Albert Barnes Commentary Psalms 97:10

"O ye that love Jehovah, hate evil: He preserveth the souls of his saints; He delivereth them out of the hand of the wicked." — Psalms 97:10 (ASV)

You that love the Lord, hate evil – Show your love for the Lord by hating all that is evil; that is, all that he hates, or that is evil in his sight. There can be no true love for God where evil is not hated in all its forms, since it is the object of divine abhorrence. We cannot be like God unless we love what he loves, and hate what he hates. There is nothing more clearly affirmed in the Scriptures than that, in order to love God, there must be the hatred of all that is wrong, and that where the love of sin is in the heart, there can be no true religion. (Compare the notes on Isaiah 1:16-20).

He preserves the souls of his saints – The lives of his saints, or his holy ones. That is, he guards them from danger and watches over them with a careful eye. (Psalms 37:39).

He delivers them out of the hand of the wicked – That is, he often does this; they may expect that he will do it. He does not, indeed, always deliver them from the temporal calamities which wicked people bring upon them—for they are not infrequently persecuted and wronged—but ultimately he will deliver them altogether from the power of the wicked. In heaven, none of the machinations of wicked people can reach them. At the same time, it is also true that God often intervenes on behalf of his people and delivers them as such from the designs of the wicked: that is, he delivers them because they are righteous, or because they are his friends. (Compare the notes on Daniel 3:16-17, Daniel 3:24–25, and Daniel 6:18-23).