Love Your Enemies: It Is the Way of Jesus

The people of God knew he sent the rain. It was a regular reminder of his grace, his kindness, and their absolute dependence on God to provide what they needed to live. The “evil” and “good” are now described with the parallel terms “righteous” and “unrighteous” (some translations have “just” and “unjust”). Our Father loves and cares for them all, each and every one. They all get the light of the sun and the nourishment of rain. When we love our enemies, those who have now been redefined as our neighbors, we are acting like our heavenly Father. Sinclair Ferguson provides helpful clarity and perspective on all this:

Can we really love those who have been hostile to us? Not as long as we live by the principles of the kingdoms of this world, which at best encourage us to ignore our enemies, and at worst to retaliate against them. Only the Kingdom of God can provide sufficiently strong motives to help us love our enemies: your Father shows love to his enemies every day in giving the sun and the rain to the righteous and the ungodly alike. He has every right to retaliate against sinners for the dishonor they have done to his creation. Instead, he shows mercy and patience. We are to do the same. Like Father, like son! (Sermon, 103)

Matthew 5:46-47

Citizens of the kingdom of God live distinctively different lives as they display the character of their heavenly Father and as they live as salt in an impure world and light in a darkened world. To love only those who love you in return is nothing more than “self-serving pragmatism” (Quarles, Sermon, 166). Even lost pagans do that. Virtually everyone does it. We must not lower our standards and be like everyone else. You are a new creation in Christ (2 Cor 5:17). You now live in a new kind of way. You now love in a new kind of way. Jesus once again puts two examples before us for our careful consideration. After all, “If you love those who love you, what reward will you have?” Eschatological judgment will not be a happy place for such persons.

Tax collectors were despised and hated in Jesus’s day. They were viewed as traitors to their own people in their service to Rome. Many were virtual thieves because they manipulated tax rates for personal gain. “Licensed robbers” was how the common Hebrew person saw them. A righteous, law-abiding, and faithful Jew believed he had nothing in common with these infamous rogues. Jesus said, “Not so quick!” Even tax collectors have and enjoy friends—other tax collectors, for example! He asks, How are you any different from them if you only love people who love you? No doubt this example would have stunned and angered our Lord’s Jewish audience. However, our Lord is not finished. He will inflame their anger even further with his second illustration.

Jewish hatred for Gentiles often rivaled their hatred of tax collectors. MacArthur notes, “Gentiles were outside the pale of God’s mercy and concern, fit only for destruction as His enemies and the enemies of those who thought they were His people” (Matthew 1–7, 349). I could just imagine how a Hebrew viewed a “Gentile tax collector”! They were filled with hate upon hate, no doubt.

We see their immense hatred in how they interacted with Gentiles. Greetings in the ancient world usually expressed some kind of blessing. It was similar but more than our greeting, “Good day.” As a result, some Jews would never greet a Gentile, and some Gentiles would never greet a Jew (Quarles, Sermon, 167). They would only greet their friends, those like them. They greeted only those to whom Jesus refers as “your brothers.” Jesus says there is absolutely nothing remarkable about this action. You are more like a lost Gentile than the loving God. Your behavior is “more pagan than divine” (ibid., 188). There is nothing different about you at all. Nothing distinguishes you from the world. There is no evidence you belong to the kingdom of God (v. 3), that you are a child of God (v. 8), or that you have a righteousness that exceeds that of the scribes and Pharisees and will get you into heaven (v. 20). How we treat our enemies says a lot about us. It may even indicate where we are headed when we die.

Matthew 5:48

A number of times in the Bible we are told, “God is . . .” These declarations reveal something about the nature and character of God. For example, we find the following affirmations in Scripture:

Jesus adds to these marvelous statements another type of “God is . . .” in verse 48. He says, “Your heavenly Father is perfect.” The immediate context is how we love our enemies. Quarles notes, “Love for others, including one’s enemies, is the essence of divine perfection and the key to true righteousness” (Sermon, 169). Let’s take a closer look at exactly what is before us here.

God’s expectation is clear even if in our own efforts it is utterly impossible. We must “be perfect.” In the greater context of the Sermon on the Mount, the idea of moral purity and practice is also before us. We are to reflect the character of the God to whose kingdom we now belong. This is where we are headed in our future glorification. Who and what we will be someday in eternity should impact how we love and conduct ourselves today. We are to be what we are becoming! We pursue the ideal with the full confidence and conviction that we will arrive there. First John 3:2-3 puts it perfectly:

Dear friends, we are God’s children now, and what we will be has not yet been revealed. We know that when he appears, we will be like him because we will see him as he is. And everyone who has this hope in him purifies himself just as he is pure.

Because we have the hope, a certain hope, that we will be like him, we pursue purity as he is pure. We pursue perfection as he is perfect.

In 1 John 3:2-3 the pattern is Christ. In Matthew 5:48 the pattern is our heavenly Father. There is no difference! The Father and the Son are one (John 10:30). As the Son is like his Father, so too should the disciple be like his or her Savior. This is the pattern Scripture sets before us. Paul understood this truth and extended it in the process of discipleship in 1 Corinthians 11:1 when he writes, “Imitate me, as I also imitate Christ.” Again, the immediate context in our text is how we love our enemies. The greater context is the Sermon on the Mount itself. I love how Spurgeon puts it:

What a mark is set before us by our Perfect King, who, speaking from his mountain-throne, saith, “Be ye perfect, even as your Father which is in heaven is perfect”! Lord, give what thou dost command; then both the grace and the glory will be thine alone. (Exposition, 32; emphasis original)

Loving our enemies is to treat others the way God the Father, in Christ Jesus, has treated us. As Paul says in Romans 5:8, “But God proves his own love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us.” Paul adds in Romans 5:10, “While we were enemies, we were reconciled to God through the death of His Son.” Andy Davis says, when we love our enemies, “we will imitate our heavenly Father and grow towards the perfection that salvation in Christ will eventually complete in us (Matt 5:48)” (loving our enemies to humility and provides ten good reasons to be humble toward our opponents. There is excellent food for thought here as we conclude this study:

What does it look like practically to be humble toward our opponents? There are many ways we can live out God’s call to be humble. Here are ten: