosity, and mercy. That combination is attractive in a way that outrage never is. When Paul goes on in Romans 12 to describe rejoicing with those who rejoice and weeping with those who weep, he is showing us what clinging to good looks like in a community. It looks like people whose firmness against evil is matched by tenderness toward one another and toward the world.
How this shapes daily repentance and hope
Abhorring evil begins with repentance. It is impossible to hold a settled loathing for sin in general while nursing a favourite sin in particular. The command therefore presses every believer to ask where they have made peace with something God calls evil. It may be a habit of speech, a dishonest practice at work, a relationship that is not honouring to God, or a private indulgence that no one else sees. Repentance is not merely feeling bad; it is turning from the evil and turning to the good. The promise of Scripture is that God is faithful to forgive and to cleanse, so the command comes with hope rather than condemnation for those who are in Christ.
Recognising that forgiveness is real is essential, because the person who is learning to hate evil can become discouraged by their own failures. Paul is not writing to people who have already arrived. He writes to a church in the middle of ordinary life. The same chapter that commands abhorrence of evil commands humility, hospitality, and perseverance. It assumes that believers will sometimes get it wrong and need to begin again. The call is not to a flawless record but to a settled direction. Over time, the heart that keeps turning from evil and clinging to good grows more like Christ, and the hatred of sin becomes less of a struggle and more of a natural reflex.
There is also a forward-looking element. Christians hate evil because they await a world where it is gone. The promise of Scripture is that God will one day make all things new, and that the deliverance He gives now is a foretaste of the deliverance to come. Psalm 97:10 speaks of God preserving the souls of His saints and delivering them out of the hand of the wicked, and that hope anchors the present struggle. We do not abhor evil merely to survive it; we do so because we know how the story ends. The one who loved righteousness and hated iniquity has been exalted, and those who belong to Him will share in His gladness.
So the practical shape of Romans 12:9 is both simple and demanding. Refuse evil, and do not pretend to be neutral about it. Hold fast to good, and do not treat your attachment to it as optional. Let your love be sincere enough to take sin seriously and humble enough to start with your own. Let your hatred of evil be governed by Scripture rather than by fashion or fury. And let your hope rest not in your own consistency but in the God who preserves His people. This is not a life of grim vigilance; it is the life of people who have been shown mercy and who are learning to love what God loves and reject what He rejects.
Biblical fidelity check
These passages establish that God's people are to hold evil in abhorrence and to hold fast to what is good, and they present this as an expression of love and of the fear of the Lord. They do not establish that believers should hate people who sin, nor that they should treat every cultural difference as evil, nor that strong feelings are themselves proof of righteousness. Romans 12:9 commands love without hypocrisy in the same sentence, and the surrounding verses command blessing persecutors and overcoming evil with good. Whatever abhorrence of evil means, it must be consistent with those commands, or it has been misread.
A common misreading is to turn the verse into a licence for contempt. Someone reads abhor what is evil, decides that a particular person or group embodies evil, and concludes that hostility toward them is obedience. That is precisely backwards. Scripture directs hatred at the evil, not at the evildoer; indeed Paul tells us not to repay evil for evil and to overcome evil with good. Another misreading is to treat abhorrence as a feeling to be cultivated rather than an obedience to be practised, so that people either perform outrage or wait for the right emotion before repenting. The verse is an imperative. We are to refuse evil and cling to good, and God shapes the affections as we obey. Where faithful Christians differ about how to apply this to particular cultural choices, they should do so with humility rather than treating their conclusions as the plain teaching of Scripture.
Other passages that speak to Romans 12:9-21
If you want to see how Scripture holds together on faith, wisdom, and trust in God, these studies are a helpful next step: What does Hebrews 11:1 mean by faith? What does Proverbs 3:5–6 mean? What does Psalm 23 mean for Christians today? and What does Psalm 46:10 mean by be still? Each of these passages, like Romans 12, calls believers to trust the character of God in the middle of real life, and reading them together helps keep the command to abhor evil anchored in the mercy of God rather than in mere reaction.
Frequently asked questions
Does abhorring evil mean I should hate people who sin?
No. Romans 12:9 says to abhor that which is evil, and the rest of the chapter commands blessing those who persecute you and refusing to repay evil for evil. The target is the evil itself, not the person caught in it. This does not mean being soft on sin; it means loving the sinner enough to want them free. Hatred of people is never presented in Scripture as obedience. If your opposition to wrongdoing makes you contemptuous of those who do it, something has gone wrong, and repentance is needed.
Is hating evil the same as being angry all the time?
Not at all. Hebrews 1:9 links hating iniquity with the oil of gladness, showing that this posture is not incompatible with joy. Proverbs 8:13 connects hating evil with the fear of the Lord, which is a matter of the heart rather than a mood. Anger can be righteous, but it is also easily corrupted. The steady fruit of abhorring evil is a settled refusal to participate, not a permanent state of indignation. Believers are commanded to pursue peace and to overcome evil with good, which requires a calm and patient spirit.
How do I know what counts as evil worth opposing?
Scripture is the standard. Where God has clearly commanded or forbidden something, believers are to obey, even at cost. Where Scripture speaks in principles rather than specifics, Christians must apply wisdom, seek counsel, and act with humility, recognising that others may reach different conclusions on matters of freedom. First Thessalonians 5:21 tells us to test all things and hold firmly to what is good, which implies discernment rather than suspicion of everything. Not every disagreement is a moral crisis, and treating preferences as commandments damages both our witness and our love.
