Sermon: 'But I Say to You' (Part Seven): Love Your Enemies
Pressing Toward the Goal
#1704
Richard T. Ritenbaugh
Given 15-Apr-23; 74 minutes
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transcript:
I saw a meme on Facebook just this past week that struck at the heart of this sermon which I was thinking about. It has been on my mind for a while now. But evidently the meme showed a picture. It was a scene from an episode of the long-running British TV show, Doctor Who. The good doctor and another person had gone back in time to early first century Judea. Behind them there were three crosses with figures on them. Obviously, they were supposed to be Jesus and the two thieves that were crucified with Him. And you could see that a crowd had gathered to watch the spectacle. The man with Doctor Who asked him, "What did He do to deserve this?" And the doctor replied with a straight face, "He told them to be kind to one another."
The reasons for Christ's crucifixion, of course, cover a great deal more than the fact that He told everybody to be kind. But the meme's punch line, as a lot of humor does, contains more than a bit of truth. Most people consider kindness to be a virtue, a good thing, something parents should teach their children in the nursery or something churches should teach children in Sunday school. It is something that the world needs more of—if we would only be more kind to one another, they would say.
Yet, in their own personal lives, when push comes to shove, most people fling kindness right out the window. They consider it highly impractical and certainly not in one's self-interest when you are in a pinch. And then they go do unto others what they were about to do unto them.
On a deeper level, Jesus' insistence on loving one's neighbor, being kind and considerate, turning the other cheek, all those things that we know from the gospels, those things are really highly offensive to human nature. Have you ever thought about that? Those things go against the grain and because they were so highly offensive to human nature, they were offensive enough that they killed Him for His high principles, for His morals, because He put them to shame. He was able to do those things. He showed them the way as He shows us the way in His life. But it just made them mad that He could be so good.
So these principles that we are being taught by Jesus and the apostles are really completely contrary to the aims of our carnal nature. Because it is a fact of life—I wish people in the world could see this—our flesh is naturally selfish. We do not want others even to be happy or content or at peace, at least not before we are or to the extent we are. We want all of that for ourselves, but we have no care for other people that they should have it too.
I am exaggerating a bit. But deep down a high percentage of people, even people who call themselves Christian, think Christ's teaching is naive and dooms those who practice it to a kind of servitude to other people who are stronger. Or even ostracism if you insist on doing moral things in an immoral world. Or perhaps oppression and persecution, because it rubs people the wrong way, gets in the way of their own ambitions, their plans. And you know what? In a sense, they are right. They found a nugget of truth like that blind squirrel in the proverb.
In His final discourse to His disciples, Jesus tells them, the twelve apostles or the eleven and whoever else were there, in John 16:33, "In the world, you will have tribulation." He told them in chapter 15, verse 19, "If you are of the world, the world would love its own. Yet because you are not of the world, the world hates you." Present tense, present continuous tense. He repeats this in chapter 17, verse 14 in His prayer to the Father to protect them, sanctify them by the truth because they are not of the world. They are going to need some help. In chapter 16, verse 2 of John, He says, "They will put you out of the synagogues. Yes, the time is coming that whoever kills you will think that He offers God service." I mean, that is taking it all the way to the ultimate of hatred.
This repeated warning, which He gives throughout that whole discourse, a verse here and a verse there, but all the way through their lives would not be easy. If you sign on the dotted line to follow God's way your life is going to have its problems—and perhaps a lot of them. And the real only reason is because you are following God's way, which is so contrary to the way of this world. So we should not expect our Christian lives to be easy, to always be on the sunny side. And you know what? Ironically, it gets worse the more faithfully we follow Him, the more faithfully and fully we follow Him.
So in these warnings from our Savior Himself, we can see that living His way does not guarantee temporal, economic, and social success, or even peace and quiet. He did say He came to bring a sword, not peace on the earth.
Now the world, driven by Satan's spirit of get and by human nature, has little patience for Christ's teachings of love and kindness, patience, peace, gentleness, mercy, longsuffering, forbearing. They call those virtues—those character traits that I just mentioned, those fruit of the Spirit—soft. They are soft virtues. They would rather have hard virtues, like pride, ambition, strength, power, and those sort of things, which we are warned against quite often in the pages of Scripture. But they think God's way, Christ's way, the church's way, however you want to put it, of these soft virtues, unfit for a world red in tooth and claw, as Alfred, Lord Tennyson put it. Or as Thomas Hobbes memorably said, "Unfit in a life solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short." They are more along the lines of survival of the fittest, the evolutionary way where you got to get what you are going to get with strength and as soon as possible.
But that is far from the way of God. As a matter of fact, it is totally opposite.
But you know, Jesus does not teach us His doctrines to lead us to wealth or success or power or prestige or glory in this world. His objective in teaching us these things is the Kingdom of God, the world to come. This is just the experimental playground, if you will, for learning those virtues. Making us better men and women in this life is just a side benefit because that is how it actually works out in the ways of the laws of God that if we do these things that He teaches us, we will have benefits in this world. We may not get those benefits in the same way the world would like to get those benefits. But they come because He blesses us—and blesses us abundantly.
Now, His aim is to transform us into glorified sons and daughters of God at the resurrection from the dead. As I said, blessings we receive now are a very nice side benefit and He uses them to motivate us and keep us moving forward. But He is aiming toward making us into the very image of the Son and the Father. His aim is making us like Him as I John 3:1-2 says.
So, in concluding His "But I say to you" passages in the Sermon on the Mount, He teaches us in this ultimate passage of this kind of teaching, to love even our enemies and persecutors. And finally, in the grand climax of that chapter, He says, "You shall be perfect as the Father in heaven is perfect." And that is what we are going to speak about today. Let us go to Matthew 5.
Matthew 5:43-48 "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 [or Gentiles, as the margin says]? Therefore [in conclusion] you shall be perfect, just as your Father in heaven is perfect."
This follows the pattern of all the other "But I say to you" passages by starting out with a quotation that was commonly known within Judea where He was giving this common religious teaching of His day. Now, the first half of this comes from Leviticus 19:18 and I want to go back there and read the verse from which this was pulled. This is in the Holiness Code section of Leviticus.
Leviticus 19:18 [It says] You shall not take vengeance, nor bear any grudge against the children of your people, but you should love your neighbor as yourself: I am the Lord.
Notice here in the construction of this verse that the phrase "children of your people" is parallel to your neighbor. So he is talking about fellow Israelites here. It is very clear that he is not going beyond Israel at this point, but he is saying that you have to love your fellow Israelites as yourself. Not take vengeance on them, not bear any grudge against them, but treat them pleasantly, kindly, and show love toward them. That is where Jesus gets this and pulls it right out of the law there in the book of Leviticus.
So, the Jews, scribes, and the Pharisees read this verse, Leviticus 19:18, to mean that they needed to only apply this "love your neighbor as yourself" to their fellow Israelites, their fellow travelers among the children of Israel. And it is this bias about who was one's neighbor that, in the Parable of the Good Samaritan in Luke 10, the priest and the Levite did not help the wounded man because they probably assumed that he was a Gentile and a sinner. Otherwise, why would God have allowed him to be beaten and thrown out the side of the road? So they showed or felt no motivation to show any concern for him. But Jesus disagrees with the conclusion that your neighbor is only your fellow Israelites or even, to put it in our scene here, our world that it is only the members of the church.
Now, the last half of the quotation where He says here in Matthew 5:43 "and hate your enemy" (that is the last half of the quotation) is clearly not biblical. You cannot find that anywhere in the Old Testament. But because of the way people think, if you construct a sentence like this, you shall love your enemy, they are very likely because of their human nature to add the opposite. If you love your neighbor, that means you can hate your enemy, right? That is the opposite. It is just on a big spectrum. You have your neighbors over here and you have your enemies over here. And if you love them, then of course you hate these others. And that is how the mind works. Even though God never said that they assumed that.
There might be more to it than that because it was not just a particularly Pharisaical problem. The Essenes in Kumon taught in their manual of conduct that members should "Love all the sons of light [meaning their fellow believers] and hate all the sons of darkness," which of course, the sons of darkness are those who believed otherwise. It did not matter what else they believed. If they did not believe like the sons of light believed, then they were obviously not their neighbors.
Now, some say, well, God taught Israel to hate their enemies. And this is not true, this is not true at all. He does take a stern stance against Israel's foes in certain places, like Exodus 17:15. That is the time when Amalek came on the stragglers of the children of Israel as they were leaving the Red Sea area and they wreaked a lot of havoc among them, killed some Israelites, and they had to have a great battle there as they were fleeing. And God said that He would have war with Amalek throughout its generations because it was God's judgment that they had gone beyond the pale. But it was He who was going to have war with Amalek, not necessarily the Israelites, although He did use them to punish them later on. There is also Exodus 34:12. We will not go to that one, but I do want to go to Deuteronomy 7, verse 2. In verse 1, he lists these nations that they were going in the land to dispossess. You know, the Hittites, the Girgashites, etc.
Deuteronomy 7:2 And when the Lord your God delivers them over to you, you shall conquer them and utterly destroy them. You shall make no covenant with them nor show mercy to them.
Now, people who are unlearned or highly emotional or what have you would say that this verse shows that God was teaching them hatred on these Canaanites. That is not what is occurring here. He was using Israel as a means of judgment. These were the Amorites, the people whom God said He would give 400 years and then their iniquity would come to the full, and He used His people Israel to judge them. He did not tell them to hate them, but He said, essentially, "Israel, you are My sword. These people have gone beyond what I allow. Their perversions are too great. And so they need to be eliminated." And that is what Israel was sent in to do; and actually failed to do. They got rid of some of these tribes or most of some of these tribes, but not all. And it caused them problems later on.
Chapter 23 here in Deuteronomy, verse 6, he says, "You shall not seek their peace, nor their prosperity all your days forever." Well, this was another judgment upon Ammon and Moab because of what they had done to the children of Israel on the way to the Promised Land. Again, another judgment. And he says that they are going to have problems with these Ammonites and Moabites, and they did. If we look just one more verse though, you would see that, "You shall not abhor an Edomite, for he is your brother. You shall not abhor an Egyptian, because you were an alien in his land." And so you could see there is a clear distinction here between actually teaching hatred and using Israel as a means of judgment.
So, these things that people bring up as backing up this idea of hating your enemy are just judgments and warnings that they should not follow these people's ways of life, ways of living. More often you find that God instructed the Israelites to aid their enemies when they were in need. I mean, let us look at one here in Exodus 23. This is actually in the covenant itself.
Exodus 23:4-5 "If you meet your enemy's ox or his donkey going astray, you shall surely bring it back to him again. If you see the donkey of one who hates you lying under its burden, and you would refrain from helping it, you shall surely help him with it."
He tells them, these unconverted Israelites, that they are actually supposed to help their enemies when they see that they are in trouble.
Let us check out Leviticus 19 back where we were about love your neighbor. This time though we will go to 19:34.
Leviticus 19:34 "But the stranger who dwells among you shall be to you as one born among you, and you shall love him as yourself; for you were strangers in the land of Egypt: I am the Lord your God."
Strangers are normally foreign and often enemies. And so He says you are to treat them like a native born person, giving them all the benefits of being native born. We can also go to Proverbs 25:21-22 but we will actually pick that up later in a quotation in the New Testament.
This has just been a very quick survey of a few of the verses. But I think it shows that God's law really does not teach an implacable hatred of one's enemies as the Jews showed toward the Samaritans, toward the Romans, towards Gentiles in general. In fact, from what we get as history in the gospels and Acts, we could say that the Jews hated far more than they loved. They were just a hateful people and it is because of teachings like this. They saw enemies everywhere under the circumstances they were in as under the boot of Rome, having to live cheek by jowl with the Samaritans, and a lot of Gentile trade coming through the area, and so they showed hatred for these people because they were not Jews. And that is not what God had taught them. It was a perversion that had crept into the teaching over, I do not know, 600 years or maybe all 1500 years since Moses gave them those laws back in the time of the wilderness wanderings.
So that is where we set up here. The Jews believed that they should love their neighbors as themselves. Every time Jesus would ask this of somebody, they would say that "You shall love your neighbor as yourself" is one of the chief laws. But they also added this other little bit, you shall hate your enemies. And it warped their minds. Let us go to verse 44.
Matthew 5:44 "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."
Now, Jesus refutes this common belief about hating your enemies with an almost impossible command. Remember, this is the Sermon on the Mount in which the disciples came to Him and He taught them. So this is directed toward His disciples, you and me, and so He is telling us what to do in this scenario. Because the scenario we have been talking about that existed in Judea at that time is essentially the same as today's world conditions. It was just in a particular area there that He was talking, but we can expand this out to the way it is in the world everywhere. People do tend to love their neighbors, in a limited way, and very much hate their enemies. And so He is telling us in whatever society, whatever time we live in, as His disciples we have to do something radical and nearly impossible.
Now, we may sit in our comfy chairs and nod sagely in agreement with Him that yes, we as God's children need to love our enemies and bless those who curse us and such. But when an enemy appears and starts hurling invective at us and perhaps even a spear or two, when a stranger curses us for supposedly cutting them off, when people spew hatred at us, when people abuse and persecute us, even among us this principle often flies right out the window. Our natural human reaction to aggression and hatred aimed at us is to return fire with everything we have got. It happens in a split second. We do not even think about it. We jump up and we go to give them what we can give them, at least as much as we took and probably a whole lot more.
Most of the time it is verbal. We think, how dare they! They are aiming this at me! Do they not know who I am? I must defend myself. I will just go teach them a lesson they will never forget. So we sin in haste and repent in leisure, after we finally cooled down and figure out that that was not the proper Christian reaction. It certainly did not come up to the standard of loving our enemies, blessing those who curse us, doing good to those who hate us, and praying for those who spitefully use us and persecute us. Our reaction was a long way from that. As a matter of fact, the total opposite of that.
Jesus commands us, this is a command from our Savior, from our King, from our Master: Love your enemies. Bless them. Do good for them. Pray for them. Not hit them, scream at them, kick them in the shins, pull the rug out from under them, cancel them, or any of those things. Because those things are human nature. The things Jesus told us to do are the divine nature and we have not developed that yet. At least not enough.
Each of these things that Jesus tells us to do here is completely contrary to human nature's drives and tendencies. In times of conflict, those times when the "fight or flight" reaction kicks into gear, He tells us you better have self-control and override it. It may be a huge drive within the flesh to do those things. But you are no longer in the flesh, you are in the Spirit. You must override those sinful drives, put on the brakes, and do exactly the opposite of what your enemy thinks you will do: Love them.
See what I mean about an almost impossible command? It is so strange; even me talking about it this way, my mind is screaming: but this is not what people do. But Jesus says we must do this. He tells us to override the "fight or flight" drive in us, reaction, and go against every urging of our flesh, even though it screams at us to do something different, and move toward the enemy with love, with blessing and goodness and prayer for their well being. It is not human. It is not human at all. It is not a human reaction. It is alien to us because it is the very character and nature of God which humans have resisted and rebelled against for 6,000 years. It is an ingrained thing in us that we want to fight our enemies or flee from them.
Is that not interesting? Jesus does not say run. He does not say fight. He says do good for them, show them love and kindness.
Now, what He commands us to do is what I would like to term "essential godliness." That is how our reaction should be, how God acts and reacts to mankind. And think of this. I mean, we have we witnessed this. Because even toward us, while we were still rebelling against Him, sinning almost constantly in mind, in mouth, in body, He loved us. He blessed us. He performed mighty acts of providence for us. We see this in Romans 5. You have recently read this before, but it is worth seeing again.
Romans 5:6-10 For when we were still without strength, in due time Christ died for the ungodly. [That means humans, people who do not act like God, but act like a creature, a human being with human nature.] For scarcely for a righteous man will one die; yet perhaps for a good man someone who would even dare to die. But God demonstrates His own love toward us, in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us. Much more then, having now been justified by His blood, we shall be saved from wrath through Him. 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.
So when He says this in Matthew 5:44 about loving our enemies, and blessing those who curse us, and doing good to those who hate us, and praying for those who spitefully use us and persecute us, He does not ask us to do anything He has not already demonstrated to us. You ever hear about paying it forward? This is what He is asking us to do. Okay, I did all this for you. I showed you love when you did not deserve it. I showed you all kinds of blessings while you were still fighting Me. I want you, now that you have had that experience from Me, I want you to pass that on to your enemies. You have to act like I did and love your enemies and bless those who curse you because otherwise, if you react some other way, you are not being like God. You are actually breaking the command that He gives here in Matthew 5:44.
He wants us, as His children, to extend the same love, the same blessing, the same goodness toward those who are still our enemies as a witness to them of the love of God shed abroad in our hearts by the Holy Spirit. That is in verse 5 of Romans 5. He wants us to act like Him in this world and that is what He did.
Let us go to Romans 12. It is always good to remember what is happening in the book of Romans. Here, Paul took eleven chapters, a very long portion of this book, to lay the doctrinal foundation for things like justification and salvation in the place of Israel. And so he has just come through all of this very deep theology so that we can understand our place before God and the principles behind what is happening in God's purpose, how He is making it all work. And so he gets to chapter 12 and there is a shift. He is done with the doctrine. Now he is going to tell us how to apply that doctrine. And he starts, of course, in verses 1 and 2 with saying that we have to sacrifice, we have to be living sacrifices, and our transformation into the image of God is all about doing the perfect will of God. And that is our reasonable service. He says, after we have known these things, after God has done all these things for us, it is only reasonable that we respond to Him in our behavior by being sacrificial and doing His will. And so what does he say? What does he get to?
Romans 12:14 Bless those who persecute you; bless and do not curse.
Romans 12:17-21 Repay no one evil for evil. Have regard for good things in the sight of all men. If it is possible, as much as it depends on you, live peaceably with all men. Beloved, do not avenge yourselves, but rather give place to wrath; for it is written, "Vengeance is Mine, I will repay," says the Lord. Therefore "If your enemy hungers, feed him; if he thirsts, give him a drink; for in so doing you will heap coals of fire on his head." Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good.
What he is saying here when it gets down to it is that once you know the doctrines, once you have had these things happen to you, like justification, you are then set on a path, a path that ends in the image of Jesus Christ and an entrance into the Kingdom of God. But what that path is designed to do is to change your character because it has been deformed and stultified (Is that a good word?), stunted by what has happened in this world, by your life that you have lived.
And so what do you do? What is the curriculum, if you will, for this path that you are now on? What is the teaching behind what you are supposed to do? It is simple, it is really simple. Act like God. Godliness, essential godliness, as I have named that. Doing so is what transforms us into the character of Jesus Christ. If you live like God, you will eventually be God. But it is so hard! We have a hard time doing even the most simple godly things sometimes.
So he gives us essentially what Jesus gave us at the end of chapter 5 of Matthew. He tells us these same things: love your enemies, bless those who persecute you, give them the help that they need. Overcome evil with good. They are in syzygy, one of my favorite words. (And every time I say it, I tell you it is one of my favorite words.) That is the way. It is very simple. Hard to do, but very simple in concept. If you want to be God, act like Him, think like Him, speak like Him. Be God in as much as lies within you in this life and you will be on your way to becoming God in the resurrection.
Notice this. I just wanted to explain this since we are here. Paul says, quoting Proverbs 25:21-22 (this is the one we skipped over earlier), he says, we heap coals of fire on our enemies heads when we are kind to them, when we feed them when they are hungry, and give them a drink when they are thirsty. This is one of those things that drives commentators batty because they do not know exactly what it means. But I think on the surface of it, it is very easy to see what it means, even if they do not know specifically how it got to be a metaphor like this. But it is probably just a way of saying your kindness may induce a change of mind and attitude, or your good deed will win him over.
Now, think about it. If you poured literal hot coals on somebody's head, what would be their reaction? I mean, just their initial reaction. It would be, aahh! aahh! They would immediately think about their own safety, right? What it does though is it changes the situation and it gives the person a time to reconsider. So kindness, Paul is saying here, in feeding or giving water to somebody who needs it, might provoke an attitude perhaps of shame or remorse or even repentance, because something has then come in the way that makes them step back and think. It could make the enemy realize that he is the bad guy in this situation or it could just simply stimulate a change of heart.
Whatever it does, it does not actually matter what happens there, at least for us, if we are the ones throwing coals of fire on his head through feeding or giving them a drink, we have shown kindness. We have done an act of love. His reaction really does not matter in the end. I mean, it might matter to us personally if he gets out a gun and shoots us. But that is not the point here. The point is that we have acted in a godly manner and then God will protect us from that point. We have to have trust and faith in that. It is the godliness that we do that makes the witness and that is what God is after. Our character change, not necessarily what this enemy is doing.
Now, we do want God to protect us from the enemy, obviously. But that is why this is so hard. Because we have to do these things no matter what the enemy does. If we are going to act like God, remember Jesus in all the trials that He went through leading up to His crucifixion. He always did what was godly. He did not revile in return. He did not, how does it say that in I Peter 2? I want to get the wording straight. "When He was reviled, He did not revile in return. When He suffered, He did not threaten, but committed Himself to Him who judges righteously." And He did that by being godly. He even forgave them on the cross. "Father forgive them for they know not what they do."
He has given us examples of doing this in a lot of instances. So we are charged by Jesus to act as He did even in the most trying of circumstances.
Let us go back to Matthew 5, verse 45. We have spent probably too long here. Notice this, what He says. This is the reason why we are supposed to do these things.
Matthew 5:44-45 "Love your enemies, bless those who curse you, good to those who hate you, pray for those who spitefully use you and persecute you [Why?], that you may be sons of your Father in heaven."
So why do we respond to hatred and evil with love, blessing, goodness, and prayer? So that we will become sons of the Father in heaven. We are already children of God by election. It says that in places like Romans 8:14-17 and Galatians 3:26-27. We are already sons and daughters of God because He called us and put His Spirit in us. And so if the Spirit of God resides in you, you are children of God, but that is only our identity as far as what God has done for us. It does not have anything to do with whether we are acting like a son or a daughter of God. God has just already graced us with that moniker, that identity. And we have to then, once we are converted, begin living up to it. And we do that by doing things like this, showing love to our enemies.
Right now, for the most part, our character and behavior do not yet match with our identity as sons and daughters of God. Those traits and virtues that identify God's children must be developed over a lifetime of spiritual growth. Notice back in Isaiah 1. This was a major failing of the children of Israel. They were given the same identity, they were God's sons and daughters because He chose them out of all the peoples of the world to be His people and to guide them into the Promised Land.
Here we get to Isaiah. This is probably right at the beginning of the seventh century BC. Israel had already gone into captivity and this is getting toward the end of Judah or the Kingdom of Judah. As he says there in verse 1, he preached during the days of Uzziah, Jotham, Ahaz, and Hezekiah. But let us read just verses 2 through 4. This is God speaking.
Isaiah 1:2-4 Hear, O heavens, and give ear, O earth! For the Lord has spoken: "I have nourished and brought up children [speaking of the children of Israel], and they have rebelled against Me. The ox knows its owner and the donkey its master's crib; but Israel does not know, My people do not consider." Alas, sinful nation, a people laden with iniquity, a brood of evildoers, children who are corrupters! They have forsaken the Lord, they have provoked to anger the Holy One of Israel, they have turned away backward.
God here is bewailing the fact that His children, the children of Israel, knew and acted less like Him than oxen and donkeys know their masters. They were worse than beasts. He was calling them worse than these oxen and donkeys. Their actions, their behaviors, the things they said to one another in the streets, were glaring signs of their rebellion against God. Even the children were corrupters. Oh, do we not see that on TikTok? I do not look at TikTok, but that is what I hear.
Now, the underlying metaphor here is a common one that we know: the apple does not fall very far from the tree. Children should look and act like their parents. The plant, animal, or human genomes are phenomenal, combining the parents DNA in the children and maybe slipping in something here or there that makes them individuals because no son or daughter looks exactly like a parent. But the family resemblance is usually very clear.
Though no DNA is involved as far as we know in God's dealings with us, God expects the same from His children. He expects His children to both look and behave like Him as much as possible. What we find though, if we look through the books of the prophets, that physical Israel acted like their pagan gods and the things that the priests of those pagan idols taught them. But for us whom He has called out of this world, He expects a very much closer divine likeness than what He saw in the physical Israelites. In fact, He wants to see Himself in us!
Let us look at II Corinthians 6.
II Corinthians 6:14-18 [He says] Do not be unequally yoked together with unbelievers. For what fellowship [what communion, what participation] has righteousness with lawlessness? And what communion has light with darkness? And what accord [or harmony] has Christ with Belial? Or what part [or what share] has a believer with an unbeliever? And what agreement has the temple of God with idols? For you are the temple of the living God. As God has said, "I will dwell in them and walk among them. I will be their God, and they shall be My people." Therefore [this is His conclusion] "Come out from among them and be separate, says, the Lord. Do not touch what is unclean, and I will receive you. I will be a Father to you, and you shall be My sons and daughters, says the Lord Almighty."
II Corinthians 7:1 Therefore, having these promises, beloved, let us cleanse ourselves from all filthiness of the flesh and spirit, perfecting holiness in the fear of God.
And so this is what He expects of His spiritual sons and daughters, spiritual Israel, the Israel of God. He very clearly here in this passage shows a definite difference between believers and unbelievers. We could say He demands a definite difference between believers and unbelievers. He is advocating a growing similarity between the believer and God. Whether it is by jettisoning bad things, evil things, evil habits, or whether it is growing in the good habits. Either way we are doing what it takes, as we have seen in the holy days here, the Days of Unleavened Bread we just went through, of putting on His character, making it the sole character within us, not this strange brew of our humanity picked up from this world, and the godliness that we have been given through His Spirit.
No, He wants all of that human stuff to go away and all that is left is our growing godliness in the way we think and speak and act. So Jesus is saying the same thing in Matthew 5:45. How we act toward those opposed to us, those who hate us, reveals to us or reveals us to be either His children or the Adversary's children. He wants to see Himself in us. But if we do not act and react in the way that He prescribes here in Matthew 5, then we are probably still resembling the Devil. That is what He told the Jews in John 8. He said, "You are of your father the devil. He was a murderer from the beginning. He speaks lies out of his own resources because he is the father of it."
So what are we going to do? Are we going to continue to act like a son of Satan? It is kind of scary to think about. Or are we going to act, behave, react like a son of God? Let us go back to Matthew 5. The other half of verse 45 says,
Matthew 5:45 "For He makes [that is, God] His sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the just and on the unjust."
Here, Jesus is showing that here again we have another example of God doing this for His enemies. He gives sun and rain to all human beings, showing His love for them so that they could survive. That is, sun and rain is how we grow our crops. That is how we eat. We need sun and rain. If God did not give them, we would not have them and we would die. So while they are still His enemies, He gives them, out of His providence, what is necessary. And He says we should be acting like this too, following the example that He has given us.
I mean, notice that He says, "For He makes His sun rise" and "He sends rain on the just." Notice the the idea of volition there. It is not that God has just made these run in a cycle. He is actually doing this, actively giving, loving, providing for even for His enemies. It is on His mind. It is in His thoughts. That is how He is and that is what He does. This is the sort of thing that we have to be growing in. Does not John 3:16 say that "He so loved the world," that is, those who hate Him so much, "that He gave [even] His own beloved Son" to redeem them from their sins? That is the loving Godlike character He wants us to develop in us to be recognized as His children.
Matthew 5:46-47 [Jesus says] "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 do so?"
Now these are all rhetorical questions, all of them are supposed to be answered with, Yes, of course. That is how the world works. There is no reward, no merit, no boasting in being pleasant and kind to our own. That is just what is expected. That is what we do. That is what we do this for those we love, those in our families, those in our set, whatever that set is. I mean, in a mutual admiration society, everyone is good and helpful to everybody else for whatever advantage it might give them. I mean, even tax collectors and Gentiles, those who are sinners, those who are cut off from God, show kindness and care for those who love them or who helped them.
No, the real test and the greatest growth occur when we face opposition and we still treat our opponents like we treat a close family member or a friend, as if they loved us rather than hated us. Jesus says that is where you are going to be profited. There is really no profit in just being pleasant among those who love you. It is really going to help you if you show the love of God to someone who is not really worthy of it.
Matthew 5:48 "Therefore you shall be perfect, just as your Father in heaven is perfect."
Let us cast our mind back a while to when I began this series to verse 17. He began this full passage with a discussion about keeping the law. First of all, He said the law is not going to be done away. That is not what He came to do. He also said that to enter God's Kingdom we must do and teach God's commandments. And if we do not, if we break them and we teach others to break them, we will not even be there.
So the law is an integral part of our training, it is there to help us. In fact, Jesus says in verse 20 that our righteousness must surpass that of the scribes and the Pharisees, in effect saying we have to excel in keeping God's law. It has to be at the forefront of our minds. We have to be thinking about it all the time so that we do what is right and good and please God.
That was the introduction to these, "But I say to you" passages. So with that introduction, one might think that He would end with something like, "Therefore, you must keep the law, not just in the letter but in its spirit, its intent." But He does not. He does not go for the obvious. He gives us something radical. He finishes this discourse with, "You must be perfect as the Father in heaven is perfect."
Do you realize what He has done over the course of these 30 verses between verse 17 and verse 47? He commands us to be perfect as the Father is perfect! I mean, we have come a long way from merely keeping the law better than the Pharisees. We can say that Jesus concludes these passages by saying, "What I have just taught you should make you realize that the standard that I expect is no longer words written on a rock or in a book or even taught by the learned sages. The standard is the very righteous and holy character of the Most High God. You shall be perfect as the Father in heaven is perfect."
Yes, the Ten Commandments are still necessary. I am not saying that they are unnecessary, not at all. But Jesus ratchets up the standard so high from there. He says, you must act like the Father in heaven in everything. He raised the bar as high as it will go and says, this is your goal, absolute perfection.
Now, I should define "perfect" here because it is not probably what you think it is. It is the translation of teleios, which means (this is the definition) "having attained the end or aim. Thus, if something has reached the point of what it was designed to do or to be, it is perfect." Let me give you a few examples. I will repeat: that if something has reached the point of what it was designed to do or be, it is perfect. So if a generator that you put on the back of your house is designed to produce, let us just say, 50 amps of electricity and it does when the storm comes and blows out your electricity, it is perfect. It was designed to produce 50 amps and it did. So it is perfect. It did what it was designed to do. Let us put it in a humorous perspective here. If a basketball coach sets the goal for his team of 100% free throw shooting for the course of the entire season, and what do you know, at the end of the season, they were 100% on their free throws, that team is perfect because they did what was delineated to be done in the goal.
So, in this case with us, if we express love, if we express blessing, if we express goodness and goodwill toward our enemies, as God intends His children to do as a way of life, we will be perfect. That is, we will be functioning as God desires and as God designed His people to be. Now, that is obviously a high goal, but perfection is reaching that goal or doing what we were designed to do or as He designated us to do.
What Jesus does in verse 48 here is sets the goal for God's children as limitless love, kindness, goodness, patience, peace, forbearance, mercy, and on and on it goes with all those godly attributes that we are learning about along the way toward the Kingdom of God. That is the way it is. Does God not have these same limitless characteristics? He does. He is talking about the righteous nature and character of God living in us in our behavior, in our thoughts, in our words. And an unspoken implication is that we are not to be satisfied with our progress until we reach that level. That is, the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ, as Paul puts it in Ephesians the fourth chapter. And Jesus tells us, "Hey, if you've seen Me, you've seen the Father." So the measure of the statue of the fullness of Christ is also the measure of the statue of the fullness of the Father. You shall be perfect as your Father in heaven is perfect. It is an impossible standard for us hunks of clay.
But we should not lose heart. Paul tells us we should not lose heart. Jesus gives us an incredible goal to shoot for all the days of our lives. We always have something out there that we can reach for. But better, He is always there in us to help us reach it.
Let us finish in Philippians 3. I know I used this passage in my first Day of Unleavened Bread sermon just last week. But it describes so well the attitude that we need to have that I thought that we should use it again. We should see it again because this is the mindset that we have to have and Paul embodied it for people like us who know that we are the chief of sinners and have to be motivated to move on to perfection, which is actually, in Hebrews 6:1, we leave behind those foundational things and we go on to perfection. We are going on to be perfect as the Father in heaven is perfect.
Philippians 3:8-16 Indeed I also count all things loss for the excellence of the knowledge of Christ Jesus my Lord, for whom I have suffered the loss of all things, and count them as rubbish, that I may gain Christ and be found in Him, not having my own righteousness, which is from the law, but that which is through faith in Christ, the righteousness which is from God by faith; that I may know Him and the power of His resurrection, and the fellowship of His sufferings, being conformed to his death, if by any means, I may attain to the resurrection from the dead.
Not that I have already attained [he is in the same position here that we are], or I am already perfected [that is not going to happen in this life]; but I press on, that I may lay hold of that for which Christ Jesus has also laid hold of me. [He has got a firm grip on us and He is pulling us with all He has got toward the Kingdom of God. But we have got to hold on to and move forward with the same motivation to be sons and daughters of God.]
Brethren [he says], I do not count myself to have apprehended; but one thing I do, forgetting those things which are behind and reaching forward to those things which are ahead, I press toward the goal for the prize of the upward call of God in Christ Jesus. Therefore let us, as many as our mature [interesting word there, that is very close in meaning to the word perfect there in Matthew 5:48] Therefore, let us, as many are [on this road to perfection] have this mind; and if in anything you think otherwise, God will reveal even this to you. Nevertheless, to the degree that we have already attained, let us walk by the same rule, let us be of the same mind.
We must press toward the goal! We cannot hang back, we cannot put off for later what we must do now in preparation for what is coming. We cannot wait until things start to get worse. It will be death to us if we put these things off until it looks like Christ is about to come. We cannot coast, we cannot rest on our oars. We cannot afford, like the Hebrews, to neglect so great salvation, even for a short time. It will set us back. We will not be pressing forward.
The journey to the Kingdom of God is not a leisurely walk. If you ever got that idea, put it out of your head and stamp on it with all you have got. The walk to the Kingdom of God is more like an agonizing uphill, double-time march with an 80 pound backpack. But every step will be worth it if we strive for the perfection of the Father and attain that first resurrection.
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