Perhaps no
culture in history has spoken about love more yet understood love less than our
culture today. Of course, we have a tool today in the radio that allows us to
lump all of our thoughts about love together and try to sort out the mess the
results. For example, Burt Bacharach sings about love as kind of a “cure-all:”
What the world needs now is love, sweet love
It's the only thing that there's just too little of
What the world needs now is love, sweet love,
No not just for some but for everyone.
But Carrie Underwood might have a thing or two to say to
Burt, because she sings:
I bet all I had on a thing called love
I guess in the end it wasn't enough
And it's hard to watch you leave right now
I'm gonna have to learn to let you go somehow
Meanwhile, Tina Turner wants to convince us that love is
nothing more than a physical sensation:
It's physical
Only logical
You must try to ignore
That it means more than that
[Chorus:]
What's love got to do, got to do with it
What's love but a second hand emotion
What's love got to do, got to do with it
Who needs a heart when a heart can be broken?
But Tim McGraw wants to tell us that love is something that
can be life-changing:
Better than I was
More than I am
And all of this happened
By takin' your hand
And who I am now
Is who I wanted to be
And now that we're together
I'm stronger than ever
I'm happy and free
Its your love
It just does somethin’ to me
It sends a shot right through me
I can’t get enough
And if you wonder
About the spell I’m under
Its your love
Bob Dylan describes love as something that sacrifices for
another person:
I could make you happy, make your dreams come true
There's nothing that I would not do
Go to the ends of the Earth for you
To make you feel my love.
But Katy Perry just wants to use your love without getting
too concerned about you:
I just wanna use your love
Tonight, tonight, tonight, tonight, tonight
I don't wanna lose your love tonight
(You don't mean nothing at all to me)
(You don't mean nothing at all to me)
Perhaps we need to tell Katy what Willie Nelson once
decided:
If this is what you refer to as love
Then I'd rather you didn't love me
Now, some
of those musicians were singing about different kinds of love, and therein lies
part of our problem—we can use the word love in so many different ways. One
English dictionary lists 28 different ways that we can use the word “love.” I
can love God, love my wife, love basketball, love bacon, and have a score of
love in a game of tennis—all at the same time!
That might
explain some of the confusion we have when Jesus commands us to “love our
enemies.” We better find out in a hurry just what it means to love, and
fortunately, the Lord will help us do just that. Follow along with me as I read
Matthew 5:43-48 [READ Matt 5:43-48].
The Problem: Granting a License
for Hatred
The
Pharisees teaching, according to Jesus in v. 43, was, “You
shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.” There’s no reason to look
for a verse in the Old Testament that says that, because there isn’t one. You
will find a command to love your neighbor in Leviticus 19:18, but you won’t
find a command to hate your enemy anywhere.
In fact, in
the laws given to Moses, we find just the opposite. Exodus
23:4-5 says, “If you meet your enemy's ox or his donkey going astray, you shall
bring it back to him. If you
see the donkey of one who hates you lying down under its burden, you shall
refrain from leaving him with it; you shall rescue it with him.” And Leviticus 19:17 says, “You shall not hate your brother in
your heart, but you shall reason frankly with your neighbor, lest you incur sin
because of him.” Then, in the book of Proverbs, we find this statement
that is repeated in the New Testament: “If your enemy
is hungry, give him bread to eat, and if he is thirsty, give him water to
drink, for you will heap burning coals on his head, and the LORD will reward
you (25:21-22).”
So how did
it ever come about that the religious leaders were teaching the people, “You
shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy?” They may have been attempting to
capture what the Old Testament says about God’s anger toward those who reject
Him. Perhaps they thought, “Well, if its okay for God to be angry toward His
enemies, then it must be okay for us, too.”
Let me give
you a very brief snippet of what the Old Testament says about God’s anger
toward those who reject Him. In Malachi 1:2-3, for
example, God Himself says, “I have loved Jacob but Esau I have hated.”
God spoke through Malachi centuries after Jacob and Esau actually lived, so
He’s talking about the nations that descended from those two men—the nation of
Israel on the one hand (Jacob) and the nation of Edom on the others (Esau). The
Edomites, throughout their history, had rejected God and even attacked the
Israelites at times. God clearly states here that He hates them for their
actions.
Also, in Deuteronomy 7:9-10, Moses gives this description of
God: “Know therefore that the LORD your God is God, the faithful God who keeps
covenant and steadfast love with those who love him and keep his commandments,
to a thousand generations, and repays to their face those who hate him, by
destroying them. He will not be slack with one who hates him. He will repay him
to his face.” Now the Pharisees may have read statements like this and
concluded, “If we love those who love us and hate those who hate us, it sounds
like we’re no different than God!” But
I believe the Pharisees forgot at least two important details about God’s love.
1. God takes no delight in the
demise of the wicked
Make no
mistake—God is the final, appropriate judge of mankind, and He will ensure that
justice is carried out. But like any good judge, He does not delight in the
downfall of those upon whom He must pass sentence. Ezekiel
33:11 states, “As I live, declares the Lord God, I have no pleasure in the
death of the wicked, but that the wicked turn from his way and live.” Though
God will surely deliver punishment when it is just, He always does so with a
broken heart.
2. God consistently does good
for ALL people—even His enemies!
That is
what Jesus points out in Matthew 5—He makes His sun rise on the evil and on the
good, and sends rain on the just and on the unjust. Notice how Jesus calls the
sun “His sun.” It’s God’s sun! He can do what He wants with it. Remember, there
was a time during the plagues on Egypt when God caused the Egyptians to sit in
darkness while the Israelites enjoyed light. He could cause the sun to shine
precisely where He chooses, but He gives it to all men equally. If God carries
out punishment upon a man, it is only after He has provided food for that man
every day of his life; it is only after He has protected that man every day
from an earlier demise; it is only after He has kept his heart pumping and his
lungs breathing and his brain working. The moment of punishment is actually an
exception in an otherwise constant pattern of mercy and grace.
The Solution: Love Your Enemies,
Too, and Pray for Them
The failure to do good for our enemies is the reason that we
so often fail to imitate God’s love, and it is the reason why the Pharisees’
teaching was broken. Their understanding was that they had no obligation to do
good to their enemies, so the Lord tells us instead in v. 44, “But I say to
you, ‘Love your enemies.’” This command really challenges the common notion of
love that we hold today. I’d like to point out two extremes that we need to
avoid when thinking about love that will help us understand what Jesus is
asking us to do.
1. Love is merely an emotion
This is the
extreme to which we are most vulnerable today, because from every conceivable
angle we are told to “follow your heart,” or “be true to your heart.” And so,
when most people say, “I love you,” if you dig down underneath that statement,
what they’re really saying is, “I have pleasant feelings when I’m around you.”
Now if we
equate love with pleasant feelings, then this command from Jesus is utterly
ridiculous. We don’t have pleasant feelings about our enemies, nor can we
simply conjure them up at will. But as we see in the rest of this passage,
Jesus doesn’t define love in terms of emotions but in terms of actions. God
loves the evil and the unjust by doing good for them. So we can see that Jesus
is simply expanding upon the idea of the previous paragraph—choose to do good
to others even when they do evil to you.
But once we’ve grasped the idea that love is not merely an
emotion, then we must be careful to avoid a second extreme…
2. Love for our enemies does not
involve our emotions
It would be
easy to justify hatred in our hearts if we defined love solely in terms of our
actions. For example, let’s say that my enemy is hungry. I would not be
fulfilling this command if I drove past him, threw some bread at his face and
said, “Here, have some bread you filthy animal! By the way, can’t you see how
much I love you?”
If we are
to learn anything from Matthew 5, its that God wants our actions and our
attitudes to be aligned; He wants our hands and our hearts to be on the same
page. So God does want us to do good to our enemies, but He wants those good
actions to flow out of a heart of compassion, pity, and mercy.
We won’t
have the same feelings about our enemies as we have about our friends, but
that’s not what God is calling for. I think we can truthfully say that God
Himself does not have the same feelings about His enemies as He does about His
children, but what He does have is a commitment to do good to all that flows
from a heart of goodwill. That could be a good “shorthand” definition of love—a
commitment to do good to all that flows from a heart of goodwill.
Jesus then
mentions a very specific way in which we can love our enemies when He says,
“pray for those who persecute you.” There is a beautiful word picture in this
statement that kind of gets lost in translation. The Greek preposition that is
translated “for” in this phrase is the same preposition that is used elsewhere
to describe Jesus dying “for” us, and of course the idea is that Jesus died in
our place, as our substitute. Jesus stepped in for us and did something that we
could not do—namely, offer a perfect sacrifice for our sins. So the word
picture here is that we are to step in for our enemies to do something that
they cannot do—namely, pray to God.
Its as
though we’re coming before God saying, “Lord, I know my enemy is shut out from
your presence because He has rejected you, so I am here in His place to pray on
his behalf and ask that you would show mercy to him and do good to him.” What a
humbling picture, one that crushes the pride and the hatred in our hearts to
allow the heart of Jesus to be formed within us.
Jesus then
calls us to do these things with reference to God, first of all telling us that
this is how we can show our family resemblance with our Heavenly Father. He
issues these commands in v. 44, then says in v. 45, “so
that you may be sons of your Father who is in heaven.” This is the way
that the family resemblance will be carved within us—not by loving only those
who love us, or greeting only those who greet us, because that’s just normal
human behavior. Anyone can do that, so if we want to truly act like a chip off
the old block and be like our Father, we must love our enemies and pray for
them.
Jesus
finally sums up His discussion in v. 48 by saying, “You
therefore must be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect.” I think
the word “perfect” is an unfortunate translation in this verse. This Greek word
can also be translated “complete,” and I think that word gives us a better
understanding of this verse because of the way that we use the words “perfect”
and “complete” in modern English.
The word
“therefore” tells us that Jesus is summing up or drawing a conclusion from
everything He has just said, and in this section He has been challenging us to
be complete people, to be whole, to have an integrity about our lives in which
our attitudes and our actions are in sync. When our
attitudes and our actions don’t line up, we’re like a jumbled mess of a person,
like a Dr. Jeykll and Mr. Hyde. Our actions and attitudes are not
integrated—they are not a unified whole.
But this is
not so for God. His actions and His attitudes are in perfect harmony with one
another, and so this is how the Lord calls us to be. And as we have been
reminded today, God maintains this harmony between His actions and attitudes
toward all people. This is another way in which we can be incomplete—if we
display this integrity toward some people, but not all people. Our Lord’s
challenge is for us to unite godly attitudes with godly actions, then act with
that same integrity toward all people.
As we close
today, I want you to close your eyes and think about someone who could fit into
the category of being your enemy. Perhaps it is someone who mocks you for your
faith, or someone who tries to take advantage of you; maybe its someone with
whom you’ve had a fight in the past or someone with different political
convictions than you. As you think about that person, I want you to ask God to
forgive you for any times in which you have failed to do good to that person
from a heart of goodwill. Be specific if you can. Also, ask God to forgive you
if you have failed to pray for that person. Finally, let’s ask the Lord to help
us rely on His strength to carry out these commands we’ve studied today.
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