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Hate Speech, Divisiveness, and Violent Rhetoric—Really?

by J.W. Phillips
09/13/25
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Hate Speech, Divisiveness, and Violent Rhetoric—Really?

What some people call hate speech and violent rhetoric just isn’t that. Leftists elasticize these words to mean articulating any view different than their own.

The mainstream news media, professional liars who daily disseminate  deceit, give instant credibility to these charges by constantly repeating them and never investigating them. 

Social media is worse. They offer a potpourri of poison where people pick to consume or contribute. Such sewage seeping with sleeze, slime, sludge and all manner of unflushed filth discredits America.

If someone questions the morality of abortion, the gay and trans ideologies, the deportation of immigrants, that’s hate speech. Tag him! 

The person in question may have never said one hateful word. It doesn’t matter. A factual argument is labeled as hate speech.

One wonders how this loose labeling would have played out in Jesus’ day.

Imagine the scene. The report comes in: Jesus has just flipped tables in the temple, overturning the merchandise.

Hate? O, yeah his opponents assure us. He actually called the religious leaders hypocrites, people worse than thieves and prostitutes, people who were allies with Satan and on their way to hell.

And yet this same Jesus later said, “They hated me without a cause.”

“Without a cause? We got cause, mister!”

You’ll notice their attitude, mister not Master.

“Your hate speech and violent ways predicted the bloody way you died. You brought it on yourself. What did you expect? No one is above the law. Roman justice did its job.”

Sound familiar?

According to Scripture, Jesus vented his anger in the temple, not once but twice: in the beginning of his ministry and at the end. He just wouldn’t learn—a repeat offender! By doing this, he signed his death warrant.

Caiaphas, the high priest who served longer than anyone else in that era, ran the show. He then appointed five other high priests who succeeded him and did his bidding. The Caiaphas conglomerate!

Here’s how they did it. They changed the temple policy for approving animal sacrifice. Under this scheme, all the animals the people brought were judged—well, as being unworthy. Therefore, they must buy a worthy sacrifice from the temple priests, who—what do you know?—just so happened to have brought a lot of perfect animals with them. And, lucky you, there’s a special going on today!

Get out the cash registers, boys!

Had they used them, the repeated ka-ching sound would have sounded nothing like the soft bell of high worship signaling when to kneel.

Pretty soon, the people quit bringing their animal sacrifices because they learned through experience the futility of that. Bottom line: Caiaphas got super rich, this “blessed” man of God.

It was Caiaphas who hatched the plot to kill Jesus and then helped to execute it. It was Caiaphas to whom Jesus was brought in an illegal proceeding to judge him just before the cross.

When Jesus did what he did in the temple, he called it, “My Father’s house.” That’s the big issue when discerning if this was hate. And it wasn’t. In the higher justice of God, Jesus’ fury was fully justified. These hucksters needed judgment.

There were other instances when what some would call hate speech came from Jesus mouth. He called certain Jews “a brood of vipers” (Matthew 12:34). He called Herod “a she-fox,” a rebuke of his cruel cunning (Luke 13:32). He declared to certain Jews. “You are of your father the devil” (John 8:44) and called still others “workers of iniquity” (Matthew 7:23). He even prophesied he will send “the cursed” into the “everlasting fire” of hell (Matthew 25:41).

That’s not nice.

Hate speech? Not if it’s true. Not if it’s a divine fact!

The real hatred is in the way they rejected truth and not in the way Jesus proclaimed it. His assessments of their character was accurate. His attack on their behavior was deserved. His warning about their future was factual.

To this day, the world hates what Jesus stood for. In fact, Jesus had predicted it would be this way when he told his disciples: They hated me and they are going to hate you (John 15: 18, 19).

The conflict between divine truth of God and the hatred spewed from sinful hearts is on full display today.

Indeed, this lunatic hatred exhibited earlier at the cross.

What the cross magnifies for our viewing is hatred so hideous, and pride so pompous, we shudder in shock by what is revealed. This insane hatred—toward a perfect man, mind you!—was so venomous and vile it leaves us aghast. Helmut Thielicke described the scene that day as “masses roused to the pitch of sadism.” They jeered, they mocked, they beat the Lamb of God without mercy!

Pounding him with their fists, shredding his back with their whips, jamming thorns into his brow, driving nails through his hands, thrusting a spear into his side—their vengeance intoxicated them, and could not be stopped! Each wound excited a drooling desire for more aggression.

All this happened not in a moment, a moment that could have been reversed upon reflection. No, this entire ordeal, contemplated well in advance, lasted for hours!

They stripped him naked, hung him for public shame, spit in his face, told their jokes in contempt, wagged their finger in accusation, mouthed off in defiance, pranced in triumph, and then left the moment he died. Pascal said, “His enemies only ceased to persecute him at the Sepulcher.”

The cross of Christ reveals what deceives even the religious and the moral, and particularly the religious and the moral. Why, the very men who killed God were in a hurry to get to the temple that day! Their religious calendar dictated a celebration of worship; and for this they wouldn’t think of being late.

The incongruity of killing Jesus so they could attend worship never registered with these deluded men. They called truth blasphemy and their hatred justice.

The world today is just as confused. They deride so-called hate speech, never seeing the hideous hatred hiding not-all-that-well in their hearts.

Their counsel is to stop being a divider, even though by their insistence of their agenda, they do this everyday. What they are really saying is agree with us, compromise, cross the aisle, let’s keep making deals until the truth you stand for is whittled away.

The world always hated Jesus’ claims of exclusivity: I am the way, the truth, the life. The gall of that guy!

No, no, no, no! You need to be inclusive. If Jesus had said he was a way, a truth, they never would have crucified him. By saying the opposite, they couldn’t get him off the planet fast enough!

The tolerance they preached, they did not practice! 

Was Jesus divisive! Yes, but it’s better to be divided by truth than united by error.