Several years ago, I wrote a book titled The Provocative God: Radical Things God Has Said and Done. The focus of the book was to address radical passages in the Bible that we have either become so familiar with that we fail to recognize their radical nature, or that, due to their radical nature, we have actually tamed them and drained the life and power out of them by ignoring or explaining away their implications. What follows is a chapter from that book. It is a bit long for a typical blog but given the current cultural climate it seemed helpful to post it here in its entirety. If this is something that speaks to you, please feel free to pass it on to others. Send them the link.. Feel free to copy it and paste it anywhere you would like. You don’t even need to give credit to where it came from. If you want a copy of the book you can get the kindle version on Amazon. The print version is harder to find but a revised second edition is in the works and almost ready to go to print.

LOVE YOUR ENEMIES

You have heard that it was said, “You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.” But I say to you, Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may be sons of your Father who is 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. — Matthew 5:43-45 

But God shows his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us. Since, therefore, we have now been justified by his blood, much more shall we be saved by him from the wrath of God. For if while we were enemies we were reconciled to God by the death of his Son, much more, now that we are reconciled, shall we be saved by his life. — Romans 5:8-10

The Bible tells us to love our neighbors, and also to love our enemies; probably because generally they are the same people. — G.K. Chesterton 

The command Jesus gives us to love our enemies is impossible to obey. It just can’t be done. How in the world is it possible to overcome the hurt, fear, anguish, pain, suffering, rage, and bitterness that is foisted upon us because of enemies who hate us? Love my enemies? Are you serious? My first reaction is to want to feast on their bones and drag their women and children off into slavery. Well, maybe that is a bit much, but you get the idea. Everything within us says that there is no way on God’s green earth that we are ever going to love our enemies, and God should understand that. 

Loving your enemies is just impossible. Or is it? Let’s think for a minute about what we mean by love. Maybe, just maybe, the issue is not with the impossibility of loving our enemy. Maybe the issue is that we don’t understand what Jesus was asking for when He said we are to love our enemies. Just what do we think love is? If I look at cultural images that seek to clarify and define love, I am convinced that our definition of love is the issue. Think about all the situations in which we use the word love. 

“I love mushroom-Swiss hamburgers.” 

“I love it when the Steelers defense shuts down opposing quarterbacks by pummeling them into the turf.” 

“I love our 115-pound Rhodesian Ridgeback hound dog.” 

“I love reading Bernard Cornwell novels.” 

“I love sitting on the back porch trimming my bonsai trees.” 

“I love my wife.” 

“I love Jesus.”

The list could go on and on but I think you get the idea. Hopefully I mean something very different when I say, “I love the Steelers’ defense,” and when I say, “I love my wife.” Hopefully my relationship with Jesus is on a different level than my relationship with a hamburger topped with Swiss cheese and cultivated fungus. Looking at such common uses for the word “love” tells me nothing about what we think love is. When you love everything it amounts to meaning that you really love nothing. If you love everything without distinction, then love is meaningless, there is no value to it. 

In romantic relationships people talk about “falling” in love. I think this might get us closer to the unspoken, culturally accepted definition of love. People see someone from across the room and boom! Something out of nowhere swoops in and grabs hold of their entire body. They start to feel a little bit warm all over, a little weak in the knees, a bit of fluttering in the stomach. They can’t take their eyes off the person. Every image of them brings an uncontrollable smile to their face. Then they begin spending time with the object of this love and it gets even more intense. Their heart beats a little faster with every word they exchange. When they kiss for the first time, somewhere fireworks blaze across the sky and angels burst forth in song. At some point they “make love,” which in itself should cause us to ask what those previous feelings really were, if now we are “making” love. If we are making it, did we or did we not have it before? 

Still, the feelings of ecstasy and delight continue for some time. The length of time seems inversely proportional to how famous you are, or if you star in your own reality cable TV show. At some point those infamous words are spoken: “It’s just not the same anymore. I have fallen out of love with you.” Suddenly the thrill is gone. The fireworks have fizzled. The angels are singing off-key. Love, like Elvis, has somehow mysteriously left the building. 

Love in our modern—and now post-modern—world is nothing more than the emotional boost of pleasure that we get from someone else’s company. It is nothing but a feeling of delight that we experience from another. That kind of love is impossible to give to an enemy. When love is seen as nothing more than a fleeting emotion that we can’t control, that we fall in and out of, and that comes and goes in a completely arbitrary way, then it is impossible to obey the command of Jesus to love our enemies. You cannot love someone if love is beyond your ability to manage or manufacture. Either something is seriously wrong with our understanding of love, or something is seriously wrong with Jesus. I think we all know that answer to that. We don’t want to admit it, but our understanding of love is seriously flawed. It is so flawed that I propose we have accepted a cheap, satanic counterfeit for love and have been duped into thinking it is the epitome of love. 

Jesus did not command us to feel a certain way about our enemies. Instead, Jesus gives us a command that directs how we are to treat people with whom we have major conflicts, no matter how we feel about them. His command to love our enemies comes in the midst of the Sermon on the Mount. In that message He has already told us that when we are sued for one thing, we should willingly give up even more. He also said that when someone forces us to do go a mile in order to serve them, then we should volunteer to go an extra mile. It is a series of statements about the need to sacrifice our own comfort and position and avoid emotional knee-jerk reactions in order to demonstrate a Christ-like character. 

The command to love our enemies is one more example in that chain of difficult behavioral commands. Although love certainly has an emotional facet to it, it is also a verb, an action that we are to carry out. When Paul tells husbands to “love their wives as Christ loved the church by laying down His life for her,” he doesn’t say to do that only when they have warm, fuzzy feelings. He is saying that we love someone by the way we treat them no matter how we feel about them. One way of understanding what Jesus is saying when He tells us to love our enemies is that we are to “be loving” towards them, by showing them the kindness that we would want shown to us. Jesus is including even our enemies in the definition of who the neighbor is that we are to love. We are to love them as we love ourselves. 

He goes on to tell us to pray for those who persecute us. Your first emotional reaction might be to pray that God strikes them down and vindicates you. But when Jesus tells us to pray for those enemies who persecute us, He is telling us to pray that God blesses them. He is telling us to pray that God pours His grace upon them and leads them to a relationship with Him. He is telling us to pray for them in a way that love demands. In doing this Jesus says we will show that we are children of our heavenly Father. That is what this is all about. How we respond to our enemies should demonstrate who God is. Our own feelings of anger and revenge and hurt are inconsequential compared to the opportunity we have to show people who our Father is and bring Him glory. Our desire to get back at an enemy should be trumped by our desire that God would be honored and glorified, and that more and more people would go from being His enemy to being His follower and friend. 

Several years ago I was faced with a person who said and did some things that unjustly caused incredible pain for my family and me. My desire was to strike back, but somehow God’s grace kept me from doing so. When his own life started to spin out of control and fall apart I did all I could to show this other person grace and mercy whenever I ran into him in the community. After two years he got in touch with me to ask forgiveness. He was trying to get his life back in order and get right with God. He told me that the grace I showed him was crucial in causing him to admit his own sin and turn back to Jesus. It was the love of Christ that made the difference. 

I could have reacted out of my emotion of hurt and anger, or I could have acted with the love of Christ. Letting the love of Christ come through saved me from a life of bitterness and him from a life of estrangement from God.  What motivated me time and again in that situation was the realization that such grace was exactly how God treated me when I was His enemy. The Bible makes it clear that prior to coming to faith in Christ, I was God’s enemy: “But God shows his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us. Since, therefore, we have now been justified by his blood, much more shall we be saved by him from the wrath of God. For if while we were enemies we were reconciled to God by the death of his Son, much more, now that we are reconciled, shall we be saved by his life” (Romans 5:8-10). 

Jesus calls us to love our enemies and has every right to do so, because He did that for us without hesitation. People rarely view themselves as being God’s enemy. It is just not something we think about ourselves. At worst, people feel like they don’t have much of a relationship or interest in God, but enemies is not in the equation. We think that enemies must be at war with one another, out to do one another in. Certainly that is not how most people approach their relationship with God. Yet, the Bible says that before being reconciled to God through faith in Christ, we are in fact God’s enemies. How can that be? It’s not like you have been shaking your fist at God in a rage, calling on Him to do battle with you on some cosmic scale. 

From the fifties through to the eighties, the United States and the Soviet Union were at war. It wasn’t a shooting war, or what people called a hot war. It was one in which we didn’t shoot at one another, at least not directly. But the two nations were clearly not at peace. It was the two big boys on the block knowing that one day they were going to have to either start throwing punches or one of them was going to have to back down and concede the rule of the block to the other. We called it The Cold War. There was no direct shooting, but neither was there peace. At least there was no peace in the biblical idea of “shalom.” Shalom is not just the absence of hostilities. It is the presence of reconciliation and of a relationship of honor, respect, love, and caring. In God’s categories, we are either in a state of shalom or war. It may be a cold war. We may not be lobbing grenades at God, but we are certainly not in a state of shalom with Him. The only way that comes about is because Jesus loved His enemies—us—to the point of going to the cross, in order to reconcile us to God and move us from the category of enemies, to that of people living in shalom with God. 

That is what loving your enemies is all about. It is about bringing real peace between you and the people with whom you are at war. Jesus went to the cross not just so you could be reconciled to God, your enemy, but so that you could also be reconciled to the enemy next door, or in the office across the hall, or the family member who hurt you so deeply years ago. What does it look like to love your enemy? The Bible gives us some very practical examples. The overarching idea comes from Jesus in Luke 6:35: “But love your enemies, and do good, and lend, expecting nothing in return, and your reward will be great, and you will be sons of the Most High, for he is kind to the ungrateful and the evil.” This verse comes in the context of how to treat people who treat you badly. Jesus is saying that loving them, your enemy, should come under the rubric of doing good things for them. In fact, He says that we should be willing to do provocatively good things for them. For instance, He says be willing to lend them money without expecting to get paid back, ever. Clearly, loving your enemies is not about how you feel towards them, but about what you do for them. 

Loving your enemies is not just a New Testament concept. It is given to us from the earliest pages of God’s Word. From Moses we get clear examples of what it means to love your enemy in practical ways. Take this example from Exodus 23:4-5: “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.” I don’t know about you, but my inclination is that if I see my enemy’s donkey wandering away, getting lost, I think I would be thrilled and consider it God’s justice. If I saw my neighbor’s donkey weighed down under its burden, unable to get up and move, and my neighbor struggling mightily to deal with it, I would laugh thinking what an idiot he was for piling so much stuff on the poor creature. In a current day example it would be as if I was driving in a typical Florida summer rainstorm, while my neighbor is at the side of the road with a flat tire, clearly having issues with it, and I drive past laughing that what goes around comes around. God will have none of that. 

Just as in Exodus, God’s people were called to love their enemies by serving them in their time of need, so God’s people today are called to love their enemies by doing the same. That loving service can be helping change a flat tire, providing a meal in time of sickness, cutting the lawn when they are on vacation, or an endless list of other acts of kindness. 

THE POWER OF COGNITIVE DISSONANCE 

You may ask, What’s the point? Why should I bother loving my enemy? After all, they don’t care a bit about me and certainly wouldn’t stop to help me with a flat tire, in the rain, on a speedy interstate highway. The answer to the why question is two-fold, and both parts have to do with the power of cognitive dissonance and God’s ultimate desire for us. “Cognitive dissonance” is the term that describes what happens in our thinking when two things just do not fit together in our mind. “Cognitive” has to do with thinking and “dissonance” has to do with fit. For instance, a dissonant chord in music is one that just doesn’t fit. Think of it as the opposite of harmony. Psychologists have noticed that we do not like to have ideas in our head that don’t fit together. We want things to be in harmony. And we will go through great mental gymnastics in order to bring about cognitive harmony. One of the points related to this is that psychologists have learned that we generally find it easier to change our minds than change our behavior. As a result there are times when, if we are forced to adopt a behavior that conflicts with a cognitive stance in our minds, we will eventually change our minds in order to resolve the conflict or dissonance. 

For instance, if you force two prejudicial people into a situation in which they are forced to depend on and watch out for one another—in a military unit, for example—over time you will find those two people becoming less and less prejudicial. Their experience in life, of having to serve the other person, runs totally counter to what their ideas and values were previously. In order to live at peace within themselves, they are forced to drop their previous prejudicial attitudes. They are not able to change their behavior because the cohesiveness of the unit and the dictates of the military will not allow it. So instead of living with an attitude or idea that runs counter to their behavior, over time they will adjust the thinking going on in their minds. 

The same thing holds true with loving your enemies. You may not feel like it. You may have justifiable reasons why to not love them. But if you are compelled in anyway to obey the commands of Jesus to be loving towards them, then eventually your attitude will change. You will not be able to keep the kind actions and feelings of hatred alongside one another. In this case the feelings of loving your enemy will follow the actions of love you exhibit towards them. You will be changed to become more and more like Jesus. But in many cases your enemy will also be changed. You see, they will in all probability also experience some sense of cognitive dissonance. The attitude they previously had towards you will be challenged by their more recent experience with you. The more you act towards them in a loving manner, as Jesus commanded, the more dissonance they will experience and the more they will wrestle with the need to resolve it. In many cases that resolution will come through reconciliation with you. It will happen because they will be confused by your highly unusual reaction to them. People are not used to an enemy treating them with dignity. What they fully expect is to be treated badly in return and thus be able to further justify their terrible opinion of their enemy. An enemy who responds by serving them with Christ-like love just doesn’t fit their grid. The question of your motivation then opens the door to pointing to Jesus who performed the ultimate act of love for His enemies. The reconciliation with you is the first step in bringing them into reconciliation with Jesus. 

Bringing people into a reconciled relationship with Jesus is the ultimate purpose of acting towards them in a loving way. It goes back to the very beginning, and us being made in the image of God. We represent God to the world. As followers of Christ we represent Him as His ambassadors who have been given the ministry of reconciliation. “That is, in Christ God was reconciling the world to himself, not counting their trespasses against them, and entrusting to us the message of reconciliation. Therefore, we are ambassadors for Christ, God making his appeal through us. We implore you on behalf of Christ, be reconciled to God” (2 Corinthians 5:19-20). There are many times I wonder why God didn’t have a better plan than relying on us to be His ambassadors who love our enemies and bring them into a relationship with Christ. But when I see how love for our enemies has the ability to totally disarm them, because they expect the opposite from sinful, fellow human beings, then I can appreciate the genius of God’s plan. It is precisely because our experience and expectations are the exact opposite that loving our enemies is the most powerful of all testimonies we can make to the power of the gospel.

Lacich, Dan. The Provocative God: Radical Things God Has Said and Done (pp. 141-153). Kudu Publishing. Kindle Edition.