Do the Word

Part VIII of our series on Doing Good

In our last post, we discovered how God is not threatened by his enemies.  Instead, he loves them (us) by giving his son up for them.  That’s a very physical kind of love.

Now compare God’s love to actor Brad Pitt’s:

He is considered to be one of the top celebrity do-gooders. He loves New Orleans and has worked hard to help people there recover from the destruction of Hurricane Katrina.

Then came the BP oil spill.

It happened because of the carelessness of BP and many fishermen lost their jobs as a result. Tourism dropped. Fish and animals died. It will take years for New Orleans and the Gulf of Mexico to recover.

When Brad Pitt was asked about the oil spill, he said in reference to the executives at BP:

“I was never for the death penalty before—I am willing to look at it again”

Why does Brad Pitt love the people of New Orleans but hate the executives from BP? It might simply be because the people of New Orleans are victims and the executives from BP are trouble-makers, but that oversimplifies things considerably, doesn’t it?

A survey done by the Pew Research Center and reported in Christianity Today says that evangelical Christians favor cutting…

• assistance to needy people around the world (56 percent),
• assistance for the unemployed (40 percent), and
• assistance for environmental protection (38 percent).

On the flipside, evangelicals report being in favor of spending money for

• military defense,
• terrorism defense,
• aid to veterans, and
• energy.

I hope this is because evangelicals know that caring for the needy and unemployed is a task for the church and not only the government, but the survey does not say why. I hope it is not because evangelicals’ care for the needy and the unemployed is decreasing, but that may be true, too.

John Wesley said the reason why the rich do not have more compassion for the poor is that they spend little time around them and thus do not know much about them or how they live. Perhaps the same thing is even true with Brad Pitt and the executives at BP.

So maybe we hate the people we do because, unlike God, we are threatened by them. Maybe we hate them because we don’t see them very much and thus we can make assumptions about how and why they think and act the ways they do.

Brad Pitt and evangelical Christians give to those they love and those that can help them. They sometimes wish harm on their enemies. But in Luke 6:33-35, Jesus says:

“And if you do good to those who are good to you, what credit is that to you? Even sinners do that. And if you lend to those from whom you expect repayment, what credit is that to you? Even sinners lend to sinners, expecting to be repaid in full. But love your enemies, do good to them, and lend to them without expecting to get anything back. Then your reward will be great, and you will be children of the Most High, because he is kind to the ungrateful and wicked.”

Lend to your enemies without expecting anything in return??? That sounds crazy! But perhaps it is far more sensible than it first appears.

In Luke 12:34, Jesus says, “For where your wealth is stored, there also will your heart be” (WNT). When Brad Pitt gives significant money to the struggling poor of New Orleans, he has done a good deed. His heart is with the people of New Orleans.

But what if Brad Pitt took all of his money and bought stock in BP Oil—the company which is his enemy?

His personal well-being would now be completely tied up with that of his enemy. He could no longer have the convenience of being able to criticize them and wish them harm without hurting himself. If Brad Pitt invested all of his money in both his friends and his enemies, how do you think it would change his actions and his attitudes? Do you suppose he might go to BP shareholder meetings?

The Bible tells us in John 3:16 that God the Father invested all of his “wealth”—his only begotten son—in his enemies. Do you remember that verse? “For God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son…”

He gave his son as a gift to his enemies without expecting anything in return. In fact, they killed the gift. But God raised that gift, his son Jesus, from the dead. He was not afraid of what his enemies could do to him.

Are you afraid of what your enemies can do to you? 

When Jesus tells us in Luke 6:35, “Love your enemies, do good to them, and lend to them without expecting to get anything back,” he is not asking you to do something new.

Instead, he is asking you to mirror into the world—to your enemies and his—what he did, and to do so in his name. In this way, our enemies will come to see—and touch—his great love. Because the kind of love he is talking about is a long-term commitment, not a one-time act. That’s the difference between loaning money to your enemies and giving it to them.

Sometimes the best gifts we can give are the ones that tie us together with our enemies for a long period of time. That gives God time to work on their hearts…and ours.

When you loan your enemies money, you will become very prayerful for them! And this is what Jesus is advocating: Tie together your well-being with that of your enemies and his.

In this way you will never forget to passionately intercede for them and do good to them.

How else might we be able to tie ourselves together with our enemies?

Part VII of our series on Doing Good

The book of 1 John begins with this verse:

“That which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we have looked at and our hands have touched—this we proclaim concerning the Word of life.”

One of the themes we come back to again and again  is that the Christian life is very physical.

We are here because God creates a physical world in which his glory may be manifested, and he creates human beings in his image to manifest his glory. Through the sin of the first Adam, human beings abandon their vocation; through the victory over sin of the second Adam, human beings recover their vocation, in him. And all of this happens in the physical world, as the spiritual world watches on, influences the action, and presses in on every side. But it is a physical calling to which we are called, and in the end we don’t abandon the physical and go to heaven; we sleep, and then we are resurrected physically to a new heavens and a new earth, where God makes his home among very physical human beings.

When Christ undertakes his earthly mission, he is in all ways physical like us. The one difference between he and us is that he did not sin. Because he did not sin, evil could not touch him. Look at how this played out in Luke 4:14-30.

First of all, he describes a very physical mission:

Jesus returned to Galilee in the power of the Spirit, and news about him spread through the whole countryside. He was teaching in their synagogues, and everyone praised him. He went to Nazareth, where he had been brought up, and on the Sabbath day he went into the synagogue, as was his custom. He stood up to read, and the scroll of the prophet Isaiah was handed to him. Unrolling it, he found the place where it is written:

“The Spirit of the Lord is on me,

because he has anointed me

to proclaim good news to the poor.

He has sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners

and recovery of sight for the blind,

to set the oppressed free,

to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.”

Then he rolled up the scroll, gave it back to the attendant and sat down. The eyes of everyone in the synagogue were fastened on him. He began by saying to them, “Today this scripture is fulfilled in your hearing.”

All spoke well of him and were amazed at the gracious words that came from his lips. “Isn’t this Joseph’s son?” they asked.

Jesus said to them, “Surely you will quote this proverb to me: ‘Physician, heal yourself!’ And you will tell me, ‘Do here in your hometown what we have heard that you did in Capernaum.’”

“Truly I tell you,” he continued, “no prophet is accepted in his hometown. I assure you that there were many widows in Israel in Elijah’s time, when the sky was shut for three and a half years and there was a severe famine throughout the land. Yet Elijah was not sent to any of them, but to a widow in Zarephath in the region of Sidon. And there were many in Israel with leprosy in the time of Elisha the prophet, yet not one of them was cleansed—only Naaman the Syrian.”

And then look how they are unable to lay hands on him:

All the people in the synagogue were furious when they heard this. They got up, drove him out of the town, and took him to the brow of the hill on which the town was built, in order to throw him off the cliff. But he walked right through the crowd and went on his way.

In fact, in Luke 8:43-46, Jesus is genuinely surprised when someone–a woman with an issue of blood—is able to touch him:

And a woman was there who had been subject to bleeding for twelve years, but no one could heal her. She came up behind him and touched the edge of his cloak, and immediately her bleeding stopped.

“Who touched me?” Jesus asked.

When they all denied it, Peter said, “Master, the people are crowding and pressing against you.”

But Jesus said, “Someone touched me; I know that power has gone out from me.”

Listen carefully to how Jesus describes his coming crucifixion.

He teaches his disciples in Mark 9:31, “The Son of Man is going to be delivered into the hands of men. They will kill him, and after three days he will rise.” (Note the statement of the Gospel there.) And again in Mark 14:41, in the Garden of Gesthemane, “Returning the third time, he said to them, ‘Are you still sleeping and resting? Enough! The hour has come. Look, the Son of Man is delivered into the hands of sinners.’”

When Jesus is resurrected from the dead and when he appears in heaven in the book of Revelation (see Revelation 5:1-6, for example), he continues to bear the marks of his having been in the hands of sinners.

God gives Jesus as a gift to his enemies.  Jesus willingly accepts being handed over as that gift. And in that process, we learn something very important about the difference between how God views his enemies and how we view our enemies:

God is not threatened by his enemies.

God is not intimidated by his enemies. God is not frightened of his enemies. God is not worried about what his enemies will do to him.

Instead, God loves his enemies. Physically.

In our next post, we’ll look at how and why God commands us to do the same.

For now, comment below and share your thoughts about why God would be emphatic about loving his enemies physically.