From Jim McGuiggan... Matthew 5:44-45: The rising sun says it's a lie!

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.