Love Your Enemies, Part 1 B

What makes you different? Grace to you with John MacArthur.

I'm your host, Phil Johnson. Have you noticed that wherever you go in this world, responsibility follows. You're responsible to your boss and to those who you work with. You're responsible to your family members at home, and you're responsible to the work God is doing in your local church. No matter how many areas of responsibility you can think of, intersecting each one of them is your responsibility to accurately represent Jesus Christ. Today, John MacArthur helps you take a hard look at how well you're doing in that, specifically in representing Christ by showing love for your enemies. John calls his study love no matter what.

So follow along as John begins today's lesson. From the very beginning, God has always called the people to uniqueness. He has always called the people to another standard, to a higher level. And God's people, for some reason, are always pulled down. And prophet after prophet after prophet came singularly and in duos and trios and so forth, they came continuously pleading with God's people to be sure they maintained their unique standards. To fall below was to dishonor God.

But kingdom character, and I'll mark this, kingdom character is to be absolutely distinct, absolutely unique, and the key to it is that you can't live that way unless you are infused with divine power. And so Jesus is saying to the Pharisees, your system is substandard and until you come to Me for power, you will never be able to live by My standards. And now as we come to chapter 5 verses 43 to 48, He contrasts their love with the kind of love that should characterize the subjects of His kingdom. And what He's doing is telling them that they're not in His kingdom, they don't qualify. Let's look what He says about this subject of love in verse 43.

It's such an important one. He says to them, as He has said in the five previous comparisons beginning in chapter 5 verse 21, your law says this, mine says this. Your law says love your neighbor, hate your enemy. Now where did that come from? Did that come out of the Bible?

No. Nowhere has the Bible commanded us to hate our enemies. Where did they get that? I mean, what do they do, just make that up? That's right. It was the logical extension of their perverted thinking. You see, what they did was they said, all right, we are to love our neighbor. Now we've got to figure out who is our neighbor, right? So they said our neighbors are the Jews, not the Gentiles. That's what the Pharisees believed. Only the Jews qualified and among the Jews, only certain Jews, right?

Certain Jews didn't qualify as neighbors. For example, look at Matthew 9, 10. And Jesus passed forth from there, verse 9, saw a man named Matthew. Matthew was a tax collector.

All right, then verse 10. He's Jesus meeting with a tax collector. It came to pass as Jesus sat eating in the house, behold, many tax collectors and sinners came and sat down with Him and His disciples.

Now you have two categories of people, tax collectors. They were the renegade, traitor, rebel, extortionist Jews that were despised by the people because they had sold out to Rome for money. And then there were the sinners. They are the public sinners, the displaying sinners, the prostitutes and the criminals.

And the Pharisees saw it and they said, what? Why eat your master with tax collectors and sinners? So they said their neighbors are the Jews, but only the Jews who aren't tax collectors are sinners.

So we eliminate all of them. They aren't our neighbors. In fact, they found a woman taking an adultery one time and they picked up stones to stone her. So it was a very defined neighbor. So they have eliminated the tax collectors and they have eliminated the sinners and they eliminated the rabble mob that weren't committed to the law the way they were. You know who their neighbors were? The people in their group, that's who. And if you were in their group, you would be loved, but outside their group you were an enemy, whether you were the rabble mob or a tax collector or a public sinner.

If you weren't one of them, you know, it was us for no more, bar the door, commitment to ourselves and nobody else. They fed their evil, proud hearts by concluding that anyone not a neighbor was to be hated. In other words, they said, the Bible says, love your neighbor, therefore if someone who is not your neighbor...therefore someone who is not your neighbor is not to be loved and the opposite of love is hate, so love your neighbor means hate your enemy. That's what's known in legal arguments as a non-secular argument.

It does not necessarily follow. But that's the way they reasoned because they had a perversion in their hearts to begin with. Their prejudice found a way. By the way, they didn't read far enough in Leviticus 19 either. If they'd have read verse 34, they would have read this, the stranger who sojourns with you shall be to you as the native among you and you shall love him as yourself. If they'd have read a little farther, they would have known that even a non-Jew, a stranger, whatever he was, was to be loved as they loved themselves. Had they conveniently ignored Exodus 12.49, there shall be one law for the native and one law for the stranger who sojourns among you.

There are different laws for different people. If you are to love, you are to love and it is as broad as the commandment of God is broad. One of the evasive maxims of the Pharisees that we've discovered in archaeology is this statement. Listen, if a Jew...this is what they taught. If a Jew sees a Gentile fallen into the sea, let him by no means lift him out for it is written, thou shalt not rise up against the blood of thy neighbor, but this man is not thy neighbor. In other words, if you see a Gentile drowning, stand there and enjoy it. Don't save him.

He's not your neighbor. With such an outlook, it is little wonder that the Romans charged the Jews with hatred of the human race. Now frankly, there's some reason to see why they were able to twist Leviticus 19 to fit their own prejudices. No place in the Old Testament does it ever say to hate your enemy, but there are some things in the Old Testament that at first might be a little hard to understand.

So let's move from our first point, the tradition of the Jews, to the teaching of the Old Testament. Where did they ever get these ideas? They wanted a way to hate. They wanted to justify it in their religious system so it wouldn't encroach on their self-righteousness. So they had to invent some way to hate.

And no doubt they found a couple of good excuses. One would be the Old Testament promises to exterminate the Canaanites. You'll remember that when God brought Israel into the land of promise, the land was filled at that time with the Canaanites who were vile, wretched people.

In fact, archaeology has shown us that there has not been a race of people found that were worse than the Canaanites. They were a despicable thing. They were a cancer on human society of the worst kind. Human sacrifice, bloodletting, massacres of babies, you name it, the Canaanites did it.

Horrible, orgiastic kind of things. And so the Canaanites were to be wiped out. And when Israel came into the land, they were told regarding the Ammonites, the Moabites, and the Midianites to wipe them out. They are not to be treated with kindness. Deuteronomy 23 verses 3 through 8, that whole section there, says that all of these people, Midianites, Ammonites, Moabites are to be treated with no kindness but they are to be done away with.

Now later on we read that also the Amalekites were to have the same fate. In fact, God says, wipe not only them off the face of the earth but the memory of them as well so they won't even be remembered. So here was God saying to these people, you go in there and you clean those people out of that land. And certainly the Pharisees would have looked on this and said, you see, God says, boy, you know, you've got to hate your enemies.

Go get them. And some people have been confused by this. They say, how could God be the same God who said love your enemies and the God who wanted to wipe out all these nations?

Now that's a kind of a confusing thing at first. But there was another thing that probably added fuel to their fire too and that's what is known as the imprecatory Psalms. Those are the Psalms in which David praised judgment on his enemies. And people have often said, well how can the Bible say love your enemies? And then David's praying, oh God, judge my enemies, oh God, punish my enemies, catch them in a trap, catch them in a snare, you know, and so forth and so on, judge them, Lord, do away with them. How can he be praying that if he's supposed to be loving his enemies? And so no doubt they had taken some of these imprecatory Psalms and used them as a basis.

I'll give you an illustration. Turn in your Bible, and I want you to look there with me, to Psalm 69, because I think it will help you to understand this. In Psalm 69, David here is praying one of these imprecatory Psalms. He's calling judgment down upon these evil people. And notice in Psalm 69 verse 22, it gets pretty heavy.

It's really pretty stirring maldictions that he gives. He says regarding these enemies, let their table become a snare before them and that which should have been for their welfare, let it become a trap. Let their eyes be darkened that they see not and make their loins continually to shake. Pour out thine indignation upon them and let thy wrathful anger take hold of them.

Let their habitation be desolate and let none dwell in their tents. For they persecute him whom thou hast smitten and they talk to the grief of those whom thou hast wounded. Add iniquity unto their iniquity and let them not come into thy righteousness. Let them be blotted out of the book of the living and not be written with the righteous. Now that's pretty heavy stuff. I mean, that's given both barrels, God, and don't spare anything.

Spare anything. Now did this become a justification for the hatred of the Pharisees? Very possibly, along with the destruction of the Canaanites.

They would say, well see, this is the way it is to be, boy, the enemies we are to hate. And they used it as a justification for their own personal hatred and vendettas. But if they did that, and it's likely they did, then they missed the point of both the word to destroy the Canaanites and the Psalms because they have nothing to do with personal relationships.

There are certain things that are judicial laws that do not apply in terms of personal relationships. And they had again confused that. They had taken the judicial code of an eye for an eye and they dragged it down and made it a way of living on a day-to-day basis.

And the same thing is true here. They had taken the judicial acts of a holy God and preserving a righteous seed and they had dragged it down to be a justification for their personal hatreds. Let me show you what I mean by that. In the first place, the Canaanites were a vile people, so nauseating and corrupt were their abominations that the Bible says the land vomited them out. They were a vile, wretched people. When someone goes to the doctor with cancer and the doctor cuts the cancer out, we don't say the doctor is a cruel, unloving, uncaring, unsympathetic, without-compassioned person.

We thank him for cutting cancer out. And when God said get rid of the Canaanites, that was not an act of evil, that was an act of goodness to take out of human society a wretched, filthy, vile people that would do nothing but pollute it. And that is a judicial act on God's part. That does not give license to an individual Jew to despise an individual Canaanite or to hate him because of something that he has done. What God does in His judicial acts does not change the fact that the same God who judged the Canaanites loved every one of them with the same love He loves you. Just as I love my child when I punish my child, the punishment comes because of the evil.

It does not deny the love. So there is a judicial element. If Israel had followed their customs, Leviticus 18 says she would have shared their fate and God wanted to preserve a righteous seed.

Why? To bring out a righteous Messiah to redeem the world. And so the preservation of Israel was a great concern with God's heart so that He would have a witness in the world and He was cutting a cancer out of human society.

We have enough sense even today, at least a few places in the world, to set apart individuals in our society who do nothing but bring cancer on our society, who kill and maim and steal. We set them aside and God was doing no more than that in a collective way in setting aside those evil people for the good of society. The wars of Israel, wrote Dietrich Bonhoeffer, were the only holy wars in history. For they were the wars of God against the world of idols. It is not this enmity which Jesus condemns, for then He would have condemned the whole history of God's dealing with His people. On the contrary, He affirms the Old Covenant.

There was a place for a holy war then. Well what about the imprecatory Psalms? What about David calling down all this judgment on his enemies? Listen, you miss the point in Psalm 69 if you don't read verse 9, because that explains verses 22 to 28. What does Psalm 69, 9 say? For the zeal of thine house hath eaten me up.

Stop right there for a minute. David, why are you so upset? David, why are you so concerned? David, why are you praying judgment on these people? Because of what they have done not to me, but to your house, you see.

This is not personal. David, believe me, had the greatest enemy in his life be his only son...or his son, Absalom. And David prayed that God would judge his son and God would judge his enemy and yet he cried from the deepest part of his heart, O Absalom, Absalom, my son, my son. The fact that he prayed for judgment to glorify God and preserve his people didn't mean he didn't love his son.

And those are things you have to hold in tension. We love the lost and yet we pray that God would be vindicated and their sin would be stopped, do we not? We love the lost with all our hearts and our hearts ache for those without Christ and yet we pray that Jesus would come and set His kingdom up and put the unrighteous people aside. We have the same reaction of dear John the Apostle as he saw the vision in Revelation 10 and he said it wouldn't scroll into my mouth and I saw what was going to happen. It was both sweet and bitter. It is sweet to see Christ reigning again. It is bitter to see what happens to the lost.

Why? Because he had the tension of loving God with all his heart and loving people too. And that's the way it was with David. It was zeal for God's house that ate him up and the reproaches of those who reproached you are falling on me. He says, I'm not defending myself, it's you I'm defending. It's one thing to defend the glory of God and the honor of God, it's something else to hate people personally.

And you have to understand those two in balance. The judgments and curses are always judicial, not personal. What is to be my attitude toward anybody, even my worst enemy? My attitude is to be one of forgiving love while at the same time I pray, O God, do not let Your enemies continue to dishonor Your name but take the glory that is due to You.

My great attitude toward an enemy is to love him and to pray God would save him and if God doesn't save him, that God would judge him so that he can bring Christ to be the rightful ruler of this world and set righteousness in its proper place again. Well you see, the scribes and the Pharisees never made any distinction in this tension. They took judgment passages and because of their evil perverse and prejudiced hearts, they allowed them to become justification for them to hate people.

That was the wrong thing altogether. I think I can sum up my thoughts by having you look at Psalm 139. Psalm 139 verse 19.

Now listen, most interesting Scripture. Psalm 139, 19, David again is saying, "'Surely Thou wilt slay the wicked, O God.'" In other words, he's saying, God, it can't always be this way. It wasn't meant to be this way. "'Depart from me therefore, you bloody men, for they speak against Thee wickedly.'"

See, that's the right attitude. It's not me I'm defending, God, it's You. "'And Thine enemies take Thy name in vain. Do not I hate them, O Lord, that hate Thee? And am not I grieved with those who rise up against Thee? I hate them... watch this... with perfect hatred. I count them mine enemies.'" Stop right there.

Now wait a minute. David, you're hating...yes, he says, but I'm hating them with what kind of hatred? Perfect hatred.

Let me ask you a question. Is it right to be angry? Is it right to be angry? No. Is there such a thing as righteous indignation? Yes. Is it right for me to be angry when somebody offends me? No. Is it right for me to be righteously indignant when somebody dishonors God? Yes. It would have been right for Jesus to say, you can't talk to me that way and punch somebody.

No. But when Jesus came to defend the holiness and the honor of God with a whip, it was right. There's a difference between anger and holy wrath.

And you want to know something? There's a difference between personal hatred and perfect hatred. That's what David's talking about. And then he says this, "'And Lord, I know this is perfect hatred. I know it isn't personal.'" Verse 23, "'And You search me, O God, and You know my heart and You know my thoughts and You see if there be any wicked way in me. You check out my heart, Lord, and You'll see that my hatred is a perfect hatred.'"

It isn't personal. It's not a vendetta. It's not a wrath for someone who's an enemy, who's opposed me.

I love that. Yes, we pray for God's glory to be vindicated. Yes, we pray for an end of the unrighteous who curse His name. Yes, we allow God to come in fire and flaming vengeance. Yes, we know the same Jesus who said, love your enemies to the Pharisees, also said to the Pharisees, you are woeful. Matthew 23, and I pronounce on you doom. Yes, we know that judicially that will become a judgment. Judicially, God will act in punishment, but that's for God to do.

And in defense of God, we'll uphold His holy name. But in our personal relationships, we are to be characterized by loving our enemies. That'll make us different than everybody in the world. People in the world love their friends. They do a pretty good job at that. They love their families, not bad at that either. And they're even compassionate and sympathetic to people who don't have much. But people in the world don't love their enemies.

Believe me, they don't love their enemies. People in the world may not kill, but they get angry. People in the world may not commit adultery, not all of them, but they do it in their hearts. People in the world may do all illegal things in their divorces, but they shouldn't have divorces anyway. People in the world sometimes keep their word, but they ought to always keep their word. People in the world retaliate, some of them on a very equal basis, but they don't forgive and forget. And people in the world love, but they don't love like this. And Jesus is saying, I don't want you to be like them. Go back to verse 47 again.

What did He say? And what do you more than others? What makes you different? You're not going to be different if you just sprinkle a little Christian activity on your human life. You're not going to be different if just a little bit of commitment goes over to Christ. What makes you different than anybody else? If you belong to my kingdom, for one thing, it is that you love your enemies.

It's a pretty high standard. To love them, said John Stott, is ardently to desire that they will repent and believe and be saved. If you love them enough, they just might respond to the Christ who lives in you, made visible through that love.

Let's pray. Who am I, Lord, to speak this message when the standard is even beyond me or anybody, but I speak as your spokesman and I speak to my own heart. May we love like you love, like Jesus loved, even those who hate us most. Father, we can't do it on our own.

There's no way. Thank you for the promise of Romans 5.5 that the love of Christ has been shed abroad in our hearts. You've given us a new capacity to go with a new command, to go with a new life. As new creatures called to a new kind of love, may we tap that capacity that's there by the presence of the Spirit of God. Give us magnanimous, big, forgiving, loving hearts that there might be a validation of our testimony. And Jesus lifted up, and truly, some of your enemies turned into friends in response to such love. For your glory, we pray.

Amen. That's John MacArthur, chancellor of the Masters University and Seminary. Today's message here on Grace To You is from John's study, Love No Matter What. As we heard today, interpreting Old Testament principles was a challenge for first-century Jews, and of course, it can still be a challenge for us today. One example related to loving our enemies comes to mind, John. In the Old Testament, we see God sometimes calling his people to crush their enemies. So how do we reconcile that call to conquer enemies with Christ's call to love our enemies in the New Testament?

You know, when you look at that, that's a very important question, because people can get stuck on that. One thing you have to start with is the responsibility of the individual is different than the national purpose of God with Israel as the, I guess, the force of his vengeance. It's crystal clear that God said to Israel, when you go into the land, you're going to be a judgment tool.

You're going to be my judgment tool to destroy the ungodly nations. There were reasons for that. I mean, they would be like the Hamas of that day. So there were times when God used the nation in an official way to act as his weapon against his enemies.

Never does that transition into an individual. That's right. Love your neighbor as yourself is an Old Testament law. It is an Old Testament law. It's the second commandment, of course. So that never gives place to personal vengeance. You also have in the Old Testament, vengeance is mine, I will repay, says the Lord. So what God did when he used Israel as his judgment nation on occasions did not cancel out the personal and individual responsibility. The New Testament picks up on the individual responsibility in a story, for example, like the Good Samaritan, that when you see somebody who's, I guess, ostensibly an enemy, you meet his needs.

And that would be consistent on an individual level. The law of lex talionis, an eye for an eye, tooth for a tooth, again, that was criminal law. That was a law that had to be adjudicated. You couldn't just go kill your enemy. There was an official declaration that death for death, life for life. But that had to be adjudicated in a principle and legal way, even within the nation of Israel. So you didn't have people running around just killing the unconverted. Rather than that, they were supposed to be the witness to them.

That's right. And that's a helpful clarification. And of course, friend, being an effective witness means knowing and communicating God's Word. To help you with that, I'd encourage you to get a copy of the MacArthur Study Bible when you get in touch today. To order the MacArthur Study Bible, call us at 855-GRACE, or go to our website, gty.org. You can choose from the New American Standard, New King James, and English Standard versions.

We also have many non-English translations, including Spanish, German, Italian, and Mandarin. Again, to order the MacArthur Study Bible, call 855-GRACE, or log on to gty.org. Now, if you've benefited from John MacArthur's current series or a recent study, perhaps his series, Foundations, Volume 2, we want to hear from you. Your comments help us plan out the programs we air, and your tangible expressions of support help keep us a strong voice on stations around the world. So thanks in advance for your encouragement. You can send us an email by writing letters at gty.org, or if you prefer regular mail, write to Grace To You, P.O.

Box 4000, Panorama City, California, 91412. Now, for John MacArthur and our entire staff here at Grace To You, I'm Phil Johnson. Be here tomorrow when John shows you what kind of love God requires and how well your love matches up to His standards. It's another half hour of unleashing God's truth one verse at a time, on Grace To You.