Loving Your Enemy

Well, let me say at the outset this morning that the phrase, "Love your neighbor and hate
your enemy" does not occur anywhere in the Old Testament.
It is purely a rabbinical invention.
And they arrived at that invention by taking the many admonitions in the Old Testament
to love your neighbor and then blended with the occasional passage in the Old Testament
that could be interpreted as hating your enemy.
And the reason they did this, and I'll listen very carefully because it is critical.
The reason they did this is because it justified the perfectly natural human impulse to love
your own kind while rejecting everybody else who is different from you.
And so, as always, in Matthew chapter 5, Jesus comes along and he takes the Pharisees
to task and he says, "You have heard that it was said, 'Love your neighbor and hate
your enemy.'"
But I tell you, "Love your enemies, pray for those who persecute you that you may be sons
of your father in heaven."
As we take a little bit of time this morning to look at those verses, I want to begin by
asking the question, "What exactly was wrong with the way the Pharisees interpreted the
Old Testament?"
What was wrong with linking love your neighbor with hate your enemy because you see, "Facts
of the matter is they weren't completely out to lunch as we might be inclined to think.
You don't have to read the Old Testament for very long or in a very deep way before you
discover there are all kinds of passages in the Old Testament that can be interpreted as
a command to hate your enemy. Listen, for example, to what David says in Psalm 139, the
verses 21 and 22, "Do I not hate those who hate you, O Lord, and abhor those who rise
up against you? I have nothing but hatred for them. I count them. My enemies."
So you can say they weren't completely out to lunch when they said, "We understand the
Old Testament to teach us to love our neighbor, but to hate our enemies." And yet Jesus says
they're wrong. So what's wrong with their thinking, well, three things. The first is that
they defined the term neighbor to narrow leg. They defined the term neighbor to narrow leg.
As the word neighbor in Scripture can refer to two levels of relationship. It can be narrowly
defined as meeting my immediate family, my clan, my tribe, my blood relatives, so to speak.
And it can also be defined more broadly as referring to anyone with whom I come into contact
with and who lives in reasonably close proximity. Now, in typical fashion, guess which of those
two definitions the Pharisees and the teachers of the law tended towards? Well, obviously
the former. They defined neighbor as a person who was of their own kind and who was very
similar to them. And the reason for doing that is that it simplified the commandment to
love your neighbor because it's a lot easier to love your own kind than to love somebody
who is very different from what you are. And in so doing what they did is they narrowed
the biblical definition of what God intended by the commandment to love your neighbor.
Because God's commandment to love your neighbor was never limited to love your own family
or love your own tribe or love your own church or love your own kind. Now, it was intended
to include everybody that lived in your neighborhood, whether they were like you or not.
And so already in the Old Testament, God put it this way. He said, "When an alien lives
with you and your land, that is a stranger. Somebody who is not an Israelite, you don't
ill treat him. The alien living with you must be treated as one of your native born.
Love him as yourself for you were aliens in Egypt. I am the Lord, your God." And even
as they defined the term neighbor to narrowly, they defined the term enemy to broadly. And
the net result was that they were able to get away with having a hatred on for almost
everybody who wasn't like them. And they were circumventing the commandment to love their
neighbor as themselves. Now, just to show you this morning, how deeply this runs for
the people of Israel, let me invite you to think to one parable told by Jesus in the
Gospels that illustrates how deeply this ran. Do you remember the parable? It's the parable
of the Good Samaritan. And if you remember the context of the parable of the Good Samaritan
in Luke chapter 10, it has to do with a question of who is my neighbor. Because the teacher
of the law had come to Jesus and they said, "Good master, good teacher, what must I do to
inherit eternal life?" And in true rabbinical fashion, Jesus responded to his question
with still another question, "What is written in the law? How do you read it?" And the
teacher of the law replied, "Love the Lord, your God with all of your heart, with all
of your soul and with all of your strength, with all of your mind, and love your neighbor
as yourself." And Jesus response was, "You have answered correctly. Do this and you will
live." Now, who remembers the teacher of the law's response? The parable goes on to
say, "Wanting to justify himself as Jesus who is my neighbor, who is my neighbor." And
it's in response to that then that Jesus tells the story of the Good Samaritan, where this
man has been beaten and plundered by robbers and a long comes a priest and a long comes
a Levite who are the religious people of Israel. And instead of sticking out their hands
and helping, they bypass the man who is in trouble because, well, you know, they're
on religious duty and they don't want to get dirty or pollute themselves with the sins
of the world. And so they go on by and that along comes the Samaritan. And you've got to
remember the Samaritans where we're sort of a half breed. They were hated by the Israelites
because they weren't pure Jewish and they had a mishmash of religion because they went
back to earlier captivity when they had married unbelievers and so on. It's a whole story.
But along comes the Samaritan, as you know, in the story and takes compassion on this man
and puts him on his donkey and takes him to the inn and pays his bill and all of this sort
of thing. And then Jesus sums it up in this way and he says, "Which of these three do
you think was a neighbor to the man who fell into the hands of the robbers?" And the
expert in the law replied, "You can just see how painfully this had to be pulled out of
his mouth, the one who had mercy on him." Can't even say this Samaritan because that was
it, isn't he? And Jesus ends the story then with these words go and do likewise. What
was the Phariseical sin? They limited neighbor to their own kind because it's always easier
to love those that you understand and that justifies treating everybody else as an enemy.
We'll come back to that later because none of us apart from the grace of God is very far
from falling in to this particular sin. So they defined the term neighbor too narrowly,
not only, but they made personal, listen carefully, they made personal, what was judicial.
And let me explain that in this way. As I said earlier, they weren't entirely out to lunch.
When they captured this Old Testament sentiment of hating those who hate God, have already
coded Psalm 139, "David, I have nothing but hatred for them. I count them as my enemies."
And that's only one example. There are many other examples. There are the imprecatory
psalms. Don't know if you've ever read any of them. Psalm 109 is one. Psalm 69 is another.
The imprecatory psalms are psalms where the believer prays the judgment of God upon the
enemies of God. Listen, for example, to this, how would you like this to be somebody's
prayer for you? May his days be few. May another take us place of leadership. May his children
be fatherless in his wife, Oedo. May his children be wandering beggars. May they be driven
from the ruined homes. May a creditor sees all he has and may strangers plunder the fruits
of his labor. May no one extend kindness to him or take pity on his fatherless children.
Now, that's David. Praying that upon the enemies of God. And then, of course, you have
the whole Old Testament example of Joshua and the children of Israel being instructed
by the Lord to utterly destroy and utterly wipe out all the pagan tribes in the land
of Palestine. And so you can say to yourself, well, you know, you can blame the Pharisees
for thinking God says, love your neighbor and hate your enemy. Well, how do you get
around that? What do you do with the imprecatory psalms, for example? Well, the key lies in
not confusing the personal with the judicial. Now we're in Scripture. Are God's people
ever authorized, commanded or encouraged to carry a personal hatred in their heart towards
those who have hurt them, wounded them, offended them, or who are otherwise their enemies?
And when David says, I hate those who hate you, he is not speaking out of personal animosity
towards those who are his enemy. Now, he is speaking on God's behalf against those who
are the enemies of God because he occupies a judicial position. It is his job as the
chosen of God in this instance to carry out the judgment of God. That's also how you
have to understand the commandment giving to Israel in the days of Joshua to destroy all
those tribes. God is Lord over all. God judges the living and the dead. God can say, you
live, you die because these are my standards and my standards have been violated in the
context of carrying out his judgment. He will often impart that authority to particularly
individual or a group in society that in a judicial fashion carries out his judgment.
And so the imprecatory Psalms are not an individual giving expression to, I hate my enemy and
God, I hope you please strike them dead. No, it is standing with God against the enemies
of God, inviting God to send his judgment because God has the right to judge the living
and the dead. The Pharisees confused the personal with the judicial. Very important for us to
understand that distinction because as I said a moment ago, nowhere in Scripture, nowhere
in Scripture does God ever authorize his children to carry this attitude of anger, hatred,
rebellion, resentment and judgment on an individual basis. You let that into your heart, the spirit
of the evil one gets into our hearts when that happens and that process will always lead
to hate, to anger and to destruction. Most of us have tasted enough of that to know what
a destructive and powerful force that is. Instead, Scripture says if your enemy is hungry
given food, he is thirsty, given water to drink. And in the Old Testament, if you come
across your enemy's ox or donkey wandering off, be sure to take it back to him. That's
the attitude that already in the Old Testament God was looking for in your life and in my
life. So did you find the term "neighbored" too narrowly? They made personal what was
judicial and in that process what they ended up doing is they misrepresented God.
They misrepresented God. Now again, listen carefully, when in the name of God, you limit
loving your neighbor to your own kind and you allow yourself to hate everybody who is
different from you than what does that say about your God? Well, it makes your God just
as narrow-minded as you are. And once you define your God just as narrow-minded as you are,
that intern gives you the right to love only your own kind and to hate those who are different
from you or who oppose you. And in the process of making God as narrow-minded as they
were themselves, they were misrepresenting God because the fact of the matter is throughout
Scripture, while God has a uniquely dedicated kind of love for his own people, the people
of Israel and the Old Testament and the church and the New Testament, he doesn't just love
his own people to the exclusion of all the rest of the world. God is not a God who just
has this little love affair with the church and it doesn't care about anybody else. No,
his love affair with Israel and his love affair with the church was for the purpose lot of
saving and reaching the world because God so loved the world that He didn't wish that
any should perish but that all should have eternal life. And that doesn't just mean that
God turns a blind eye to everything that happens in the world. No, what it means is that God's
heart towards a suffering broken sinful world is that He desperately wants to reach out to
them and to bring them back to Himself. And that's why misrepresenting God, in the way
the Pharisees did, becomes such serious business you see because wherever you misrepresent God,
in the fashion that the Pharisees were misrepresenting God, I can guarantee you two things are going
to happen. The first is this, you become arrogant and proud. We are God's chosen people.
We have a special inroad with the Almighty. He likes us better than He likes everybody
else. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Isn't that wonderful? Don't ever think that spirit was exclusive to
the Pharisees or exclusive to the Jewish people because history has been full of good church
people who secretly pride themselves in being just a touch better than everybody else. Wouldn't
you agree? That's pride and arrogance that flows out of this ferocerical spirit of reducing
the commandment of your neighbor and expanding the commandment of Hitchor and a man. Not only that,
wherever that spirit takes root, you become an exclusiveist. Oh, big word. You begin to
exclude everybody that is not your own kind. So now you limit your attention to just your own
people and you don't want to get your hands dirty with other people who are dirty and you look
down your noses at everybody else because you see, well, they're just the Gentiles. They're
just people who are steeped in sin. They don't know the commandments of God. Look at how they lived
together. Look at how they fornicate. Look at how they drink and look at how they carry on.
And before you know it, your spirit is more like the spirit of the Pharisees than the spirit of
Jesus because the Pharisees, they wash their hands of dirty people, didn't they? What,
nothing to do with them because they didn't want to be polluted. Why do you think the priest and
the Levite passed by on the other side? They didn't want to get dirty with the sins and the brokenness
and the pollution of the man that had been beat up. But Jesus leaves the glory of heaven,
steps into the messiness of your life and my life, the messiness of this world,
and he says, "I've come to seek and to save the lost. I've come to lay down my life."
So that other people might come to salvation and might come to know you.
And so Jesus in this passage then, as He always does, not only corrects the misinterpretation
the Pharisees have given to these Old Testament commandments, but He takes us back to the original
spirit. And what is the original spirit? You have heard that it was said love your neighbor
and hate your enemy, but I tell you, He says, "Here's what God meant to teach you from the very
beginning. Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you that you may be sons of your
father at heaven." He causes a son to rise in the evil and on the good and sends rain on the
righteous and on the unrighteous. Notice there are two things there that He says was always God's
intention in the Old Testament. And that is that His people should love their enemies,
and that secondly, they should pray for those who persecute them. Let's take a few moments
and look at each one of those. Love your enemy. Can you see how far this is removed from
the Phariseical definition of a neighbor that limits my neighbor just to who I am
and gives me the right to look down my nose at everybody who is my enemy? It was tacitists.
An ancient Roman historian who said concerning the Jews, they readily show compassion to their
own countrymen, but they bear all others the hatred of an enemy. Jesus says, "You know what God
was really teaching you in the Old Testament?" He says, "He wanted you to love your enemy." Now an
enemy, so the opposite of a friend, obviously, and an enemy is a person who actively opposes you
or is hostile to your interest. And that can be anybody from, you know, the kid down the
block who steals your toy, to the teenager who steals your girlfriend, to the rascal out there
who seduces your wife, to the person who disappoints you in this area or in that area,
and what happens naturally in everyone of our hearts outside of the saving grace of Jesus is what?
Resentment, anger, disappointment, and bitterness. And if you've never had any of those emotions,
you've probably never really had an enemy. Because I tell you, when you have an enemy and you know
they're gunning for you and they want to do you in and there is no love whatsoever in their actions,
every little bit of Adam and Eve that is left in our flesh rises up and wants to fight back
because we've seen earlier. And Jesus in this passage says, "It's not only not good enough,
not to give in to those negative emotions." No, he says, "I want you to go further than that.
I want you to learn to love your enemy." And that means by both your outward actions and by your
inward disposition, you are kindly disposed to your enemy and you want to see your enemy as
blessed rather than cursed. Because Scripture goes on to say, actually one of the,
"I'm getting ahead of myself. I'll need to come back to that in just a moment." But Scripture puts
it this way, "If your enemy is hungry, give him food to eat, if he is thirsty, give him water to
drink." And Paul, quoting that at the New Testament, he says, "Do not take revenge, my friends,
but leave room for God's wrath for it is written. It is mine to avenge. I will repay," says the Lord.
You want to test your spirituality this morning? You want to test just how mature you are in Christ
and try to find, think back to the one person who has done you the most harm. The one person who
most deeply disappointed you, the one person who skewered you in places that has left you
reeling. And you can't live very long in this world before somebody has done that to you,
somewhere along the line. And then you ask yourself the question, "Lord, how can I love this person?
How can I want what's best for that person? How can I not only get rid of the negative feelings
that I have, but how can I really bless that person and encourage that person and really rejoice
when they do well?" Because that's the real test, you see. The real test of forgiveness and the
real test of loving your enemy is whether you can rejoice when they do well as opposed to secretly
helping, "Well, God's going to get you. I'm just going to wait and sit around until God does
you in so I can feel good and vindicated." I mean, am I only talking about me here or is that an
accurate description of most of our hearts? Do you see why we need Jesus? Because short of Jesus
and apart from Jesus, folks, this ain't to be had. It is not a natural way of living,
which is why Jesus goes on to say it a few moments, "If you love those who love you, what more are
you than the sinners and the public?" And everybody can do that, but only God. And the power of God
can change the human heart in that fashion. Love your enemy, says Jesus. And then he goes on to say,
"Pray for those who persecute you." "Pray for those who persecute you." Now, it's a very
interesting thing. Earlier, manuscripts, not as dependable as the ones that have been used to translate
the new international version, go on to add the verses, "Bless those who curse you and do good to
those who hate you." Likely, some scribe who got carried away and added those verses, which
expand really on what it is that Jesus was talking about when he says, "You've got to pray for
those who persecute you." Now, to be persecuted is to have somebody pursue you with the intent
of making your life miserable or doing you harm. And again, it can be any number of people,
it can be any number of situations. And thank God most of us live in a country where we're not
persecuted for faith, but there are, and there have been throughout the course of history,
multitude of believers who have been tragically persecuted because of their faith in Jesus,
anywhere from being robbed economically to being dispossessed out of their houses and homes
and their businesses and having been put in jail and tried unjustly and executed. That's persecution.
Now, if you've ever tasted even a touch of that, you will know that again, the perfectly
natural human reaction is to do odd. Angry, bitter. You know, that's when you want to start
praying the imprecatory Psalms. Don't you, Lord, I hate those who hate you. Send fire from heaven. Oh,
God, I hope they burn in hell and turn it up, you know, seven times higher than what it's running
now. That's the human heart. But Jesus says it's not good enough to put away those feelings.
No, he says, I want you to learn to love your enemy. I want you to pray for those
who persecute you. By the way, do you know why Jesus says to pray for those who persecute you?
I believe the reason is this. Persecution comes out of
narrow hearts and lives. That is to say, people who are struggling and who are unhappy and who
find life difficult and painful and they see somebody else prospering and flying. And the spirit
of kin in them wants to bring them down to their own level. And you'll find in your own life
that one life is hard and painful. That's when you become most critical of other people. You
become jealous of their prosperity. You become jealous of their success. And you wonder why
they're favorite and you're not. Isn't that true? None of us has immune to that.
And that's when even we can turn nasty as the children of God. What's the antidote
to that spirit that says, I hate you because you've got life and freedom and liberty in a way
that I don't? Well, you pray for God to bless them. Because a person who is blessed, a person who
is successful, a person for whom things are going well, is too busy doing life to be bothered
by the difficulties or the pleasures or the joys of somebody else. Do you understand what I'm saying?
People who are doing well and who are successful for all the right reasons,
they don't have time to look down their noses at everybody else and stick their nose
in everybody else's business wondering, you know, why are you doing what you're doing? No,
they're just busy serving God and doing their own life. And so when somebody's hot on your tail,
if for no other reason, instead of praying, God judge them and curse them and make life miserable
and bring them to repentance, bring them to the... No, just pray, God, bless them.
Pour out your grace upon them because nobody can long experience the grace of God
without coming to repentance and without falling on the knees. Still want to be Christian?
Still understand why we need Jesus? Now notice again then, Jesus says, love your enemies,
pray for those who persecute you. What's the ultimate reason he gives us? He gives us this reason
that you may be sons of your father who is in heaven. He causes his son to rise and the evil
and the good sends rain and the righteous and the unrighteous. If you love those who love you,
what reward will you get or not even the text collectors doing that? And if you greet only your
brothers, what more are you doing than others do not even pagans do that? Be perfect as your heavenly
father is perfect. Why love your enemy? Why pray for those who persecute you? Because that's
what God's like. A lot of people think God is this narrow-minded person who's just sitting and
having a waiting to strike somebody dead. Now know, God so loved the world. Does God exercise judgment
that your bottom dollar that He does? And will God allow sin to go on indefinitely? No indeed He will
not. But He isn't some mean, vindictive person who has personally been injured and feels offended
and therefore, you know, I'm going to get even with you because you haven't done what I wanted.
I mean, if anybody had the right to feel that way, it'd be God now, wouldn't it? That's not
what motivates the judgment of God. When God exercises judgment, it is because of His love and His
passion for creation evil has to be destroyed even as a surgenist to destroy cancer so that the
rest of the body might be saved. And He says, "You call yourself a Christian. If you want to be a
son or a daughter of your father who is in heaven, then what God wants to do is reproduce His
character in your heart." And the test of that says Jesus is not how much you love those who love
you because even the pagans can do that. Now the test of that is how much you can love those
who are even your enemy. And a lot of you've heard the story and you've heard me tell the story
of Cory Turnbull. Desperately mistreated during World War II in a concentration camp,
saved through a clerical error, lived to tell about it, eventually developed a ministry whereby
in post-World War Europe and then later on in America could share the story of God's amazing grace
and His power to forgive. And you've heard the story how speaking to, I believe, a crowd of
Germans at one point about the power of forgiveness, a man came to the front after her presentation
extended his hands towards her and said to her, "Isn't it wonderful how God in Christ
forgives us all are sin?" This man she immediately recognized as one of the SS officers who had made
their lives hell during that time of the concentration camp. And as she describes the story,
you can read about it in some of her writings, the turmoil that went through her soul
because all of a sudden she was confronted by this stark reality, I've got to make a choice.
Am I going to hold on to the anger, the pain, the bitterness because of how I have been treated
during the war or will I extend forgiveness even as God in Christ has forgiven me? And it was only
afterwards seemed like an eternity, that battle of the soul, that she could then finally reach out
and take that man's hand, extend forgiveness in the name of Jesus and recognize him as a brother
in Christ. That's the power of the gospel and that's the invitation Jesus has for you
and for me for his glory.
Jesus is the greatest of all, Jesus is the greatest of all, Jesus is the greatest of all.
Jesus, Jesus is the greatest of all, Jesus is the greatest of all, Jesus is the greatest of all,
Jesus is the greatest of all, Jesus is the greatest of all, Jesus is the greatest of all.
Taking my sin, my cross, my shame, what my purpose, your name, your name, your name.
When I fall down, you pick me up, when I am proud, you pick me up, when I am proud, you're my God, your name.
Jesus, love of God, love is your name, Jesus, love of God, love is your name.