Matthew 5:44-45: The rising sun says it's a lie!
If
we cherish bitterness or arrogance or scorn toward fellow-humans we’re
unlike God. As sinners we wrestle with attitudes and feelings like that
but that’s just it—we wrestle against them, knowing in our bones that
we’re not to excuse ourselves by saying it doesn't matter—it does matter.
It’s one thing to lose a battle in these areas and something else to
gutlessly refuse to make war. Jesus Christ said to his disciples of his
Holy Father (Matthew 5:44-45), “Love your enemies, pray for those who
persecute you, that you may be sons 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.”
Luke
records Jesus (Luke 5:35-36) as saying that his Father is kind to the
ungrateful and wicked and that if we want to be his children we’re to be
like him.
It’s
too easy to simplify such calls; they’re much more complex than they
appear. But my suspicion is that that’s not where—in the main—our
difficulties lie. I think we know very well what’s at the heart of such
calls and that because they run contrary to our wants and comfort zones
we analyse them rather than wholeheartedly embrace them.
The
call is clear! If we truly want to be the children of God then we’re to
seek the heart of the Father and reflect his image. Those who make no
profession to be God’s children will make their own way through life but
Jesus teaches us that that approach isn’t open to Christians. In
Matthew 5 Jesus rises above the debate about the meaning of this
specific verse or that (see 5:43) and takes us to the source of all the
verses.
There’s
something truly ugly about the way we justify our self-service and
bitterness, something obscene about our “good reasons” for withholding
forgiveness and fellowship to the repentant. When we work to justify our
bigotry or malice, spite or arrogance, greed or lust while professing to be his children we shame God in whose image we claim to live.
Christ
saw his Father reveal his heart in the daily rising sun and in the
falling rain and they speak as surely today as they did two thousands
years ago.
Every day the sun comes up it says, “Limited atonement is a lie!”
Every day the sun comes up it says, “Racism is a lie!”
Every day the sun comes up it says that our good reasons for being spiteful and shutting people out are lies.
Every
day the sun comes up it says sin is evil but sinners aren’t worthless.
More to the point, it says our enemies aren’t worthless. However our
commitment to our enemies is to be worked out, if we are truly children
of God then we do have a commitment even to those who don’t love us.
©2004 Jim McGuiggan. All materials are free to be copied and used as long as money is not being made.
Many thanks to brother Ed Healy, for allowing me to post from his website, the abiding word.com.