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Transcript of 1997 Issue 7 - Sermon on Luke 6:17-49 - The Command to Love Our Enemies and the Imprecatory Psalms -...
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8/12/2019 1997 Issue 7 - Sermon on Luke 6:17-49 - The Command to Love Our Enemies and the Imprecatory Psalms - Counsel of Chalcedon
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The ommand to Love
loving lips of our Lord jesus.
fulness if
we
are
to
know
Him
as
'
..
O U
Entmtes and the
These
prayers signal alarm to
all
He
really is.
He
is, of course, the
Imprecatory Psalms
who
are
still enemies of
King
loving and merciful Savior who
A problem arises
for
some and
jesus.
His
prayers will be
forgives sin; but He also clearly
it is this: how is it possible to
answered God's wrath is revealed
tells us that He is the one who is
harmonize loving our enemies and
upon
all who oppose Christ.
coming in judgment on those v.:ho
praying the imprecatory psalms
Anyone who rejects God's way of
disobey the gospel, Thes. 1:
6f.
"-
with reference
to
our enemies?
forgiveness
in the cross of
Christ
Adams,
pg.
4Of.
First, we must define and identify
will bear
the
dreadful curses
of
God." -
Adams,
pg. 33.
The Prayers ofJesus
for
the
the imprecatory psalms. They
are
Forgiveness ofSinners and for
those psalms which pray for the
"All the enemies of the Lord
theJudgment
of
Sinners
curse and wrath of God
to fall
need
to
hear these prayers of
upon His enemies. These psalms
Christ proclaimed today. They
These prayers, (imprecatory
include: Psalm 58:6-10;
are not the prayers of a
careless
psalms), then, for woes
59:12,13; 69 :24-28; 55:15; 6:10;
and com passionless tyrant, but
unutterable upon enemies, are the
83: 17. Should Christians who
are
the effectual prayers of the Lamb
prayers of Christ
Himself. But
the
called to 'love their enemies pray
of God
who
bore the curse of
God
difficulty to many minds about
such psalms of imprecation?'
for
the sins of
all
who
bow
their
this is that it seems inconsistent
Here are some
with
His
helpful
prayet for
comments on
enemies,
this issue by
'Father,
jamesE
forgive them;
Adams from
for they bow
his book WAR
. not what they
PSALMS
OF
do.' , .That the
lliEPRINCE
two prayers
OF PEACE.
fell from His
Jesus nd the
lips, we know;
Imprecatory
and thatthey
Psalms
represent
two
The same
different
Christ who
thinj1:s which
issued the
He
'received
as
,cdmtriand to love our enemies
a commission
from
the Father to
knee to
Him.
The wrath of
the
do, we know. He has power on
also:
prays
imprecatory psalms.
psalms must be preached as
the
earth
to forgive
sins, and
He
has
these psalms have historically
wrath of the Lamb of Cod. God's
power on earth to execute
been understood as being the
kingdom is
at war "- Adams,
pg.
judgment upon enemies ... The
voice of Christ. Augustine wrote
on Psalm 58, "The voice of Christ
34.
Psalms themselves present both
and His Church'was well-nigh the
These
"war
psalms" which
sides of His Mediatorial character
only voice to be heard in the
Christ prays
for
God's
vengeance,
and work in this respect." - james
Psalms ... We ought
to
recognize
must not dilute the
force
of
Dick quoted in Adams, pg. 38. '
His voice in aU the Psalms."-
Christ's command
to love
our
'Jesus is indeed the forgiving
Adams,
pg.
32.
"The
Lordjesus
enemies. Is jesus' prayer for
Savior, and
we who
have
Christ is praying these prayers of
God's vengeance on His
enemies
a experienced
His
forgiveness
vengeance. The prayers that cry
contradiction of His prayer oflove
gratefully
give Him
the praise of
out
for
the utter destruction of the
for their forgiveness and ofHis our being. But this does not
psalmist's enemies can only be
command to love? NO "
We
negate that He is also tlie
grasped when heard from the
must receive jesus Christ in
His
awesomejudge."-
Adams
.
pg.
41.
4 .f THE COUNSEL
o
Chalcedon f August
1997
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8/12/2019 1997 Issue 7 - Sermon on Luke 6:17-49 - The Command to Love Our Enemies and the Imprecatory Psalms - Counsel of Chalcedon
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The Lavefor Our Enemies and
the
Vengeance o
God
There is never a
place for
seeking personal revenge in the
lives of God's people, Rom.
12:19-21. However, God says,
Never take
your
awn revenge,
beloved,
but
leave
room
Jar
the
wrath oj God, Jar
it
is written,
'Vengeance is
Mine,
will repay,
says
the Lord. '- Rom. 12:19. All
of our
vengeance
must
be given
over to the
Lord. Every impulse
to
gratify
ourselves by
avenging
a
wrong
done
to us is surrendered
to the Lord as we truly
follow Him.
-
Adams,
pg.
46.
To pray the imprecations
of the
Psalms
is
to
surrender
all rights
for vengeance to
God. It
means
being
prepared to snffer and to
endure without personal
revenge
or hatred as Christ
did. It
involves being gentle and loving
even when I am
reviled
and
persecuted. It encompasses
acknowledging in all
my
ways
that
God's cause
is more important
than I
am. -
Adams, pg.
56.
Therefore,
where do we get
the idea that it is wrong to ask
God
to
bring judgment upon the
wicked?
-
Adams, pg. 47.
Righteous retribution is one of
the
glories
ofthe divine character.
If it is right that
God
should
desire
to
exercise
it, then it cannot
be
wrong for
His
people
to desire
Him to exercise it.' Dabney in
Adams,
pgs.
47-48.
We
should pray that our
enemies
be
converted and become
our friends, and if not, that their
doing and designing
be
bound
to
fail and
have
no
success
and that
their persons perish rather than
the
Gospel
and the
Kingdom of
Christ. Thus the saintly martyr
Anastasia, a wealthy, noble
Roman
matron, prayed against her
husband,
an
idolatrous and
terrible ravager of
Christians, who
had flung her into a horrible
prison, in which she had
to
stay
and
die. TIlere
she lay and
wrote
to the saintly Chrysogonus
diligently to pray for her husband
that, ifpossible, he
be
converted
and believe; but if not, that he
be
unable to carry out his plans and
that
he
soon
make
an end
of
his
ravaging.
Thus
she
prayed him
to
death, for he went to
war
and did
not return home. So
we, too,
pray
f 1: our
angry enemies,
not that
God
protect and strengthen them
in their
ways,
as
we
pray
for
Christians, or that He help them,
but that they
be
converted, if
they
can be;
or,
ifthey
refuse,
that
God
oppose them, stop them and end
the game
to
their harm and
misfortune. - Martin Luther
quoted by
Adams,
pg.
62.
The
Struggle Between the
Kingdom of Light and the
Kingdom of Darkness and the
Command to Love Our Enemies
The
church that
is
conscious
of the
life
and death struggle
between the
two
kingdoms
will
not exclude hatred for
Satan's
kingdom
from
its
love
for
God's
kingdom.
The
church is
compelled to show love unto all
men and to pray
for
their
conversion. At
the same
time,
with her
eye
fixed on the promise
of the coming of the
day
of the
Lord
in which all God's enemies
will
be
crushed eternally, the
church prays
for
the hastening of
the day of judgment. - Harry
Mennega
in Adams, pg. 50.
God's kingdom cannot come
without Satan's kingdom being
destroyed. God's will cannot
be
done in earth without the
destruction of
evil.
Evil cannot be
destroyed without the destruction
of men who are permanently
identified with it. Instead of being
influenced by the sickly
sentimentalism of the present day,
Christian people should
realize that the glory of God
demands the destruction of
evil.
Instead of being
insistent upon the assumed,
but really non-existent;
rights of men, they should
focus
their attention upon
the rights of
God.
Instead of
being ashamed of the ImpreCatory
Psalms.
and attempting to
apologize
for
them and explain
them away, Christian people
should glory in them and not
hesitate to use them in the public
and private exercises of the
worship of God. - Johannes G.
Vos
in Adams,
pg.
50.
The Enemies
o
God s
People
According to the Pharisees
The Pharisees perverted the
Scriptures, misinterpreting those
Scriptures to teach that there is
justification
for
hating anybody
they did not like,
as
their enemies.
In so doing they destroyed the
great principle oflove so clearly
taught in God's Law. Your enemy
could be JUSt about anybody,
whether he was God's enemy or
not. Included among those
identified as the enemies of the
Jewish people were the oppressive
non-Jewish overlords in control of
the civil government, whom the
August,
997
j THE COUNSEL
ofChalcedon
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8/12/2019 1997 Issue 7 - Sermon on Luke 6:17-49 - The Command to Love Our Enemies and the Imprecatory Psalms - Counsel of Chalcedon
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Jews were taught to hate.
Furthennore, there was hostility
between the
GOOD
Israelites,
who were devoted
to
the
traditions of the scribes and
Pharisees, and the BAD Israelites,
who were not so devoted to thei.r.
traditions. And then there were
racial and ethnic hostilities .
between Jews, Samaritans and
Gentiles. This environment bred
hatred between people.
"It was in the midst
of
his
intensely narrow-minded,
exclusivistic, and intolerant
environment that Jesus carried on
is ministry. All around im
were those walIs and fences. He
came for the very purpose of
bursting those barriers, so that
love---pure, warm, divine,
i n 6 n i t e ~ w o u l d be able
to flow
straight down from the bean of
God; hence
from His
own
marvelous hean, into the hearts of
men.
is
love overleaped
all
the
boundaries of ace, nationality,
patty, age,
sex, etc." - Hendriksen
The
Way
to Love OUT Enemies
Jesus said
we
are
to
love
olir
enemies by doing good
to tbj:m
when they hate us, and to
bless
those who curse us, and to pray
for
those who mistreat us.
2
This
is how the Christian is to respond
when he is insulted by others
beCause of Christ.
His
command
t us here is to return benevolent
actions fot spiteful actions, retum
kin(f words for bitter words:
And
when we are being cruelly '
persecuted by our enemies
because we are Christians, we
milSt
sincerely ptay fot those
who
persecute us. We must get on
our knees, and talk to ourSelves .
before
we
talk
to God.
Instead of
being bitter and harsh,
instead of
reacting in these tenns ofself and .
ina desire to get our own way, we
must remind ourselves that in
everything we do we
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pacifidsm, the refusal
to
resist
evil, or self-defence when our
well-being is threatened, is a
misuse of this verse. A slap in the
face
or the demand
for
our coats,
may be insulting, humiliating and
inconvenient, but it is not a threat
on our life. It is an insulting
experience, but not a
life-threatening experience. It
may cause us discomfort and
inconvenience, but not real injury.
The EJ(:ample
ofJesus
tnJohn 18:22,23
Jesus
is
commanding
love
that
acts
wisely,
courageously and with
intelligent purpose. Rather than
to
give way
to anger when he is
snuck unjustly on the cheek or
even to strike back in anger
as
natural right dictates, the disciple
who has this love in his hean will
offer
the
other cheek
for
a second
blow that would otherwise not be
struck. A false literalism would
make a farce ofJesus' precept.
The faCt that anything of this kind
is excluded
we see
in the action of
Jesus Himself when He was struck
without cause in John 18:22,23,
. where
He
furnishes us the
commentary on this precept.
Lenski.
The Control o Anger by Love
The point Jesus is making is
that
LOVE
CONTROLS ANGER.
If the civil government, with its
power of the sword acts as the
enemy of your filmily, and tries to
insult and intimidate you, and to
make demands on you, (regarding
your coat), which ii has no right
to demand, do not argue with
your enemy over your rights, take
the insults and overbearing
demands, out oflove
for
your
family. Don
't make your enemy
angry
so
that he will try
to do
serious harm to
you
or your
family ; do whatever is possible to
get him away from your door. Be
more concerned with your
DUTIES than your
RIGHTS.'
The Necessity o the
Denial of Self
The spirit of retaliation is a
deadly one. To practice this
command ofjesus
we
must repent
of such spirit; and we
can
do
that
only when we deny ourselves. To
be the kind ofloving disciples
Jesus demands,
we
must become
dead
to
ourselves. I must have a
proper attitude to my self, so that
I won't want to take revenge on
those who insult or embarrass me;
and a proper attitude toward my .
possessions so that I won't want
to
take revenge when unjust
demands are made on them by
civil government. It is not that
our Lord is giving us here a
complete
list
of what
we
have to
do in every circumstance and
condition which
we
are likely
to
meet in life.
He tells
us first that
we have to die
to
self. What does
this
mean?
This paragraph, Mat.
5:38-42, shows us how
we
can
do
that; it shows us some
ways
in
which
we
can test ourselves
as
to
whether we are dying
to
self or
not. - Uoyd-Jones, pg. 280.
We must rid ourselves of this
constant tendency to be watcbing
the interests of self,
to
be always
on the look-out for
insults or
attacks or injuries, always in this
defensive aUitude. That is the
kind of thing He has in mind. All
that must disappear, and that of
course means that
we
must cease
to be sensitive about self. This
morbid sensitiveness, this whole
condition in which self is on .the
edge' and
so
delicately and
sensitively poised and balanced
that the slightest disturbance can
upset its equilibrium, must be got
rid of. The condition which our
Lord is here describing is one
in
wbich a man simply cannot be
hurt. ''':'- A statement which the
great George Muller once made
about himself seems to illustrate
this very clearly. He writes like
this: 'There was a day when
I
died, utterly died, died to George
Muller and his opinions,
preferences, tastes and will; died
to the world, its approval or
censure; died
to
the approval or
blame even of my brethren and
mends; and since then I have
studied only to show myself
approved unto
God.
That is a
statement to be pondered deeply.
I cannot imagine a more perfect or
adequate summary of our Lord's
teaching
in
this paragraph than
that. - Uoyd-Jones, pg. 291f.
The Relationo
Love
and the
Concern
fOT
th Maintenance o
Law and Order
''What our Lord says is that I
am not
to
be concerned about
myself, my own personal honor
and so on. But that is a very
different thing from being
unconcerned about the
maintenance oflaw and order, or
about the defence of the weak and
unprotected. While I must and
should be prepared
to
suffer any
personal insult or indignity that
man can ever inflict upon me, I
should at the same time believe in
law and order. - Uoyd-Jones, pg.
282f.
The Rewncilation ofJe5US
Command and Jesus Example
How do we reconcile such '
Biblical
teachings as Luke 6:29;
Matthew 5:39f with John
18:22,23; Matthew 18:15-11; Acts
16
:37? Our Lord here in the
Sermon on the Mount seems
to
be
saying that invariably you must
tum the other cheek, or if ever
you
are
sued
for
your coat you
August, 997 ' THE COUNSEL of Chalcedon ' 7
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must throw in your cloak as well.
But He Himself, when
He
is
smitten
on
the face, does not tum
the other cheek, but registers a
protest. And the apostle Paul
insisted upon the magistrate
coming down to release Him. f
we accept the original principle,
there is no difficulty at
aU
in
reconciling the two sets of
statements. It can be done in this
way. These instances are not
examples and illustrations of
either our Lord or the apostle
insisting upon personal rights.
What our Lord did was
to
rebuke
the breaking of the law and His
protest was made
in
order to
uphold the law. He said to these .
men,
in
effect: 'Youknow by
striking Me like this you are
breaking the law.'
He
did not
say:
'Why do you insult
Me?'
He did
not lose His temper or take it as a
personal affront.
He
did not
become angry, or show concern
about Himself. But
He
was
concerned
to
remind these men of
the dignity and honor of the
law.
And the apostle Paul did exactly
the same thing. He did not make
a great protest about having been
thrown into prison. His coucern
was that the magistrates should
see that by throwing him into
prison like that they were doing
something that was illegal and
were Violating the law that they
had been appointed to carry out,
So he reminded them of the
dignity and honor of that law.
The Christian is not to be
concerned about personal insults
and personal
defE;Ilce. But
when it
is a matter of honor and justice,
righteousness and truth, he MUST
be concerned and thus he makes
his protest. - Lloyd-Jones, pg.
284f
6:30) The Command to Give
Without Demanding a Return
Give
to everyone
who asks
of
you,
and whoever takes away what is
yours, do
not
demand
t back.
e ~ e
we
have two commands
in
one:
(1). if anyone asks
something from you, and you give
it, do not demand it back; and (2).
if anyone takes away something
from
you, do not demand it hack.
The Constant Readiness
o Love t Help
Love will
always
be ready to
help,
to give
without expecting a
return. But it need not be said
that Jesus could not inculcate
indisCriminate giving such as
fosters
shiftlessuess and other
evils. - Lenski.
Passages
such
as
I
John 3:17,18, Deuteronomy
15:7-10 and Proverbs 21:26
reaffirm this command; and
passages such as
II
Thess. 3:lO,
Exodus 22:25-27, Chronicles
19:2, Proverbs 11:15; 17:18;
20:16 and Proverbs
28:
17 reveal
the limits and conditions
to
this
command.
Of course, this again could be
interpreted
in
a mechanical and
literal manner so
as
to
make it
ridiculous. But what it really
means can be put in this
form.
t
is this denial of self once more. It
is jIlst our Lord's way of saying
that the spirit which says, 'What I
have I hold, and what is mine is
mine; and I cannot listen to the
request of those other people
because ultimately I may suffer: is
completely wrong.
He
is rebuking
the wrong spirit of those who
are
always
considering themselves,
whether they are being struck on
the face, or whether their coat is
being taken, or whether they are
compelled to carry the baggage or
to
give
of their own goods and
wealth to help someone in need.
Let
us now
go
immediately
to
the
qualification, realizing that that is
8 1=
THE COUNSEL
of
Chalcedon ' AllgliSt
997
the principle. Our Lord does not
encourage us here
to
help frauds
or professional beggars or
drunkards. - Lloyd-Jones,
pg.
288. (to be continued)
'An excellent book on the
imprecatory
psalms and
their role in
the prayers of the Christian is WAR
PSALMS OF THE PRINCE OF PEACE:
LESSONS FROM THE IMPRECATORY
PSALMS
y
ja'1les E. Adams, (1991,
Presbyterian and Reformed Publishing
Co., Phil1ipsburg, New jersey).
lThese
imperatives are
in the
present tense denoting continuous
c t i o n c p v e r i n g the entire lives of true
disciples of Christ.
just
as the usual
and continous behavior of our enemies
is to keep on hating, cursing and
mistreating, 50 the usual and
continuous behavior of beliefs toward
these people is loving, doing good,
blessing and praying for them. 1hey
may go on in their wickedness toward
us we too
will
go on in our love and
loving treatment of them; they shall
never outdo us. - l..enski
'Martyn Uoyd-jones makes a
helpful comment on Matthew
5 ; 4 1 ~ A n d whoever
shaII
force
you
to
go
on.
mU.,
o with him two. He writes:
This compelling to go a mile is a
reference to a custom which was very
common in the ancient world by
means of which a government had a
right
to
commandeer a
man in
a matter
of porterage or transport.
A
certain
amount of baggage had to be moved
from one place to another, so the
authorities had the right to
commandeer a man at any place and
they would make him carry the
baggage from that stage to the next.
Then they took hold of someone else
and made him take it to
the
next stage,
and so on. This of course
w s
a
power that was especialIy exercised by
any c.ountry that
had
conquered
another
and
at
this
time
Palestine had
been conquered by the Romans. The
Roman rmy was
in control
of
the life
of the jews, and they very frequently
did this sort ofthing. - THE SERMON
ON THE MOUNT, Vo\. I, pg. 286,
(London, Inter-Varsity Press,
1966
.