We are not to concern ourselves with justice at the present time; justice will come later. God knows that those who receive his sunshine and his rain undeservedly will not necessarily be won over by his continued kindness. If they do not respond, there will come a day when justice will catch up with them, but it is not yet. The quest for justice can eat away at us and stop us obeying Christ as he requires. In carrying out the will of God towards our enemies we are to put their case in the hands of God; he will decide when is the right time to end their opportunity to repent. For our part, we can forget about justice, and live towards them by grace, and do our utmost to seek their salvation, that is, to bring them to repentance, so that they receive the forgiveness of the Lord. That is how God dealt with us, and that is how those who witnessed to us behaved towards us, and why can we not give to others the same grace that we have received ourselves? God exercises grace towards the lost while they are enemies, and he has no other incentive than the goodness of his character. As we exercise grace towards the lost, we are reminded of the grace we have already received from God, so we owe them the same. We receive grace and we pass it on; we are a pipeline of grace to others. As it comes to us, it is grace directed at us, not at them, but it should be easy for us to translate that into grace towards our enemies, as we follow the example of God’s goodness towards us. Every resentment that arises in our minds on account of the evil done to us by our enemies, can be set aside as we remind ourselves of what we were and of how others treated us.
And what do we lose by acting in this way? Nothing at all. The flesh tells us that we lose by relinquishing the opportunity to take revenge, but that is an illusion. If vengeance is really our aim, we can leave it to the Lord, who will act far more terribly towards them than we can. But we should not want that to be the outcome, and we should pray from our hearts that God will have mercy on them.
This does not imply that God is indifferent towards us when we show kindness to our friends, and to those who return kindness to us, and that he only takes notice when we show kindness to those who do not deserve it. The Lord looks upon the mutual love of his people with great pleasure (John 15:12). Christ is making a comparison here, for he knows that it is harder for us to love our enemies than to love friends. It is a greater test of our willingness to love when we show love to those who hate us. That is the measure also of the love of God.
‘For sinners also love those that love them.’ Are God’s children no better than sinners. Sinners manage to show love to their friends who do good to them. The human race in its present condition is not yet fallen to the level that men can only hate each other and snarl at each other. That is coming in hell, where all vestige of good will be stripped away, but for now God has left a remnant of his good gifts in mankind. What difference has salvation made to us if it has not enabled us to do more than those who are still far from God? True religion changes behaviour, and enables the believer to do what he could not have done before. At the new birth there is a conscious and glad embracing of the commandments of Christ and an understanding that God is love, and his children must learn to love as he loves. So here is Christ’s very practical test of the improvement that conversion should make in us: it should enable us to behave to some extent as our heavenly Father behaves and to be like him. That grace which is in God and which we marvel at, should also be in us.
We are to love those who do not love us; we are to express that love practically by doing good to those who do not do good to us; and we are to lend to those who are unlikely to repay the loan. In this last case, it is still called a loan, and it would be reasonable to expect that they return what has been lent, but in reality there is a low expectation of this. Nevertheless we respond to the request to borrow, even if we suspect that there is no likelihood of repayment, or that there is no real intention to repay. In lending in this way we are acting in obedience to Christ; it is almost as if he has asked us to make this loan on his behalf, because he too intends to show grace towards this unworthy person, and he privileges us with the opportunity to act as his representative.