““You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’ But I say to you, love your enemies, bless those who curse you, do good to those who hate you, and pray for those who spitefully use you and persecute you, that you may be sons of your Father in heaven; for He makes His sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the just and on the unjust. For if you love those who love you, what reward have you? Do not even the tax collectors do the same? And if you greet your brethren only, what do you do more than others? Do not even the tax collectors do so? Therefore, you shall be perfect, just as your Father in heaven is perfect.” (Matthew 5:43–48)
Who is my enemy? That is the question of the day right; or is it? For people, identifying our enemy is simple as evaluating a person’s intentions toward us. If a person is running toward you with a gun or knife, he is your enemy right? Well, maybe; their intent depends on how they are holding the weapon and what they are saying too. They may be running past you and away from an attacking enemy; on the other hand, they may be pointing the gun or knife at you as they are running toward you – usually, it’s not hard to ascertain their intent. An invading army is a more obvious enemy while a sinister group of leaders may veil their true intent to harm you with deceptive words and promises. If they intend to harm our peace, our families, our livelihoods or our future we usually deem them to be enemies.
But are they really?
In the quoted section of His sermon on the mount, Jesus pointed the listener to a problem not in the scriptures but in the way the listener interprets them. When we read the Bible context is important, often people pull verses out of the context into which they’ve been nested and develop a doctrine, belief or principal which is not biblical; but the local context is not always the only one to consider. For example, Jesus begins this teaching with a quote from (Lev.19:18), “You shall not take vengeance, nor bear any grudge against the children of your people, but you shall love your neighbor as yourself: I am the Lord;” and contrasts it with another quote from Moses in (Deut. 23:3-6) where the Israelites were commanded to never seek the peace or prosperity of the Ammonites or Moabites because of the way they treated them as they journeyed through the wilderness away from Egypt and towards the land of promise. The people apparently interpreted those commands to mean love those who agree with you or are like you in terms of national and religious identity and hate or despise those who do not. In (v.46-47) Jesus makes it clear to His audience (then and now) that it is no great act of love to love those who love you rather, to truly offer neighborly love, love those who curse, hate, use, persecute and despise you.
That’s what Jesus did!
Lately, I have been struggling with the question of how to handle my perceived enemies maybe you have been struggling similarly. To be honest, my eyes and ears inform me that I live in a world void of justice, sense, decency, morality – void of everything but hope in Jesus. The world seems to have declared the right to be wrong and the wrong to be right or, put another way – good to be evil and evil to be good. Trust me, I could list my grievances here and chances are that many of you would see it the same as I do but to do so would only fan the flame without arriving at an answer to my question: who is my (our) enemy?
The best way to get to the answer is to consider the question from Jesus’ perspective and to get that, I would direct your attention to the words He spoke just before He was persecuted and killed – “Now is the judgment of this world; now the ruler of this world will be cast out. And I, if I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all peoples to Myself.”” (John 12:31–32) Satan, is the one Jesus called “the ruler of this world.”
Satan is the great deceiver who darkens the minds of people like Judas which betrayed the Lord for worthless coin. Through His Son, God has “delivered us from the power of darkness and conveyed us into the kingdom of the Son of His love.” (Colossians 1:13) As the apostle Paul made clear in (Ephesians 6:12): “For we do not wrestle against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this age, against spiritual hosts of wickedness in the heavenly places.” Taken with what we read in (Romans 5:10) “For if when we were enemies we were reconciled to God through the death of His Son, much more, having been reconciled, we shall be saved by His life;” we get an understanding that the enemy of Christ was and is the prince of darkness.
Unpacking (Romans 5:10) we see that when we were literally hateful adversaries of Jesus Christ and captive servants of Satan (John 8:43-44) Christ died for us (Rom. 5:8). Jesus died for people conducting themselves as His enemies. Why? Because He did not perceive people to be the enemy to be defeated rather, His war was against the enemy within us – the darkness of the deceiver and knowing that Jesus came to set the captive free should change the way we see those who are adversarial, hateful and worse to us.
The answer to a world full of people who seem to hate God, His word, His people and His church is to love them anyway – not to agree with their foibles or join them in those activities which oppose God; nor to compromise for the sake of our own peace or shrink back from our mission of preaching the gospel and discipling the believer. In order to be effective in evangelizing we must do what God did when He chose David to be king of Israel – “look upon the(ir) hearts.” (1 Sam. 16:7) It’s a common saying but we need to remember that every person is someone for whom Christ Jesus died and if we can see them for their need rather than for what they’ve done we have a chance of reaching them. Above all, we have a chance of sidestepping the bitterness which will no doubt fill our hearts if we let the iniquity abounding in the world today cause our hearts to grow cold (Matt. 24:12).
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