THE SCENARIO AggappH practices something that does not come
naturally. They do justly, they love mercy, they walk humbly before their God
Jehovah—yes, all of that, and more: they love their enemy. Such is the
disposition of AggappH’s heart, to love even their enemy. And from that
disposition follows the justice, the mercy, and the humility mentioned. A love
like unto God’s love, His way of loving, unconditionally, is centrally seated
in AGGAPPH’s heart. How did that kind of love get into AggappH’s heart? Jehovah
placed it there (1John 4:7-8) and helped a willing AggappH understand it and
cultivate it.
.
In the outworking of
this scenario please consider the following:
Sensitivity
Points Under Consideration
2.
Who is your enemy dear
reader, why are they your enemy? Do you hate them?
3.
The bounds of necessary,
practical self-protection.
4.
Understanding AGAPH love
(=the way God loves), cultivating it.
5.
Whence AGAPH love in a
human being?
1. Spiritually,
Satan embodies the term “enemy,” he is the self-proclaimed enemy of God and
humankind. Clearly, we do not love this wretched enemy, and that means
no prayer, no sympathy, nothing along those lines. God’s decrees regarding His
enemy Satan and his future are perfect, and they shall stand, and Satan shall
forever burn (Matthew 25:41). He was knocked off his perch at Calvary by our
Champion and Savior Jesus—he lost his gamble—and it is just a matter of time
before this arrogant, killer-enemy is forever banished and punished for his
defiant, determined antagonism and penetrating hurt aimed at God and humankind.
Please notice that Satan is a liar and a murderer (John 8:44); evil enemies do
those sorts of things: ‘…ye will know them by their fruit…’. Generally, it is
not true that an enemy is necessarily evil, it is a matter of perspective and
certainly fallout. Satan is the exception, he is our enemy, and he is evil;
this unclean thing means to do us serious spiritual and otherwise harm all the
while mocking and testing our God Jehovah. A sinner, by definition, is the
enemy of God (Romans 8:7, Colossians 1:21), and hence a sinner does Satan’s
bidding and is to varying degrees in league with him.
Oxford Languages defines
“enemy” so: “Actively opposed or hostile to someone or something.” Opposition
may be good; hence an enemy may serve a good purpose, but hostility is never
good.
2. Let
us take inventory of our human enemies, is there more than one? Do you hate
them? Let’s trim the list down to one enemy. Please explain why you think this
person is your enemy. Have they been hostile toward you and done you harm, you
or a loved one for that matter? Do they stand in the way of your goals? What
single, specific reason makes them your enemy? What would it take either coming
from you, or from them, for them not to be your enemy any longer? Can you
picture yourself loving them at some point; what would it take for that to
happen?
3. When
enemies are hostile and threaten physical harm, some means of protection
must be pursued, and there are God-instituted legal channels available for us
to do that—this is God’s design (Romans 13, “Romans Chapter Thirteen
Commentary”). Or perhaps blatant and costly wrongs must be addressed via
litigation. But what about physically non-threatening situations like, say,
mockery and slander, which are different sorts of hostility that our enemies
might assault us with—what to do in the context of loving our enemy? Here is
where animosities can escalate and get out of hand but for a biblical response,
which is essentially a non-response following the pattern of Jesus. Jesus did
not revile in kind when reviled (1Pe 2:23). Praying for
such enemies is hands-down loving them, and the first order of prayer
oftentimes involves asking God to just simply help us get into the frame of
mind and spirit to pray for these enemies—that is a big first step. And then
patience, and not least perseverance in prayer must follow whilst waiting for
God to do His work with us and the enemy. This is much easier to write about
than to put into practice, granted, but God can get the job done with all
parties and let us not doubt that whilst we persevere in prayer for a given
enemy and wait patiently for Him to work things out. It may take longer than
one wishes, oftentimes it does, but we must wait for Him to work things out
and—let Him teach us something pertinent in the meantime. Praying for a given
enemy pleases God because one can hardly love an enemy better than lifting him
or her before God in well-meaning, sincere prayer. One might say, ‘…Lord, why
are they doing thus and so to me, am I understanding it correctly…’? ‘…Lord, I would
like to fire back, but guide and cool my temperament so that I may begin to
love them even as you love me a sinner…’. ’…Lord, please guide my brain and my
heart and my lips; lead me to your Word and counsel me there…’, and so forth.
God knows that our emotions are strong motivators—He knows that full well—and
He takes all things into consideration because after all He is God; and He will
love us throughout our conflicts with our enemies—whom He loves by the way—and
when we are beseeching Him to do it His way, the loving way, we can mark it
down it will get done His way. And all shall be well, for that is how Jehovah
God operates—we know that to be true looking at the written record of His work
in the lives of people, and by looking at the living record of His work in our
own lives day to day. Hard as it is to swallow sometimes, our enemies are in
our lives for a reason, it is not by accident that they are there.
In another sense, what about war,
those kinds of enemies; are we to love them too? Yes. But consider—suppose one
kills an enemy on the battlefield, that hardly sounds like loving them.
Nevertheless, one must kill on the battlefield or else be killed and/or
put one’s comrades at risk of being killed. War is a different context, and it
is certainly not God-instituted. Yes, one may kill an enemy on the battlefield,
and still love them—it is the height of irony, bordering on the absurd almost;
it is the absurd height to which Sin has “lifted” humankind.
Finally, does not God kill the
unrepentant sinner and unbeliever. i.e., His enemy, in hell, yet He loves
the sinner, to the extent that He laid down His life for said enemy such
that said enemy need not perish (John 3:16, “A Letter of Invitation”)?
4. Quintessential
love, the same is the love of God, and it is unconditional
(AGAPH love in shoe leather). Consider please: while we God’s creatures
were yet His enemy (=sinners), He loved us (Romans 5:8, 1John 4:10). God hates
the sin directed squarely at Him but loves His enemy the sinner. It is a tall,
tall order, but we God’s people must do the same—we must love
unconditionally—and so doing we shall by default love our enemies.
Unconditional love means no agendas, no bias, no prejudices. The same is
certainly ideal here precisely because it is AGAPH love. One cannot attain to
that ideal unless God Himself indwells one and moment by moment, day by day,
births one unto said ideal. It follows that attaining said ideal is only
possible for a believer in and a follower of Jesus Christ, for such a one has
living within them the Holy Spirit of God (John 14:16, 26). It means that the
believer is held to a higher standard and is taxed with a greater
responsibility in the exercise of God’s AGAPH love ideal, for the believer is
informed—he/she knows the enemy-love mandate—and has within them the means to
attain to it.
5. AGAPH
love, the way that God loves, comes by way of the Holy Spirit of God—it is
not natural for a human being to love like that, we are inclined to hate, and
not love, our enemies.
Practice makes perfect as the saying
goes, and by His providential teaching Jehovah God might bring more enemies
before us than we care to have precisely to cultivate His manner of love in us
through a tough regimen of training played out in the fiery furnace face-up
with our enemies. But we get something back from God, as is always the case
with Him, in that while we may be perplexed and vexed by our enemies, if we
utilize their presence in our lives to become more and more like Jesus, we will
in fact become more and more like Him—deity, perfect, the Son of God, indeed,
loving like He loves. One can hardly attain to anything greater than that, it
is unequivocally the Ultimate. Imagine, heaven, our destination and future home
for eternity, will be populated by such blessed spirits; no more evil and
hurtful enemies going forward into eternity future in heaven for the saints of
God. Surely, with God by our side and in our heart, we can weather our enemies’
storms for a little while longer down here in the land of the living, loving
them as best as humanly possible following in the footsteps of Jesus, until we
are called home to that blessed heaven where we are assured by the faithfulness
of Jehovah God to His Word that love and joy and peace dominate and rule. It is
hard to imagine a sublime existence such as that but that is what Scripture
promises the saints of God (Revelation 21:4-5).
6. Forgiveness
suggests having incurred wrongs. That is the rub—the wrongs. And depending
on the depth and severity of the wrongs, forgiveness may be some very difficult
grace to extend to the perpetrator, to the enemy. Clearly, one cannot love an
enemy without first forgiving them. It follows that the first step in the way
of loving an enemy is forgiveness. That is essential. That is the pattern that
God lays down for us to follow. He tells us repeatedly in Scripture that He
loves us, but we are His enemies—sinners, every one of us. And so on the Cross
is found His forgiveness for our sins and…His attendant exceeding love for us.
One cannot aspire to the necessarily lofty love-of-enemy mountaintop without
first clearing the no less lofty forgiveness-of-enemy foothills; the ascent to
the mountaintop begins in the rugged foothills.
7.
Dear Christian friend, how goes the
struggle with your enemies? Are you being bashed, beaten, and bruised, and yea,
maybe even worse than all that? If you wish, take a moment bloodied friend in
Christ and fix on a Cross in your vicinity or simply in your mind, and shift
your focus to Jesus’ enemies, which include you and me, and see Him there dying
for His enemies. No greater love has one for another than to lay down their
life for them, but what shall we say of that love if it is an enemy for which
one dies as Jesus did for us? How great His love for us is indeed. We have been
forgiven and are exceedingly loved by Him, and as His people we must forgive
our enemies and love them even as Jesus forgave us in keeping with His love for
us. It is difficult for us to do that because God built certain defense
mechanisms into our person designed to protect us from hurtful enemies, and so
it is natural to want to resist an enemy, to fight back and whatnot—loving an
enemy does not come naturally to say the least. But we are in the process of transformation unto the Spirit of Christ by that very Spirit.
We are going places that the natural man ever resident inside us is not
familiar with and balks at; we are not quite there yet, the process continues
down here in the land of the living as we in our spirit are being carried along
by the Spirit of God unto Christ-likeness, and so as the process continues it
is understandably difficult for us to always love our enemies and others per se
perfectly like Jesus. Nevertheless, let us be carried along by the Spirit of
God toward ever greater love for our enemies and not resist Him. With each
enemy that God allows into our lives He brings another opportunity for us to be
like Jesus, another opportunity to “get on the Cross next to Jesus” and forgive,
and love our enemies, and glorify God, in solidarity with Jesus, our great
savior God and the Lover of our Souls.
Praised be your Name great
savior God, lover of my soul even whilst beforetime I was your decided enemy.
Thank you for bearing long with me and loving me throughout; thank you for
redeeming and saving my impoverished soul my Lord. Amen.