The issue with loving your enemies
Understanding the times
A great paradox of today’s Christianity is that we heavily emphasize Jesus’ teaching to love our enemies while tacitly maintaining that Christians should never, ever have enemies.
The prevailing way Christians approach culture in our modern day is through winsomeness—trying to get the culture to see we’re nice, loving people in hopes that will make them warm to our preaching.
For this reason, many genuinely believe that the only reason the masses are not Christian and our culture is spinning into chaos is because churches have been too heavy-handed with the truth.
From this mindset, acknowledging we have enemies, naming them, and engaging them is the worst thing we could do.
But if you can’t see that Christ and His church have enemies right now, I’m afraid you live in an unbiblical fantasy land.
When a Christian school in Nasvhille was shot up by a woman who claimed to be a man, the media, the cultural influencers, and even the highest officials in the land made the response all about defending the shooter’s identity group.
We heard from the White House Press secretary about how “the trans community is under attack.” Hours after the shooting, ABC News thought it important to remind viewers that Nashville was, in fact, where a recent law was passed to ban gender-reassignment treatment - as if to say “this violence against children is the consequence.” The Country Music Television awards featured a group of drag queens in a performance broadcast from Nashville just days after the shooting.
On the bright side, at least Madonna announced a benefit concert in Nasvhille.
Wait, correction: she announced a benefit concert, alright… but for the trans community.
In other words, all of these groups have treated the victims in one of two ways: they have either ignored the victims and their families, especially ignoring that it was an explicitly Christian community, or hinted that they had it coming. And they’ve done so while running past them to embrace the community of the shooter, a community they claim without any sense of irony is “under attack.”
Beyond all of this, scores of tweets can be found boasting the shooting as trans revenge for the Tennessee anti-gender treatment law. “You [messed] around and found out,” one widely-shared tweet said.
Again, if you can’t see that Christ, His truth, and His church have enemies right now, what world are you living in?
So, who specifically are these enemies?
Oddly, not the Nashville shooter. She was merely a pawn in the game of the real enemy, a pawn the likes of which there will be many more. How do we know that?
There is a clear effort being made to lure children away from familial and religious moorings and recruit every vulnerable young person into this abominable ideology.
They want to recruit my children and yours and subject them to their degeneracy, as evidenced by drag queen story hour, pride parades, and a steady infusion of their ideas into television shows and movies aimed even at preschoolers. When I was a kid, Cartoon Network showed Scooby Doo and the Flintstones. Now they want to lecture kids about LGBT rights.
Call it what it is - grooming. And they’re succeeding with countless vulnerable youths.
Don’t forget, the entire community is rife with suicide attempts and raging depression statistics, showing a deeply unhealthy, unhappy way of life.
Now, mix in an insistence that they are under attack by Christians and anyone with traditional values, forcing them to “fight for their lives.” Guess what’s going to happen? It is inevitable that more displays of unhinged anger will be seen.
If they can’t recruit and groom our children, and if we object to their efforts, they view it as only fair that violence would come to our families. When violence does result, they will be defended and celebrated by an entire political party, the news media, and American corporate culture.
It is the people behind all of this who are the enemy.
All those who seek to “make these little ones stumble” are enemies of God, and it’s okay to say so. It’s also okay to say we hate their deeds, as we’re supposed to hate wickedness (Rev. 2:6). It’s okay to pray for their demise - just read the imprecatory Psalms. It’s even okay to hate those who hate God (Psalm 139:21-22).
The winsome mindset that keeps us from saying these things also keeps us from doing anything. And when we don’t do anything, souls are at stake. It’s embarrassing that conservative commentator Matt Walsh has had to be the one leading the charge against these groomers because nobody else will. I’m not even a Walsh fan, but at least he’s done something. And he’s undoubtedly saved lives in the process.
By naming enemies and engaging them as such, we make it clear where God stands and show the world how we’re different rather than trying to show them how we’re just like them.
But, as always, we must cover both bases.
Should the existence of enemies and the need to engage them be a new concept for us, we have to guard against the temptation to swing too far and mistreat them. We must still love our enemies and pray for those who curse us (Matt. 5:43-44). We must not repay evil for evil (Rom. 12:17).
Yet while there’s always the danger of not loving them enough, it is certainly the lesser danger right now. Those who demand winsomeness rather than engagement are just another case of C.S. Lewis’ fire brigade striking again, totally concerned with the wrong side of the issue.
We have to keep these two concepts in balance - the need to engage our enemies, and the need to love them while we do. Jesus wept over Jerusalem in the same week in which He cleansed the temple, pronounced woes on the Pharisees, and promised to return and destroy everything in sight (a promise He kept in 70 A.D.)
This is our model. We should pray for their repentance and weep for their souls - and we should also pronounce God’s judgment against them and work to see their efforts neutralized.
You might not think they’re your enemy. But they certainly think you are theirs.
Accept the reality of the situation, and use the full counsel of God to guide your response.
I am with you generally, but there is a problem with "Don’t forget, the entire community is rife with suicide attempts and raging depression statistics, showing a deeply unhealthy, unhappy way of life." The problem is that word "entire". You don't know that, and furthermore "rife with suicide attempts and raging depression statistics" applies to a much larger portion of the population than just the "trans community". How might it apply to "the modern church", a much larger segment if possibly not as severely affected?
I write as an unwilling member of the "trans community" (it's not really a community as the dictionary might define it), placed there from birth (Mt. 19:12a) most likely through the action of an endocrine disrupting pharmaceutical given to my mother, although I can't be certain about that. That my endocrine system was disrupted by the time I was born, by something, is certain, and there are tens if not hundreds of thousands of others in similar situations due to in utero pharmaceutical exposure.
We have no idea how many more in the "community" might have been affected by environmental factors, although it is rather clear that many participants in the current madness were exposed to life-destroying social media influences. Those people are themselves under attack by the aforementioned, deceiving, media, cultural influencers, and highest officials in the land. I don't, however, in any way endorse the evil activities about which you write.
I became aware of my own situation at a very early age, and I quickly learned that I could not talk about it with anyone. I eventually came to understand that "my kind" was hated by the church, not to mention society, though I was raised in the church. Doctors and pharma, on the other hand, were worshiped as gods. They still are, although maybe not quite as much anymore.
After I turned 21 I left the church for 19 years, returned for 8, left again for 3 1/2, tried to return again with help from friends but came face-to-face with open LGBT hatred coming from the pulpit and left again for another 12 years, before finally returning to stay. God dragged me back twice through direct interventions. But God is like that. The "church", not so much. I had to learn, finally, that "the church" is not God.
During that 12 years, horror of horrors, I transitioned, with surgery, male-to-female, at 56-57 years old and with full informed consent, and my life became more livable. I did not somehow "become a woman"; rather I am whatever it is that I am. It's different, but very much "not male" -- I never knew those adult behaviors, and never cared for them. My puberty faltered and fizzled for want of adequate hormones, specifically all of the "sex steroids", leaving me asexual and sterile. I had a built-in form of "puberty blocker", though not as damaging and dangerous as those being administered to children today as a form of child sacrifice.
I transitioned for the usual reasons, but also because I had learned that my endocrine disorder put me at high risk for cancer (through my own research, not from anything my doctors told me) and I was hoping to avoid that. I took too long to transition, however, and had to deal with cancer treatment during transition. It would appear that God had planted the cancer concern in my mind, as something I would listen to if not to Him directly. Think what you will, but I am alive and reasonably well at 72 because of it, and free of pharmaceuticals.
Seven years after transition I returned to church, but to a "modern/affirming" one. I am "out" ("visibly trans"), not "stealth", but having no desire to attract attention. I poured myself into supporting that church. Eventually, however, I came to realize that the gospel was nowhere to be found there, though there was plenty of depression, not to mention left-wing political idolatry, and I was led away to a nearby evangelical church after three years. I am on my third one of those now in this stretch (I belonged to another one pre-transition), so far, but I have only the One God, and I am not leaving Him again, a determination that was thoroughly tested by the behavior of the larger evangelical church in 2020 and beyond.
My original health problems (there were several, a type of autism being not the least) continue to take their predictable toll, and I can't do as much in-person volunteer work now, but I am finding more that I can do online. I actively participate in church life to the extent that I can, somewhat on the periphery. I have been a choir member on and off for over 30 years and I still am, livestream and all! The most unhealthy things I ever did were to hide, and to flee. Yet even in all the time away, some 35 years, God remained with me.
In reviewing the news feeds the primary factor in todays times is the loss of truth. Murder is not murder, facts are not facts and one may recast history and prior events into whatever suits current popular opinion or agenda. This is thrust on a group of humans who are docile and gullible regarding scripture. Consistency and even-handed justice are long gone from upper levels of culture. What is still required is the strict adherence to the accurate english translation of the Bible, understanding what is figurative and what is literal in the Bible and what is a non binding opinion. A return to the scriptures calls for a naming of errors and a mental dismantling of each is fundamental friendship with those outside of Christ and a brave show of love. If we love and exhibit friendship we will show a different life choice that is essential and fundamental to salvation. It is not being "church conformance" it is progressing into a transition of life. That life is now at total opposition to culture.