Love your enemies

logabe said:

​Love your enemies, do good to them that despitefully use you and your reward will
be great in the Kingdom of God. Col. 1:19-20 says,

​19 For it was the Father's good pleasure for all the fullness
​to dwell in Him,
​20 and through Him to reconcile all things to Himself, having
made peace through the blood of His cross; through Him, I say,
​whether things in earth or things in heaven.

​We are ambassadors of Christ through the work that He accomplished at the cross.
​2nd Corinthians 5: 18-20 says,

18 Now all of these things are from God, who reconciled us to
​Himself through Christ, and gave us the ministry of reconciliation,
​19 namely, that God was in Christ reconciling the world unto Him-
self, not counting their trespasses against them, and He has
​committed to us the word of reconciliation.
​20 Therefore, we are ambassadors for Christ, as though God was
​entreating through us; we beg you on the behalf of Christ, be
​reconciled to God.

​Jesus is the Prince of Peace and we are to follow in His footsteps and become just like Him.
We need to take up our cross and follow Him. The sword that He uses is the Word of God,
​which is, His Law. When we lay down the physical sword and pickup the spiritual sword, His
​Grace begins to work within us to become like Him.

Logabe

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Boll Weevil said:

Good thought, it can seem there are two different principles that God expected/expects from His people. I've wondered this for awhile yet don't have a good answer. Of course it is obvious today as God's people, Christians, we are to love our enemies and this trumps His expectations from His people mentioned in the Old Testament.

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junobet said:

Yeah, Stranger, of course Jesus was just handing out some courtesy rules for Thanksgiving Dinner with annoying Aunt Ethel. Contrary to what Matthew 5:43-48 might indicate to fools who take it literally, surely Jesus doesn’t want His followers to behave in radically different ways from the rest of the world.
Ever heard the word “lukewarm”?

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junobet said:

Yes, I’m aware of your position, Stranger. You still overlook the fact that Jesus has literally given us a new commandment (John 13:34) and you think that it is enough to accept Christ as Lord with our lips only, whilst carrying on with business as usual. Well, good luck with that, but I fear that you’re building your house on sand (Matthew 7:24-27).

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junobet said:

As the Sermon on the Mount tells us: even pagans love their brothers, that alone is not a new accomplishment! And as I’ve already pointed out to you: the Sermon of the Mount does not just make promises about the Kingdom of Heaven, but tells us how to give witness of it right here and now. The peacemakers are blessed for they will be called children of God. The peace-making has to be done right now. Do warmongering instead and see what that will get you called in the Kingdom of Heaven.

He has indeed opened my eyes and transformed me into a better person than I could be without faith. That’s why I can be no other than opposed to the death penalty and a pacifist willing to win life by losing it.


You got something seriously wrong here: I do believe the Bible to be inspired. But I’ve got rather old-fashioned notions about what ‘inspired’ means and don’t go for the new-fangled and plainly ridiculous notion that you seem to entertain. The Pope winces at the Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy just as much as I do.


Your belief that the Bible is inspired by God will remain phoney lip-service that leads you to nothing as long as you bend scripture’s meaning to your personal liking, which is what you do here.
Mind you, I understand why the Sermon on the Mount is a hard pill for you to swallow. I myself am certainly not as perfect as the Sermon on the Mount demands. There’s a good many nasty people both in my private and in public life that I find hard to love. However, I don’t make false excuses: I know that I ought to love them, I pray for being given the ability to love them and I feel sorry for whenever I did not love them. God loves us in spite of our own nastiness and if we don’t pass that on, we truly deserve to end up like the unmerciful servant in Matthew 18:21-35.

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Dcopymope said:

Well, as Donald Trump once said, the Hebrews had to "drain the damn swamp". That was not a time to show "love", but to make war against the nations surrounding them who hated God's people and would have completely destroyed them had they not have made war with them. To put it simply, we wouldn't have Jesus Christ as our salvation because the Hebrews would have been eradicated. That is why God told the Hebrews to kill anything that moves when they made their way into the promised land.

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junobet said:

I did not call you a warmonger, but whom the shoe fits … ;-)


The death penalty reflects the forgiving and healing Spirit of Christ that should be mirrored in our thoughts and actions?


“If anyone comes to me and does not hate father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters--yes, even their own life--such a person cannot be my disciple.” (Luke 14:26)

I should think this makes it very clear what to choose when it comes to a choice between defending our family and following Christ’s way of peaceful resistance.


“Jesus said, "My kingdom is not of this world. If it were, my servants would fight to prevent my arrest by the Jewish leaders. But now my kingdom is from another place." (John 18:36)

If His Kingdom is not of this world, nor should ours be. Christianity and Patriotism go together as Christianity and Mammon do: whenever they enter into an unholy marriage this compromises and soils Christianity.

Abusing the Bible to justify war, makes one a warmonger.


You may honestly hold these beliefs, that I assume were taught to you, but IMHO this interpretation of Scripture is extremely warped:

I already pointed you to the fact that - being God - Christ reigns forever. Nowhere in Scripture does it mention a 1000 year reign of Christ. What is mentioned is a 1000 year reign of Christ with “those who had been beheaded for their witness to Jesus and for the word of God, who had not worshiped the beast or his image, and had not received his mark on their foreheads or on their hands.” (Rev. 20:4b). Note that this verse speaks of people who got killed for their witness to Jesus, not of people who did kill. Christians such as Maximilian the Martyr (274-295) got beheaded for refusing to join the military. Another thing that I already explained to you that numbers in the Bible, especially in the Book of Revelation, are mostly not to be taken in their literal but in their symbolic meanings. We can derive their symbolic meaning from having a look how the Bible uses these numbers elsewhere. (For “1000 = completion/full number” see for example Psalm 50:10). The Bible clearly tells us that Christ already reigns right now:

“18 And Jesus came and spake unto them, saying, All power is given unto me in heaven and in earth.
19 Go ye therefore, and teach all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost:
20 Teaching them to observe all things whatsoever I have commanded you: and, lo, I am with you always, even unto the end of the world. Amen.“ (Matthew 28:18-20).

According to the Bible Christ will reign with abovementioned martyrs until the end of the world on judgement day, after which God will be all in all and there’ll be no more enemies for us to love because all animosity has ceased and there are no more enemies. The Kingdom of Heaven is not just reserved for a future day, the seeds for it are already sown into us. If we have faith in Christ and observe His commandments, these seeds will grow. (Matthew 13)


What is new-fangled is to claim that the Bible is verbally inspired without leaving any room for its human dimension, thus falling into the trap of bibliolatry. It is also new-fangled to claim that the Bible per se makes statements about historical or scientific facts in the way you think it does. Christians as early as Augustine have warned against such silly claims and their damaging effects.
And yes, as far as I’m aware of Popes quite frequently give Bible homilies. It usually takes a degree in theology including Biblical Studies to become Pope. So I should think they are well equipped to do so. Being a Protestant myself I don’t feel obliged to follow Papal authority, but here’s just one Papal advice concerning the Bible that I reckon to be rather good: http://www.catholicnews.com/services/englishnews/2015/through-thick-and-thin-pope-urges-youths-to-read-the-bible.cfm


There are many Christians with whose view on Biblical inspiration I disagree and that don’t give me cause to suspect them of lip-service. It is lip-service if one does not follow through with the claim that the Bible is always to be read literally, but starts to flat out ignore the Bible’s literal sense, whenever the literal sense does not suit one’s personal agenda.
You may not have noticed it yet, but your eschatology in which you seek to postpone love of enemy whilst – praise be - admitting that God grants you the ability to do so already now, literally does not make sense. And see above: reading the Bible literally defending ourself, our family and nation is not what Christians are called to. We’re supposed to be the guys that happily get martyred rather than use violence.


Christ did not kill for our salvation. He died for us rather than allowing His disciples to use violence in His defense and allows for His followers to suffer and get martyred in this world. So getting killed rather than having our spouse become a killer is the option we should prefer:

“ 38 The one who doesn’t take up his cross and follow me isn’t worthy of me. 39 The one who finds his life will lose it, and the one who loses his life because of me will find it.” (Matthew 10:38-39)

Tough one, I know.

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junobet said:

You keep saying we’re not under the law anymore. But then you reckon the death penalty is still valid. Why? Do you think we just get to pick the laws we want to keep and to throw out those we don’t want to keep?
As I understand the Bible there’s only one law we’re meant to keep, and that’s the double-commandment of love. It’s love that will never fail (1 Corinthians 13:8). And very clearly the Death Penalty is not guided by love.


Of course He did: I already pointed you to the story of Jesus and the adulteress and the Parable of the unmerciful servant. With these in mind you still feel entitled to condemn anybody to death? Even though you yourself are a forgiven sinner, you yourself don’t want to show mercy?


Jesus became guilty? What’s that supposed to mean? Clearly the Gospel of Jesus’ life, death and resurrection does not tell us that we are to embrace the death penalty, it tells us that Good will prevail instead of it.


Oh hear! So you don’t believe Luke 14:26 is verbally inspired and literally true? Why is that? Because you find hating your family too counterintuitive and offensive for this verse to be literally true? And yet your Christian compassion doesn’t make you find the idea, that God should actually have ordered genocide, equally counterintuitive and offensive; and you view the Book of Joshua as verbally inspired and literal historical fact without question? Surely you realize that - if this conquest ever took place - its victims must have been somebody’s beloved father, mother, sister, brother, child … .
However, personally I don’t even need to violate my own hermeneutical principles to agree with you that Luke 14:26 doesn’t mean to tell us to literally hate our family. It tells us to always and absolutely put our discipleship to Christ first, even above our Family.



We don’t know what happened to Cornelius after he converted. If he did not leave the Roman army, he certainly did not defend his country but helped to aggressively expand it.
And why should Christians care about countries anyway, when we know that wordly Empires come and go? We worship God, who created the entire world, each single hair on your head as well as on mine and on everybody else’s, whether they live in America, Europe, the Middle East or Subsaharan Africa … .
If you want to learn about the Kingdom of Heaven instead and about how to serve it, I strongly recommend you put the Book of Revelation aside for a moment and get engulfed in the Parables. Sadly it seems many Christians have stopped paying any attention to them whatsoever.


Nonsense! War is a product of our human sin. Remember, God promises that people “will beat their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning hooks (and) nation will not take up sword against nation, nor will they train for war anymore.” (Isaiah 2:4/Micah 4:3). That’s what He wants for us. It seems you somehow got stuck with the tribal warrior god the ancient Israelites had in mind rather than following up on how divine revelation unfolded, finding its pinnacle in Jesus Christ. Praise be that the current Pope has a more wholesome picture: https://zenit.org/articles/popes-morning-homily-there-is-no-god-of-war/


I’m sorry, but it certainly comes across as if justifying war is what you are after.


The Bible isn’t interested in science and if we ask eminent old-school theologians such as Calvin the Bible is not to be taken for accurate science. If you want to learn about science, that’s what God’s other Book, the Book of nature, is for. http://www.ccel.org/ccel/calvin/calcom01.vii.i.html#Bible:Gen.1.16


I amply demonstrated that your interpretation is far from literal. Just repeating it rather than coming up with actual arguments for it/countering mine against it, won’t help to convince me of your eschatology, let alone the opinion that soldiers are in any way more courageous than martyrs. However, it seems you’re not the first one who thinks the Messiah ought to be a Lion, not a Lamb, and who doesn’t understand the power of martyrdom:

“18 For to those who are perishing, the preaching of the cross is foolishness, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God. 19 For it is written:
“I will destroy the wisdom of the wise,
and will bring to nothing the understanding of the prudent.”[a]
20 Where is the wise? Where is the scribe? Where is the debater of this age? Has God not made the wisdom of this world foolish? 21 For since, in the wisdom of God, the world through its wisdom did not know God, it pleased God through the foolishness of preaching to save those who believe. 22 For the Jews require a sign, and the Greeks seek after wisdom. 23 But we preach Christ crucified, a stumbling block to the Jews and foolishness to the Greeks. 24 But to those who are called, both Jews and Greeks, we preach Christ as the power of God and the wisdom of God. 25 For the foolishness of God is wiser than men, and the weakness of God is stronger than men.
26 For observe your calling, brothers. Among you, not many wise men according to the flesh, not many mighty men, and not many noble men were called. 27 But God has chosen the foolish things of the world to confound the wise. God has chosen the weak things of the world to confound the things which are mighty. 28 And God has chosen the base things of the world and things which are despised. Yes, and He chose things which did not exist to bring to nothing things that do, 29 so that no flesh should boast in His presence.“ (1 Corinthians 1:18-29)

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junobet said:

The story of Noah also mentions a dove + olive-branch + rainbow, the very symbols used by the Christian Peace-Movement. http://ncpo.org.uk/

As for Noahic Law: I take it you’d never eat a bloody steak. But you may want to take a closer look at the Gen. 9: 5-9 and the dire consequences it would have if actually taken literally: If a man’s blood has to be shed by man for shedding man’s blood, that will result in blood shedding until the last man standing commits suicide.

You say this law has never been revoked, I say enough blood has been spilled on the cross to cover for us all. We live under a New Covenant with a New Commandment.


Glad to hear you don’t want to stone adulterers. Still I hope that - as a forgiven sinner who knows he ought to forgive others their sins - you realize that the actual point of this pericope is not restricted to adultery.


Christ, being blameless, carried the sin of the world, one of those sins being that people crucified Christ. And if He had not considered crucifixion a sin, He’d hardly have felt the need to forgive those who crucified Him (Luke 23:34).


Jesus tells us to not just love our family and friends but also our enemies, literally so and in the present tense. What He literally does not say in the Sermon on the Mount is: “Don’t worry about these commands of mine, they are for the distant future.” In fact Christ literally insists on us to be taught to obey all that He has commanded (Matthew 28:18).
Contrary to the branch of Protestantism you seem to belong to, I never claimed that everything in the Bible is to be understood literally. So I’m not breaking any of my personal doctrines when I read the Bible with a at least some basic knowledge in literary science, when trying to discern what in it is and what is not to be taken literally. Context is everything: Matthew 5:44 is to be taken very literally, the rest of the passage and the Bible (read with Christ’s life, passion and resurrection at its center) make this abundantly clear. But I fear you may be too occupied with Gen 9 to meditate much on Romans 12:17-21. Do I personally always like what this verse commands? No, the old Adam in me still raises his vengeful head here and there. But with the help of Christ I can rule him in. I trust you could, too.


I base my theory on the teachings of Christ about love, forgiveness and our call to martyrdom.



God never changes, but our human ideas of Him did. God’s ultimate self-revelation is Jesus Christ. Back in the NT-times people who understood the OT’s prophecies about the Messiah in the way you do, expected a great warrior leading armies into glorious battle. They were very dissappointed by Christ’s first coming. And I have an inkling some will be dissapointed by His Second Coming also. Whatever this Second Coming is going to be like, I would rather be found on the side of the martyrs who made their robes white in the Lamb’s blood (Revelation 7:14), than on the side of “the kings of the earth and the great men and the rich men and the commanding officers and the strong” (Revelation 6:15).


Yepp, Lutheran/Reformed United to be precise, from the very heartland of the Reformation. As such I feel perfectly entitled and even obliged to be fond of what- or whoever my conscience tells me to be fond of, even if it is a Catholic Pope. And that I do indeed think that the current Pope got very many things right, does not mean I feel in any way inclined to celebrate Mary’s ascension.
Other Christians I’m quite fond of are Martin Luther King and Desmond Tutu. I don’t need to become Baptist or Anglican to be in awe in how Christians like these proved the teachings of non-violent resistance as given in the Sermon on the Mount to be rather effective.


As Christians we are to be brave enough not to take part in the killing. If this conscientious refusal gets us killed, like so many before us we’ll get those abovementioned white robes.



In your head it may be literal, it clearly ain’t literal by the Bible’s letters.
As for the Bible being a Book of Redemption: quite so, but it tells us that redemption requires repentance and change of heart.

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