I. The last clause of the text may be considered as supposing that a man becomes the slave of another, and that this other is one who entertains towards him a feeling of hatred. Through the apostasy of Adam, Satan obtained a dominion over the globe which he never could have held had our first parents remained firm in their allegiance. It may have been that it was hatred to man which first moved Satan to attempt his destruction. That haughty spirit, chafed by his defeat, and furious at his own exile from happiness, could not endure to look on the purities and felicities of Paradise. Man was innocent, and that made him hateful; man was happy, and he was, therefore, instinctively detested. And if we may speak of man as an object of hatred to Satan when he held fast his allegiance, what may we suppose him now now that, seduced into apostasy, he has been secured by the interference of God manifest in the flesh? Who will attempt to tell what must have been the rage and disappointment of the devil when he found that the creature whose overthrow he had compassed, and whom he therefore regarded as his undisputed prey, was the object of a most wondrous arrangement an arrangement which in the largest measure was to bring good out of evil, and cause that the very fall of our race should issue in man's exaltation to a far higher than his original glory?
II. Satan must hate man, so that whosoever is the servant of this chief of fallen angels, is accurately in the condition described by our text. There are but two moral states. Mankind admit morally of only one division the servants of Satan or the disciples of Christ. Therefore is no alternative but this; for the whole world would have been Satan's empire had not Christ interposed. And whilst the effect of that interposition has been to diminish that empire already, and to secure its final demolition, it is only those who acquire "repentance towards God and faith towards our Lord Jesus Christ," who are translated into the new kingdom before which every other shall ultimately give way. Every unconverted man is virtually in such a state that he may be described as "delivered unto the will of him that hateth him."
H. Melvill, Penny Pulpit,No. 1654.
References: Ezekiel 16:54. Spurgeon, Sermons,vol. v., No. 264; Preacher's Monthly,vol. iii., p. 354.Ezekiel 16:62; Ezekiel 16:63. Spurgeon, Sermons,vol. xxii., No. 1289. Ezekiel 17:4. Clergyman's Magazine,vol. xvii., p. 95.