LOVE YOUR ENEMIES
Matt. 22:35-40, “Then one of them, which was a lawyer, asked him a question, tempting him, and saying, Master, which is the great commandment in the law? Jesus said unto him, Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind. This is the first and great commandment. And the second is like unto it, Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself. On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.”
The Lord says everything hangs on these two commandments. Now, if these two commandments support everything else, it certainly behooves us that we learn what these two commandments are all about. And, for that matter, if everything hangs on this, it will not do much good to learn anything else, if we miss this.
But he did not stop there. In the Sermon on the Mount he said, “But I say unto you, love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you, and persecute you,” Matt. 5:44. And in his letter to the Romans Paul says, “Therefore if thine enemy hunger, feed him, if he thirst, give him drink, for in so doing thou shalt heap coals of fire on his head,” Rom. 14:20.
It is easy enough to love those who love you. It is easy enough to love your wife and children. It is easy to love your friends, and those who do good things for you, but loving your enemies is something else again. How do you love those who do you harm? How do you love those who cast out your name as evil? How do you love those who want to see you suffer?
There can be no mistake; that is what he said. Not only did he instruct us to love God, and to love our neighbor; he instructed us to love our enemies. He went on to instruct us to feed him if he is hungry, and to give him drink if he is thirsty. Those are the Lord’s instructions, but how do we do it?
If you ask any professing Christian if he loves his enemies, there is a good chance that he will say he does, or that he does the best he can to love them. Sometimes he will say that he loves his enemies, but some of them are mighty hard to love. And, sometimes, if you find somebody who is more honest than most, he will tell you that there are a few people, he has tried to love, but he just has not been able to do it.
You will probably get more hedging, and dodging the issue, on this question than you will on any other question you will ever ask. You will get more exceptions, more explanations, more qualified answers, on this question than on just about any other question.
The fact is that it is a very rare person, who really does love his enemies, no matter how hard he may try to convince you otherwise.
In this little booklet I want to show you that, not only is the commandment to love our enemies a reasonable command-ment (the Lord has never given us any unreasonable require-ments), but it is also much easier than most of us have ever imagined. When we better understand the matter, it becomes not only a duty to be performed, and a worthy goal to pursue; it becomes our delight to love our enemies (if we have been blessed to have any), and we can learn to appreciate them, even when they try to do us harm. When we better under-stand the matter, we realize that there are benefits we often receive at the hands of our most bitter enemies, that we could never have received from our friends.
In this command to love our enemies the Lord provides us with the most powerful, and the most effective, weapon we will ever have. It absolutely revolutionizes warfare, so far as the personal conflicts of this life are concerned. It simply blows the enemy away, and at the same time, it lays the only sure ground for a lasting peace.
In August of 1945, the United States introduced a weapon that revolutionized warfare. We were at war with Japan. The world had never seen such a war as the Second World War was. Virtually the entire world was at war. The United States and the Allies were winning the war, but they still had a long way to go. Japan was losing, but it would not be an easy matter to invade Japan, and clear out the opposition. With strong pockets of resistance here and there, the war could have gone on for a long time, and thousands more lives would be lost.
Then on August 6, the United States dropped a bomb on Hiroshima, Japan, that just blew the enemy away. A few days later they dropped another bomb on Nagasaki, and the war rapidly came to a close.
Albert Einstein worked out the basic formula: E=MC2; energy equals mass times the square of the speed of light. He con-vinced President Roosevelt the bomb would work. Enrico Fermi, Edward Teller, Ernest Orlando Lawrence, Robert Oppenheimer, and the other Oak Ridge scientists worked out the practical application, and the United States produced a bomb such as the world had never seen. There was nothing that could stand before it. It just blew the enemy away.
Einstein and those other scientists did not come up with any new form of energy. That formula, and that energy, were locked in the nucleus of the Uranium 235 atom from the first day of creation. Those scientists just learned how to turn it loose. The power had been there all along.
When the Lord answered that Jewish lawyer in the twenty-second chapter of Matthew, he did not introduce some new principle. That principle was at the very heart of the old Law Service. We find essentially the same language in Deuteronomy, chapter six. But it is much older than that; it is bound up in the very nature of God himself. 1 John 4:7,8, “Beloved, let us love one another; for love is of God; and every one that loveth is born of God, and knoweth God. He that loveth not knoweth not God, for God is love.”
God is love, and it is his sovereign good pleasure to love even his enemies. Rom. 5:8-10, “But God commendeth his love toward us, in that, while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us. Much more then, being now justified by his blood, we shall be saved from wrath through him. For if, when we were enemies, we were reconciled to God by the death of his Son, much more, being reconciled, we shall be saved by his life.”
God loved us when we were his enemies, and he commands us to love those who are our enemies. It is his delight to love his enemies, and when we understand the truth aright, it becomes—not our duty—but our delight to love our enemies.
In many ways, love for your enemies (if it is genuine love) is very much like the atomic bomb. There had never been a weapon such at that. It literally blew the enemy away. Nobody could stand before it. Love for your enemies does that. In the conflicts of life, it is a weapon like no other. It blows the enemy away. Nobody can stand before the power of genuine love. It is our failure to understand this one simple principle that has crippled most of us in our dealings with conflict in our lives.
Love for your enemies is the ultimate weapon. As irresistible as it is, it is very different than any other weapon. It is irresis-tible in its force, and it strips the adversary of his defenses, but it does not do him any lasting harm, and it provides the only sure basis for peace.
I know that some, perhaps most, of those reading these lines are thinking this idea might work in theory, but in actual practice, it is a different matter; loving your enemies is not nearly so easy a matter as you say it is. Some of you are thinking, “Harold Hunt, if you knew what that rascal did to me, you would not be so glib to talk about loving your enemies,” or, “Harold Hunt, you don’t know how my life has been; you don’t know how I have been mistreated. If you had been mistreated the way I have, you would hold a grudge too.” But I want to show you that it does work. God would never have given the commandment, if it did not work. And, not only does it work; but properly understood, it becomes one of the most valuable lessons of your life.
Some of you are, no doubt, saying, the way the disciples did in John, chapter six, “This is a hard saying; who can hear it.” But it is not a hard saying; it is a lesson fully in line with the influence of the Spirit of God that lives in your hearts.
There is an insurance company, which for several years now has been running a commercial on television advising people to “Simplify your life.” They think it will simplify your life, if you will just buy your life insurance from them. I am not sure they are right, but they think they are. At least, they want you to think they are right. But whether it will simplify your life to buy your life insurance from that company or not, it certainly will simplify your life if you can learn to follow the Lord more closely, and keep his commandments more faithfully.
Loving your enemies is not hard. If you want to know something that is really hard, just try to get even with your enemy—and stay on good terms with the Lord at the same time. If you want to tackle a hard job, that is a hard job. James tells us that “a double minded man is unstable in all his way,” James 1:8. He is unstable because he is trying to do two things at once. And if ever anybody was double minded, it is the man who is trying to get even with his enemy, and still get along with the Lord. You just cannot do it.
When I was growing up, my father was the pastor of a church in a little mountain community in Western North Carolina. I used to go with him to fill his appointments. One Sunday we went home with an old couple for lunch. The old brother told us about some experiences he had back during hard times. Now he was not talking about the Great Depression. This was in the fifties, and the brother was old at that time. He was talking about the way things were in those mountains in the early part of this century, before industrialization came to that area.
At that time people in the mountains depended on wild game to supply their table. He told about one day when he went hunting for wild turkeys. He only had one bullet, but he was a crack shot, and he was sure that if he saw a turkey, one bullet would be enough. As luck would have it, he spotted two turkeys. In those days, bringing home two turkeys was a real treat. But he just had one bullet. The old man insisted that he really was a crack shot, and he was sure that if he could get those two turkeys lined up just right, he could bring both of them down with one bullet. He told how he kept edging around, trying to find just the right spot, where he would have those turkeys lined up just right. He told how very quiet he was, and how very carefully he placed his feet so he would not make a sound. He did not want to scare the turkeys. He finally found a spot where he had those two turkeys lined up just right—and he shot off the heads of both those turkeys with one bullet.
That old man had a reputation for telling the truth, and I had been taught to respect my elders, but to be honest about it—I really did not believe him. It has been almost fifty years now since the old brother told that story, but try as I may, I still cannot believe he shot off both those turkeys’ heads with one bullet.
But to get back to the subject, if you think it is unlikely that somebody could shoot off the heads of two wild turkeys with the same bullet, that is not nearly as hard as trying to get even with your enemy, and get along with the Lord at the same time. You can be sure that you could kill turkeys two at a time all day long much more easily than you could stay on good terms with the Lord at the same time you are figuring a way to do harm to your enemy.
It is really no problem to love your enemy. The hard part is getting your own heart right. If you can straighten out your own thinking, your enemy will not be a problem. If we will spend our time and energy in working on our own prejudices, and our own hang-ups, by the time we get that problem fairly well solved, we will discover that we do not really have a problem with the person who might have been trying to do us harm.
David said, “Great peace have they which love thy law, and nothing shall offend them,” Psa. 119:165. It is hard to offend somebody whose mind is firmly anchored in Christ. In fact, this verse says you cannot do it. We only have time for one battle at a time, and if we will fight the battle of getting our own thinking straight, we will not need to fight the other battle. It will simplify your life.
It is no accident that the word mad is a synonym for angry, and it is also a synonym for insane. The providence of God was involved in the formation of languages. For the most part, there is a very solid foundation under the form and structure of the various languages.
When we refer to a madman, we are not generally talking about an angry person. We are talking about somebody who is insane. When a person gets angry, he goes more than a little insane. Anger blinds our judgment, and makes us think things we would not have thought if were in a calmer frame of mind. When we become angry with somebody, it is easy to think much more harshly of them than we should. It is easy to think their motives are much worse than they really are.
For several years, when I was working in the insurance business, I had a district manager who was an expert at handling people. His ability to handle people (and to manipulate them some of the time) allowed him to retire a quite wealthy person. One of his working slogans said, “We are all crazy some of the time; the trick is not to be crazy at the same time as the other person.” He was probably right. I am convinced that the only two entirely sane men who ever lived were the first Adam and the Lord Jesus Christ. I am convinced that a touch of insanity has infected all of mankind ever since the sin of Adam. It just affects some people more strongly than it does others. And it affects us more at some times than it does at other times. Sin has put our hearts and minds out of balance, and it is seen to one degree or another in everything we do.
Most of our conflict with other people is the result of the fact that we are not thinking straight. Most of our trouble is in our own minds. We are in trouble, because we think we are in trouble. We are injured by the other person, because we think we have been injured. Most of the time, if our own thinking was right, we would not be offended in the first place. This is what David meant in the one hundred and nineteenth Psalm. “Great peace have they which love thy law, and nothing shall offend them,” Psa. 119:165.
Mark Twain said a lot that will not do to repeat. But he was a brilliant man, and when he told it right, he could hit the nail on the head. Mark Twain used to say, “My life has been one long series of great tragedies, most of which never happened.” Very few of us have ever had as much trouble as we think we have. We just have a tendency to walk around under a cloud, expecting the sky to fall—and it never does. Things are usually not nearly as bad as we think they are. As a general rule, things are bad, because we think they are.
Somebody has said there are three ages of man. At age twenty, he does not care what anybody thinks about him. At age forty he does care what people think about him. And at age sixty he discovers that nobody is thinking about him. As a general rule, there are not nearly as many people on our case as we think there are. Other people have problems of their own. It is unlikely they are thinking about you in the first place. And if they are, it is unlikely that you have been injured nearly as much as you think you have.
Most of the time, when we suffer, our misery is the result of our thinking. We suffer because we think we are suffering. We are injured because we think we have been injured. If we could get our thinking straight, our misery would disappear, and our attitude toward our enemy would entirely change.
I believe that just a few illustrations will demonstrate that fact. One of the worst problems any person could experience is to starve for lack of food. Starvation is synonymous with great distress. We read about pitiful situations in places like Ethiopia, and Somalia, and Bosnia, where people are literally starving to death, and our feelings are deeply stirred. But it is also a fact that millions of people here in America are starving. Untold numbers of people right here in my home town go to bed hungry every night, and get up hungry every morning. They go through the day hungry, and much of their thought is about food they cannot have. But as hungry as they are, they is no government agency that is making any effort to do anything about it.
There is no agency that can help, because these people have money sufficient to buy all the food they need. There is food in the refrigerator, but they do not eat it. Their problem is not in any inability to acquire the necessary food. Their problem is that they are concerned about their weight. They have decided that they have to lose weight, and they deny them-selves food in order to do it. I am not trying to be funny; the point is simply this: their hunger pains are just as real as the hunger pains of the person who is not able to acquire the necessary food.
But while their hunger pains are just as real, it would be a mistake to think they suffer in the same way those people do, who are not able to get the food they need. Their suffering is diminished, because they know they could have the food any time they make up their minds they want it. They do not suffer the mental anguish those people do, who know that they cannot have the food, no matter how much they may want it. I do not, in any way, want to minimize the suffering those people experience who are going without food. Those of us who have never been in that condition cannot begin to imagine the way those poor people must suffer, knowing that they are not able to acquire the food they need.
But the point is still the same. There are people in our own country, who are depriving themselves of food, without any appreciable anguish, because in their own minds they know they can have the food any time they want it. The primary difference is in their minds, and how they think about it.
But consider another example. Suppose your worst enemy were to sneak up behind you, and just blindside you. He hauls off and knocks the living daylights out of you, and while he has you off balance, he continues you whip up on you. He leaves you all dirty and bloody, and perhaps, he even inflicts an injury that bothers you as long as you live. Very few of us have ever had any such experience, but if we did, we would think that, of all people, we had been sorely mistreated. We would probably have mean thoughts toward that person as long as we live, and it is unlikely that he could ever do anything to regain our confidence.
But again, the problem is more in our perception of the problem than it is in the reality of what happened. Every Saturday at this time of year eighty to one hundred thousand people gather here in Knoxville for the express purpose of watching twenty-two men spend the afternoon whipping up on each other. Those twenty-two men maul each other mercilessly, because they cannot agree about who is going to have possession of a little football, and they cannot agree on which way they are going to run with it. All afternoon they push, and shove, and grab each other. And all the while, that entire crowd jumps up and down and hollers like a bunch of heathens.
And you can be sure that half the men in the stands would give a month’s wages, if they could be down there on the field taking part in the affair. It is unlikely that your worst enemy will ever manhandle you the way those men manhandle each other. Some of them will receive injuries that will plague them as long as they live. If our worst enemy treated us like that, we would feel that we had been sorely mistreated, but those men feel to be highly honored to be part of the game.
Again, the suffering we experience is largely in our own minds. It depends, for the most part, on the way we look at it. The pain those football players experience is no less real than it would be if it was some enemy who sneaked up behind one of them and began to beat up on him, but the one is cause for offence, while the other is counted to be routine and expected.
In this connection we cannot fail to remember the day when Peter and some others were arrested and beaten, because they had been preaching in the Lord’s name, “And they departed from the presence of the council, rejoicing that they were counted worthy to suffer shame for his name,” Acts 5:41.
Consider just one more example. When we hear that somebody has been casting out our name as evil, it causes us great distress. Nobody enjoys having his good name slandered. And when somebody says something bad about us, we have a tendency to say something just as bad about him. But, no matter how harshly you may have been judged by somebody else, he has probably not said anything about you that is worse than you have (in the privacy of your own mind) said about yourself. I cannot imagine that anybody has ever been so disgusted with me as I have often been with myself. I cannot imagine that anybody has ever judged me more severely than I have judged myself. Why should I feel so mistreated, when others judge me in the same manner that I have judged myself?
We should take some comfort when others criticize. The Lord placed a great woe on the man every man speaks well of. The fact that others criticize you when you do well is nothing more than the faithful child of God should expect. And if they criticize you because you have done wrong, you have nobody to blame but yourself. 1 Pet. 2:20, “For what glory is it, if, when ye be buffeted for your faults, ye shall take it patiently? but if, when ye do well, and suffer for it, ye take it patiently, this is acceptable with God.”
I enjoy reading the book of Job. Job is the oldest book in the Bible, and for that matter, the oldest book in the world. There is sufficient internal evidence in the book of Job to indicate that it was probably written about three or four generations after Abraham’s day. And it was probably written some time before Moses’ day. At least, it was written before the Law of Moses became commonly known. Job and his friends never once quoted the Law of Moses. It is obvious those men were well informed people, and as widely read as they were, if the Law of Moses had yet been given, or if it had been around for any time, those men would have quoted from it.
For the most part, the book of Job is a transcript of a long running conversation between Job and his friends. And in listening to them talk, we discover that they talked about exactly the same things we talk about today. They talked about sin and salvation. They talked about redemption, and regeneration, and resurrection. And more than that, they talked about their troubles.
In chapter fourteen, we read, “Man that is born of woman is of few days and full of trouble,” Job 14:1. That theme runs all through the book. They spent much of their time talking about their troubles. Things have not changed much. Four thousand years have passed since that day, and people still like to talk about their troubles.
But talking about your troubles is about the most unprofitable activity you can engage in. You can count on it that if you tell somebody your troubles, you will discover that he is sure he has a worse problem than you have. And if he does not have a worse problem than you have, there was a time when used to have a worse problem. And if there never was a time when he had a worse problem than you have, he knows somebody who did. He will top you, even if he has to borrow something from somebody else to do it. It is kind of like the old saying, “The first liar does not stand a chance.”
Somebody has said, “If you must talk about your troubles, don’t burden your friends, tell your worst enemy; he would love to hear it.” He may not even want to talk to you, but if you will send word that you want to tell him how badly things are going with you, he will probably find time for you. He might even cancel something else to listen to you.
There are lessons you will learn in adversity that you will never learn in any other way. There are lessons to be learned in the furnace of affliction, that you cannot learn when things are going well, and the sun is shining on your way. There is a little rhyme I learned a long time ago. It went something like this:
I walked a mile with Pleasure,
She chattered all the way,
But not a thing I learned from her,
For all she had to say.
I walked a mile with Sorrow,
And not a word said she,
But, Oh, the things I learned from her,
When Sorrow walked with me.
Most of us have experienced times when it seemed that our entire world was falling apart, times when it seemed that everything we had ever worked for was coming to nothing. No doubt, you have experienced times, that every night, when you went to bed, you lay awake for two hours or more. Your problems were pressing down on you so heavily that all you could do was lie there and stare at the ceiling in a cold sweat. You were terrified at the prospect of what appeared to be coming your way. Sometime in the night you would finally fall asleep, only to wake up long before time to get up, just as tired as you were when you lay down, and just as terrified at your situation. Perhaps, this went on for weeks, or even months.
It would be foolish for anybody to try to convince you that was a good time in your life. It was not. You have never been so miserable. It was an absolute nightmare. No doubt, there were some times of great blessing even then. There were times in the midst of your troubles, when the Lord seemed to be so very near, and you would not take anything for those moments. But, on the whole, it was a miserable time.
But miserable as you were, deliverance did finally come. In one way or another, the Lord brought you through. Perhaps, he delivered you in a way you would never have imagined, but he did deliver you. The Lord has promised that he will never forsake us, and over and again, he has proven that he is faithful to his promise. 1 Cor. 1:10, “Who delivered us from so great a death, and doth deliver: in whom we trust that he will yet deliver us.”
There is nothing that can convince us that God will deliver us the way we are convinced by the fact that he has always delivered us in the past. We can preach that he will deliver us, because we have read his promises, but until we have experienced that deliverance, we can never believe it in the way that we believe it after deliverance does come. And the more distressing the problem we face, and the longer we languish under that problem, and the more desperate our situation, the more keenly we appreciate deliverance when it does come. The sweeter the deliverance is to us, and the more precious the memory of how God has delivered us.
When I was a boy, everybody in our community went barefoot from the time it got warm enough in the spring until it turned cold in the fall. Except for Sundays, we just did not wear shoes in the summer. When you go barefoot all summer, there are plenty of times when you stub your toe, and sometimes you stub it really hard. And you could be sure that if you stubbed your toe really hard, one of your little buddies was going to assure you, “That will feel good, when it quits hurting.” When anybody told me that, I always wanted to hit him, but I was always the smallest kid on the block, and when you are the smallest kid around, you learn to be selective about who you hit.
But I can tell you that in this matter of God’s delivering us from the problems of this life, it really does “feel good when it quits hurting.” It feels good when deliverance finally does come.
There is nothing—absolutely nothing—that strengthens our faith, the way it is strengthened by deliverance from great adversity. That person who comes through the darkest valley receives a benefit he could not have received in any other way, and he receives blessing that others, who have never been there, can never know.
One of the most encouraging stories in the Bible is the story of Shadrach, Meshach, and Abed-nego. We usually refer to them as the Three Hebrew Children. The King of Babylon had erected a huge, vulgar, idol in the plain of Dura (Dan. 3:1). The idol was three-score cubits tall and six cubits wide. That is about ninety feet tall and nine feet wide. The text calls it an image of gold, gold plated, no doubt. That idol, covered with highly polished gold, must have glistened in the sun. It was a sight to inspire the heart of any superstitious pagan. Judging from the nature of the religion of Babylon, it would have inspired him with some of the most vulgar, degrading thoughts, but it inspired him, nonetheless.
The king made a decree that at the sound of all kinds of music, everybody should bow down and “worship the golden image that Nebuchadnezzar the king hath set up,” (vs. 5). And that “whosoever falleth not down and worshipeth shall the same hour be cast into the midst of the burning fiery furnace.” But Shadrach, Meshach, and Abed-nego refused to bow, and somebody told the king. The king commanded that the men be brought to him. He wanted to know why they had not bowed down and worshiped his image, and he told them they were about to be thrown into the furnace.
He wanted to know if their God was able to deliver them from the fire. They told him, “We are not careful to answer thee in this matter. If it be so, our God whom we serve is able to deliver us from the burning furnace, and he will deliver us out of thine hand, O king. But if not, be it known unto thee, O king, that we will not serve thy gods, nor worship the golden image which thou hast set up,” (vss. 16-18). They were not sure whether God would deliver them from the fire, but they had no intention of bowing to the king’s image.
The king commanded them to “heat the furnace one seven times more than it was wont to be heated” (vs 19), and the three men were thrown in the fire. The fire was so hot that it killed the men who threw them in. But when the king looked in the furnace, the text says that he was astonied, and he said, “Did not we cast three men bound into the midst of the fire?……Lo, I see four men loose, walking in the midst of the fire, and they have no hurt; and the form of the fourth is like the Son of God,” (vss. 24,25).
The inside of that furnace had to be fairly small. In order to gold plate the image they had just erected, they needed a furnace to melt the gold, and the inside of the furnace had to be small enough to concentrate the heat. In order to concentrate the heat that much, it is surprising that the inside of the furnace was large enough to contain the men, much less to give them enough room to walk around, but the text does say that they were “walking in the midst of the fire.”
The point is this: these men were walking in the midst of the fire—and more than that—they were walking with their Lord. They had never in all their lives walked so closely with their Lord as they were walking with him at that very moment. They were in the fire, but they were in the fire with the Lord.
If a closer walk with the Lord is the greatest treasure in all the world to you—if walking more closely with the Lord means more to you than life itself—then being in the fire is a small price to pay. Why should we object to being in the fire, if it is in the fire that we find the one treasure we have searched for all our lives. If it is in the fire that we find our greatest fulfillment, why should we feel any kind of resentment toward those who put us there. After all, though the people who threw us in the fire may, in every other respect, be our most bitter enemies, why should we feel any kind of animosity toward them. They have helped us find what we had never been able to find without their help. Why should we not, in a very real way, feel a sense of gratitude toward them that we do not have toward other people.
Why should loving our enemies not be a very easy and natural thing, when we realize what they have done for us?
Those men were walking with the Lord–and they were free. They “fell down bound into the midst of the fire,” but when the king looked in, they were loose and walking around. There is no way you can bind those whom the Lord has set free. “If the Son therefore shall make you free, ye shall be free indeed,” John 8:36. They had never been more free in their lives than they were at that time.
On that dark night, when Paul and Silas were singing and praying at midnight in a Philippian jail, the jailer had “made their feet fast in the stocks” (Acts 16:24), but they were free. It was only their feet that were bound, and God took care of that. But even when their feet were still bound, they were free. Those fetters did not in the least hinder them from worshiping God. You cannot bind those whom God has set free.
For that matter, the magistrate who put them in jail actually helped them. The jailer needed to hear what Paul and Silas had to say, and the brand new church at Philippi needed the jailer and his family as members. The magistrate just put Paul and Silas in a situation where everything came together. What gospel preacher would not be willing to be suffer somewhat, and to spend the night in jail, if the church could receive such a boost?
But back to the three men in the furnace, they received the greatest of all benefits, but it was mighty hard on those men who threw them in.
It is a dangerous thing to mistreat the Lord’s little ones. It was mighty hard on those men who threw Shadrach, Meshach, and Abed-nego in the furnace. In fact, it was downright fatal. How very often we have seen people destroy themselves by trying to destroy others.
How very careful we ought to be in our dealings with others, and we need to realize that principle works both ways. It is a dangerous matter to injure others, but it is also dangerous to injure those who injure us. It is only natural to strike out at those who strike out at us. If they hurt us, we want to hurt them.
It is very natural—and very foolish. God has never given us permission to hurt people, just because they hurt us. It does not make any difference that they might have been in the wrong. God still does not give us permission to injure others, just because we are convinced that they are in the wrong.
There can be no doubt that King Saul was in the wrong, when he and his army went all over the country looking for David and his little band. He intended to find him and kill him, if he could. David had not done him any wrong, and even if he had, that would not have given Saul the right to hunt him and try to destroy him.
David had opportunities of his own to destroy Saul. At Engedi David and his men were hiding in a cave. Saul’s army passed by, and Saul went in the cave “to cover his feet,”
1 Sam. 24:3). David’s men wanted to kill Saul. It was the perfect opportunity, but David refused. He had another opportunity in the Wilderness of Ziph. Abishai begged for permission to kill Saul. If David would not do it, Abishai would be glad to do it for him. But, again, David refused. He said, “The Lord forbid that I should stretch forth mine hand against the Lord’s anointed,” I Sam 26:11. He was perfectly willing to leave the matter in the Lord’s hand. He said, “As the Lord liveth, the Lord shall smite him; or his day shall come to die; or he shall descend into battle and perish,” (vs. 10).
Saul was in the wrong. He wanted to kill David. He had hunted him all over the country, but he was God’s anointed. God had appointed him as king over his people Israel, and David would not lay his hand on him.
Saul was clearly a child of God. When God chose him to be king, he was a very humble man. We are told that he was little in his own sight (1 Sam. 15:17). We are told that God gave him a another heart (ch. 10:9), and that he was turned into another man (ch. 10:6), and that he prophesied (ch. 10:10). Those are not the sort of things the Bible says about the wicked. He made shipwreck of his life, but it is clear enough that he was a child of God. No matter how bitterly we may be opposed by our enemy, it is very possible that he may a child of God. He may be our brother in Christ, and it behooves us to be very careful in our dealings with him.
Not only may that person who has done you harm be your brother in Christ, he may be entirely sincere in his opposition to you. The fact that he is in the wrong does not mean that he is being malicious, or that his motives are necessarily wrong. He may be just as sincere as you are. He may believe that in his opposition to you he is being a strong and stalwart defender of the right.
Acts 13:50, “But the Jews stirred up the devout and honorable women, and the chief men of the city, and raised persecution against Paul and Barnabas, and expelled them out of their coasts.” Who would deny that Paul and Barnabas were faithful servants of the Lord, and they were doing their best to serve him? Who would deny that they had suffered unjustly? But among those who persecuted Paul and Barnabas were a number of devout and honorable women, along with the chief men of the city. These were honest and good people, and yet they were convinced that it was their duty to oppose these men of God, and to drive them out of their country.
The Jews who opposed Paul and Barnabas persuaded these people that Paul and Barnabas were up to no good, and they needed to be stopped. These people were wrong, but they were sincerely wrong. How very often that is the case. Good and honorable people become confused, and wind up opposing the right. And how very careful we ought to be in our reacting to those who oppose us. They may very well be just as sincere as we are. In reacting to those who oppose us we may find ourselves fighting against good and humble children of God, who believe from the depths of their hearts that they are doing right. And if we are not very careful, we may find ourselves injuring one of the Lord’s little ones.
The Lord pronounced a terrible woe on any person who would offend one of his little ones. Matt. 18:6, “But whoso shall offend one of these little ones which believe in me, it were better for him that a millstone were hanged about his neck, and that he were drowned in the depth of the sea.” A few times in my life I have heard somebody make the comment that some person “would be better off dead.” That is a harsh comment, to say the least. But in this passage that is what the Lord says. If a person has a millstone hanged about his neck, and he is drowned in the depth of the sea, he is dead. The Lord says a person would be better off dead than to offend one of his little ones.
It is hard to imagine anything more terrifying than for the Lord to say you would be better off dead. I would certainly hate for the Lord to say that about me. How very careful we ought to be in the conflicts we experience from time to time. We might be in the right—at the outset—and yet in the course of events we oppose those who oppose us. We strike out at those who strike out at us, and we offend some little child of God, who simply thought that by opposing us he was taking a stand for the right.
The Lord commands us to love our enemies, and that is just what he means. It is more than our duty to love our enemies; it is our privilege and our delight to do so. In spite of all of the almost unbearable grief our enemies sometimes lay on us, it is a fact that, by their very meanness and bitterness toward us, they sometimes put us in a situation that we are able to experience a closeness with our Lord that we have never experienced at any other time, and in any other way. As strange as it may seem, our enemies sometimes do us the greatest of all favors at the very time they were trying to do us the greatest harm. And for that we can and should appreciate them.
But while God has called us and instructed us to be kind, and forgiving, and loving, he has not called us to be foolish. We are commanded to love our enemies; we are not commanded to trust them. The fact that we may love our enemy does not mean that we would walk in front of him on a dark night. We do live in the real world, and the instructions God has given us are for the real world. Not everybody we deal with is interested in our welfare. We are commanded to watch as well as pray. Love your enemy, forgive him, and pray for him—but keep your eye on him. There are those who would very willingly do us harm, and we are not under any obli-gation to put ourselves at their mercy.
We said at the outset that in this commandment to love our enemies the Lord has given us a weapon that revolutionizes warfare, so far as our day to day conflicts are concerned. A willingness, and even an eagerness, to love your enemies is a weapon that just blows the enemy away. He does not know how to respond. I see a little wall motto from time to time, which says, “Love your enemy; it will drive him crazy.” He tries to do you harm, and he expects you to respond in just as malicious a way as he has dealt with you. But you sincerely love him in return—and he does not know what to do.
This principle only works if you are sincere. If your love for your adversary is only a show, it will backfire on you, and it ought to. To pretend to love somebody, when you secretly want to see him suffer, is hypocrisy, and it will bear its own fruit. In the end it will be shown for what it really is.
I never cease to be amazed at the Bible, and the instructions it gives us about how to go about living our lives. Those instructions are valid for every day and age. They are valid for every situation we will ever encounter. They are the only guide for us to follow, and in this command to love our enemies, it is the most effective course to follow. It leaves the enemy bewildered. He cannot figure out how to respond, and if he ever does get his own heart right, it lays out the only sure ground for peace.
THE END