Matthew 5:43-48
Love for Enemies
43 “You have heard that it was said, ‘Love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’ 44 But I tell you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, 45 that you may be children of your Father in heaven. He causes his sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous. 46 If you love those who love you, what reward will you get? Are not even the tax collectors doing that? 47 And if you greet only your own people, what are you doing more than others? Do not even pagans do that? 48 Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect.
I used to wonder why Jesus commanded us to be perfect as God is Perfect in the Sermon on the Mount, when talking about and loving our enemies...When Jesus commands us to love our enemies, He is moving us from a morality of "fairness" to a morality of "perfection."...We ought to love everyone on earth...So we can see that Jesus is taking us to the ultimate "Ought to "—a standard that exists because it flows directly from the nature of a Perfect Moral Father...In our natural state and the way we feel and what we believe, we are inclined to love those who love us and those who like us and who have the same interests as us, a behavior Jesus points out is common even among "tax collectors and pagans."...This type of love is merely a transaction, a social contract that requires no change of heart...However, the Moral Law of Christ demands something much higher: a love that is proactive, unconditional, and directed toward those who may never return it...By doing this, we move beyond the "facts" of human conflict and enter into the "Truth" of Divine Relationship...This helps us better see God's Type of LOVE...
Jesus uses the beautiful imagery of the sun rising on the evil and the good to explain God’s "common grace."...This reveals that God’s character is not reactive; He does not withhold His goodness based on our failures, but rather pours out His blessings because of who He is...When we love our enemies and pray for those who persecute us, we are participating in this Divine Nature...We are proving that we are "children of our Father" by reflecting His Image back into a broken world...This is why the command to "be perfect" is the climax of this passage—it is an call to align our hearts so closely with God's heart that his unconditional love becomes the standard by which we treat every person we encounter...
This teaching bridges the gap between the "Law of Human Nature" that C.S. Lewis described and the spiritual reality found in the Gospel...While the conscience tells us we "ought" to be good, Jesus shows us that "good" means being like God...Loving our enemies is the most difficult task a human can undertake because it requires us to die to our own sense of "justice" and live according to God’s sense of "mercy and forgiveness"... It is a reminder that the Christian life is not about following a set of rules to earn a reward, but about being transformed by a Relationship so profound that we cannot help but extend the same grace to others that the Father has so freely extended to us...
C.S. Lewis, a former atheist, talks about this and began his defense of the Christian faith by pointing to a simple but profound observation about the way human beings argue...He noticed that when people quarrel, they do not merely say that another person’s behavior is inconvenient, but rather they appeal to a standard of "fairness" or "right and wrong" that they expect the other person to know... This led Lewis to conclude that there exists a "Law of Human Nature" or a Moral Law that is just as real as the law of gravity, yet fundamentally different because it can be disobeyed... While a stone must obey gravity and a tree must follow biological facts, a human being is the only part of creation that feels an "ought" sitting above the actual facts of their behavior... Lewis argued that we did not invent this law any more than we invented the multiplication table, as it remains remarkably consistent across different cultures and centuries... He observed that although we all acknowledge this law, none of us actually keep it perfectly, creating a permanent tension between our ideals and our actions... This gap between what we "are" and what we "ought to be" suggests that there is a Power or a Mind behind the universe that is intensely interested in right conduct... If the universe were merely a cold, accidental collection of atoms, we would have no reason to feel "guilty" or "wronged" when someone treats us unfairly... Therefore, this internal sense of morality acts as a pointer, or a signature, left by a Creator who is a Moral Lawgiver... For those who do not know Lewis, his thinking serves as a vital first step in realizing that the universe is not just a series of physical events, but a moral stage where a higher standard is calling us to account... By recognizing that we are "flawed and imperfect" in the light of this Law, we are finally prepared to understand why we need the grace found in the Gospel of Jesus Christ...
We know that God is a Moral God, as we follow Him in Genesis and as He gives us the Ten Commandments...The profound observations made by C.S. Lewis regarding the distinction between the laws of nature and the Moral Law offer a striking gateway into understanding our standing before a Holy God...When we look at a stone or a tree, we see entities that exist in perfect submission to the physical directives God has woven into the fabric of the universe...A stone does not "decide" to fall, nor does a tree "fail" to grow if the conditions are right; they simply are what they are, acting out the facts of their existence without any sense of moral obligation...As we can note, we only call a tree "bad" if it fails to meet our personal expectations for shade or fruit, yet in the eyes of natural law, that tree is perfectly obeying the chemical and biological prompts of its environment...This suggests that in the non-human world, there is no gap between what "is" and what "ought to be"...The sun rises because it must, the tide retreats because it is pulled, and the seasons turn in a rhythmic dance of factual necessity...However, when we turn our gaze toward the human heart, we encounter a startling and unique phenomenon that defies the cold logic of physics...Unlike the stone, a human being is constantly aware of a "Law of Decent Behavior" that they did not invent and cannot seem to fully obey...We find ourselves living in a tension where we know how we ought to behave, yet we consistently choose a different path...This is the "something else" that Lewis identifies—a standard that sits above the facts of our behavior like a judge over a courtroom...
This internal sense of "ought", in fact, this "Very Loud Ought", is not a mere social instinct or a biological byproduct, but is the echoing voice of our Creator inscribed upon our very souls...Scripture tells us in the book of Romans that the requirements of the Law are written on the hearts of men, their consciences also bearing witness...This is why we feel a sense of failure when we act selfishly or dishonestly, a feeling that a stone never experiences regardless of where it lands...When Jesus tells us in the Sermon on the Mount to "be perfect, even as your Heavenly Father is Perfect," He is acknowledging this higher standard that Lewis describes...God is the Perfect Designer...Lewis is pointing to the Original Design for humanity—a design where the "is" and the "ought" were once perfectly aligned in the Garden of Eden...Before the Fall, man functioned in harmony with God’s Moral Law just as naturally as the planets function in harmony with gravity...But the entrance of sin introduced a fracture into our nature, creating a world where we are now "flawed and imperfect" creatures living in a state of constant contradiction...We are the only part of creation that can look at its own behavior and say, "This is wrong"...This realization is the beginning of all true religion and the first step toward the Cross...If we were merely like trees or stones, we would have no need for repentance because we would simply be "obeying our nature" without any moral consequence...
The presence of sickness, suffering, aging, and death is a direct result of this cosmic misalignment...While God created the natural laws of gravity and biology to be good, the introduction of human rebellion allowed a "law of decay" to permeate the physical realm...The Apostle Paul describes this in Romans 8, stating that the whole creation groans and labors under the bondage of corruption...This means that even the "natural laws" we observe today—the aging of our bodies and the eventual return to the dust—are part of a world that is not currently functioning as it "ought" to...God allows these realities, not because they are His ultimate desire for us, but because they serve as a constant, physical reminder of our spiritual condition...Sickness and death are the physical shadows of the spiritual death that occurred when we stepped outside His Laws of Human Nature...Just as Elijah sought comfort and shade only to find that true peace is found in the "still small voice" of God’s Presence, we often seek to fix our imperfections through human convenience rather than divine transformation...Most of the time we do not recognize our flaws and think of God or point to Jesus, we just move on to the next thing we are doing...We try to treat our flaws as if they were merely "wrong shapes" like a stone for a rockery, rather than recognizing them as a fundamental break from our intended purpose...
God's allowance of human freedom—the ability to "behave in our own unique ways"—is perhaps the most mysterious and beautiful aspect of His character...He did not want a universe of programmed stones that had no choice but to obey; He wanted children who could choose to love Him...This freedom, however, carries the heavy weight of responsibility and the inevitable reality of failure...We all fall short of the Glory of God, and the wages of sin is our deaths...Because we are not stones, we are capable of being "bad" in a way a tree never can be...A "bad" man is not just an inconvenient man; he is a man who is actively resisting the very Law of his own being...Yet, it is within this very gap between our behavior and the Law that the Gospel performs its greatest miracle...Jesus Christ came into this world as the only Human Being who ever perfectly aligned the "is" with the "ought"...He lived the Law of Human Nature completely, fulfilling every requirement of the Moral Law that we routinely shatter...By doing so, He became the bridge between our flawed reality and God’s Perfect Standard...Through Him, the "Law of the Spirit of Life" sets us free from the "law of sin and death"...
Ultimately, Lewis’s argument leads us to the conclusion that we cannot save ourselves by simply trying harder to be "better trees"... We must realize that we are more than just biological facts; we are spiritual beings who have lost our way and are in need of a new nature entirely...The sickness and aging we experience are not the "whole story," as Lewis hinted, but are the temporary conditions of a world in wait of restoration...God’s Plan is not merely to make us "convenient" for His purposes, but to make us holy, restoring us to that state of perfection where we will one day obey the Moral Law as naturally as a stone obeys gravity...In that coming Kingdom, there will be no more "ought," for our hearts will be so transformed that we will finally be what we were always meant to be...Until then, we live in the "Presence of God" in our own wilderness, learning to trust that the God who created the sun and the stars is the same God who is working within our imperfections to bring about a masterpiece of His Perfect Opus...We are invited to stop blaming our "soil or weather" and instead look to the Gardener who can graft us into the True Vine...This is the final consequence of recognizing our imperfection: it drives us into the arms of the only One who is truly Perfect...