Love your enemies

https://odb.org/2023/11/10/love-through-prayer

I think the commandment to love your enemies like yourself is probably one of the most challenging and perplexing to come out of Christianity. It is counter-intuitive, and although there have been reported instances of believers doing so in terms of forgiveness of crimes done to their family members, I doubt that it is commonplace. If this commandment is freely practised by many of us, there will certainly be fewer conflicts, misunderstandings, and feuds among believers. Churches will not split up and go separate ways. Love and forgiveness go hand in hand. You can not love without forgiving. They are very much two sides of a coin.

Forgiving those who had hurt us may be rationalised by the metaphor of drinking poison to kill someone else. If we keep hate and spite because we have a vengeful spirit, we are only destroying ourselves from within. So it becomes easier to forgive once we see the utility in forgiving and letting things go. We need to move on with our lives from a natural perspective. We need to move in God and take hold of His specific will for us in the spiritual realm. We can not afford to live and dwell in the past. It is both inhibitive and destructive.

To conquer this commandment to love your enemy – perhaps we could look to God Himself. The rationale is that He is actually like that. He loves everyone and even those who are against Him, who persecute and oppress Him. Jesus was the perfect example. He died on the cross willingly and focussed on His mission until the very end. He could have called upon the legions of angels to rescue Him, but He would have compromised His ultimate objective to become the second Adam and reconcile man to God. Until today, the Jews do not believe in Jesus and reject Him. So we see the current situation in Gaza. Israel has vowed to kill every single Hamas militant and will turn Gaza into rubble to do so. Certainly for them, it is not forgiveness and loving your enemies!

The message today is to pray for your enemies in order to love them. If we take the effort to pray for our enemies, we will somehow see God’s heart in all that. That’s the key to how we may actually love our enemies. Practically pray for both Israeli soldiers as well as Hamas militants and Palestinian civilians. Everyone deserves God’s love and compassion! Pray that there will be a reasonable resolution to the conflict. Pray that both sides will be able to live in peace with one another and accept certain realities of the situation.