Putting God first in our lives is about making Him not only a priority in our schedule, but primary in our hearts. This is made clear by Jesus in the Gospels when questioned about which commandment is the greatest (see Mt 22:34-40, Mk 12:28-34, Lk 10:25-28).
He makes it clear that having God first in our lives means loving Him above all else. Therefore, the fulfillment of the First Commandment — I am the Lord your God, you shall not have strange gods before me. — is not only about recognizing God as God, but principally about loving Him as He should be loved.
It is important to understand though, that while we will never fully love God in this life as He should be loved, the moral failures in this regard come from some choice on our parts.
The fact that we don’t yet love perfectly is to be expected. The fact that we have the ability to strive to love Him better is where our moral responsibility is found.
Are we seeking to deepen the relationship of love we have with Him? Are we doing those things (and avoiding other things) which will foster such a relationship?
As is often said, “Love is a two-way street.” In the case of God, He already loves us perfectly. The question becomes, “What is our response to that love?”
The Catechism of the Catholic Church lists five specific ways in which we might fail in our response to God’s love (CCC 2094). For this article, we’ll just look at the most obvious one: “hatred of God.” (The others will be discussed later.)
“Hatred of God” is a basic refusal to see Him as good. We may seek to blame Him for the bad that happens or see Him as someone who takes delight in inflicting punishment, or who wants us to be miserable in this life. In general, He’s viewed as our enemy and as an obstacle to our happiness. It really means giving up altogether any effort to try to love Him.
Like so many other sins, it comes from a place of pride, believing that God should serve us or that He should simply conform to the image and understanding we have of Him.
Any “failure” on His part to do these things is perceived as evidence that He’s opposed to our good, thus becoming someone to be resisted or rejected. We feel justified in harboring anger and resentment toward Him because He didn’t meet our expectations, our wishes, or didn’t offer us an explanation we demanded.
“Hatred of God” is not the same however, as struggling to understand why God seemed to act one way and not another, or why a prayer seemed to go unanswered. Any number of things can precipitate struggles like these for us. Even the great saints had to endure them.
Such struggles are not necessarily sinful. But if not worked through or addressed, they can begin to slowly plant seeds of resentment toward God.
This growth of resentment can be very dangerous. If we’re not careful it can eventually become a form of hatred, born from our own judgment of His having failed us or hurt us in some way. From this we may begin to dislike hearing Him mentioned or grow angry even thinking about Him.
While not always the case, sometimes a complete rejection of the existence of God begins with such a rejection of His goodness, all of which may flow from a basic inability to understand that which we can’t yet understand or from a misunderstanding of who the Creator is, and who is created.
These last points are critical to remember in order to avoid ever sinning against the First Commandment in this way. Since “hatred of God” ultimately comes from pride, humility is its surest antidote. With it, loving God as He is becomes possible, and hatred has no ground upon which to grow.