What Does It Mean to Love Your Enemies?

Does anyone have an enemy? An enemy is an adversary, nemesis, opponent or hostile force. In this sinful, fallen and broken world we all inevitably come face to face with an enemy. The impulse to the hater is to return the hate. Treat them with contempt. Words like isolate, retaliate, castigate, annihilate, and desolate apply to enemies. Jesus Christ, however, taught us to love our enemy. This radical alternative to loving neighbors and hating enemies typified in the world. Loving unconditionally is wholly in conformity to God’s benevolence.

Jesus taught: “You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’ But I say to you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you (Matt. 5:43-44).¹ “Love your neighbor” is a direct quote from Leviticus 19:18; however, “hate your enemy” is never explicitly stated in the Old Testament. The Old Testament, on the other hand, encouraged seizing opportunities to show mercy and compassion towards one’s enemy. Solomon taught, “If your enemy is hungry, give him bread to eat, and if he is thirsty, give him water to drink, for you will heap burning coals on his head, and the Lord will reward you” (Prov. 25:21-22; cf. Exod. 23:4).

We can still find a few passages illustrating God’s hatred of sin. For example, Solomon taught, “There are six things that the Lord hates, seven that are an abomination to him: haughty eyes, a lying tongue, and hands that shed innocent blood, a heart that devises wicked plans, feet that make haste to run to evil, a false witness who breathes out lies, and one who sows discord among brothers” (Prov. 6:16-19). We can also find God’s people sharing the same sentiment towards sin. David declares, ^“Do I not hate those who hate you, O Lord? And do I not loathe those who rise up against you? I hate them with complete hatred; I count them my enemies” (Psa. 139:21-22). In another psalm, he says, “I do not sit with men of falsehood, nor do I consort with hypocrites. I hate the assembly of evildoers, and I will not sit with the wicked” (Psa. 26:4-5). Simply put: “as much as love of neighbors was at the heart of Old Testament teaching, God’s hatred of evil was also a central theme in the Old Testament.”²

Yahweh’s command to love neighbors and expressed hatred of sin is evident in the Old Testament; however, “later groups within Israel took this further by identifying ‘neighbor’ exclusively with those within their Jewish community and the ‘evildoer’ as Gentiles or those outside their community and therefore God’s and their enemies.”³ One can even say that “some Jewish groups, like the Essenes, emphasized hatred toward those outside the covenant,” which made them identical to the world, for even “Greek ethics sometimes stressed learning from one’s enemies’ criticism but also could stress making sure to hurt one’s enemies more than one was hurt by them.”⁴

Love for one’s enemies is Jesus’ radical alternative to the world’s way of loving neighbors and hating enemies, but “undiscriminating love will mark disciples out as sons of your Father, for the son shares the father’s character, and it is the character of God to dispense his natural blessings on all alike.”⁵ Jesus says, “[God] makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the just and on the unjust.” (Matt. 5:45).

Those who display love towards enemies reflect the glory of the Heavenly Father who loves unconditionally. For us, to know God is to know true love, and to show true love is to reflect the glory of God. The Apostle John writes, “In this the love of God was made manifest among us, that God sent his only Son into the world, so that we might live through him. In this is love, not that we have loved God but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins” (1 Jn. 4:9-10). The Apostle Paul, likewise, tells us that “one will scarcely die for a righteous person—though perhaps for a good person one would dare even to die— but God shows his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us” (Rm. 5:7-8). Despite our total depravity, neither meriting nor deserving any favor, God takes the first step in saving sinners from their miserable state of affairs. The Son gives His own life for sinners so that they can receive everlasting life. God is the one who first loved His enemies.

God loves and the Christian response is to participate in that very same kind of divine love. John puts it this way: “Beloved, if God so loved us, we also ought to love one another” (1 Jn. 4:11). The Apostle, of course, is passing on to his community teaching he received from Christ, who said, “A new commandment I give to you, that you love one another: just as I have loved you, you also are to love one another. By this all people will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another” (Jn. 13:34-35).

Without a doubt God has enemies today and the enemies of God are likewise the enemies of God’s people — Christians. In the West, soft persecution tactics are employed against the Church. One of the more popular sneering statements about Christianity comes from New Atheist Richard Dawkins, who writes, “The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction: Jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully.”⁶

Now there are good reasonable answers to such skepticism based upon reason, philosophy, exegesis, and theology. It is necessary for the Christian apologist to offer well-reasoned responses to the objection. (For response to Richard Dawkins and other New Atheist, see “Darwin’s Rottweiler: Fierce Barks, Feeble Bites” by Doug Groothuis, “Contemporary Atheists and Sneer” by Graham Veale, and “The Folly of Answering Distracting Atheistic Arguments” by Clay Jones and Joseph E. Gorra) The refutation is necessary; however, I am more than convinced such is far from sufficient. New Atheist who harbor such sentiments about God and God’s people are to be loved. Just as God sends rain upon their crops along with the crops of the righteous, so too the Christian is to love their enemies. A most profound response to the skeptic who has been deluded into supposing the God of Christianity to be Cosmic Hater (i.e. “a misogynistic, homophobic, racist,”) is to extend love.

Beyond the West and into the rest of the world Christians suffer hard persecution. Open Doors, the ministry of “Brother Andrew” (Andrew van der Bijl) “based on decades of tracking the realities of persecution in some of the darkest corners of the earth” estimates “that roughly one hundred million Christians today suffer interrogation, arrest, and even death for their faith, with the bulk located in Asia and the Middle-East” and “the overall total makes Christians the most at-risk group for violations of religious freedom.”⁷

I can scarcely imagine what it would be like to live in a place where hard persecution against the faith persists. I can only apprehend the fact that God does preserve saints through great tribulation and the martyrs experience vindication through the resurrection life made available through Jesus Christ. I can hardly fathom how loving enemies works in the world of persecuted saints.

There are, nevertheless, instances where even persecuted saints love their enemies. For example, Corrie ten Boom, who was arrested and imprisoned at Scheveningen for helping Jews escape the Holocaust of World War II, she subsequently spent time in the concentration camps at Vught (Herzogenbusch) and Ravensbrück. Due to a clerical error she was released from imprisonment, escaping an inevitable death in the gas chamber. After the war, at a church service in Munich, she met a former S.S. guard from Ravensbrück. Ten Boom could only pray, “Lord Jesus…forgive me and help me forgive him…I cannot forgive him. Give your forgiveness.” At that moment, within her heart sprang an overwhelming love for the man. She then “discovered that it is not on our forgiveness any more than on our goodness that the world’s healing hinges, but on His. When He tells us to love our enemies, He gives along with the command, the love itself.”⁸ For ordinary humans to have this extraordinary divine love for enemies comes ultimately as the result of supernatural intervention.

— WGN

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1. All Scripture cited from The Holy Bible: English Standard Version (Wheaton, IL: Crossway Bibles, 2016), unless noted.
2. Michael J. Wilkins, The NIV Application Commentary: Matthew (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2004), 252
3. Ibid., 252.
4. Craig S. Keener, The IVP Bible Background Commentary: New Testament (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1993), Mt 5:43–44.
5. R.T. France, Tyndale New Testament Commentaries Matthew, vol. 1, ed. Leon Morris (Grand Rapids, MIL Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1985), 129.
6. Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion (New York: First Mariner Books, 2006) 51.
7. John L. Allen, The Global War on Christians: Dispatches from the Front Lines of Anti-Christian Persecution (New YorkL IMAGE, 2013, 2016), 36-37
8. Corrie ten Boom, The Hiding Place, (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 1971, 1984), 262.

(This post was updated on 2/18/2020)