What about When God Commands His People to Destroy Their Neighbors?

You cannot fit everything into one sermon.

This past week the sermon focused on the positive command of God’s people to love their enemies via Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount. But what about those times in the Old Testament when it appears that God commands the opposite?

The truth is that while there is no command in the Old Testament to hate your enemy, there are many statements in the Old Testament that may have encouraged people to hate their enemies. Martyn Lloyd Jones categorizes a few:

When the Jews entered the Promised Land of Canaan, they were commanded by God, you will remember, to exterminate the Canaanites…Then they were told that the Amorites, the Moabites and the Midianites were not to be treated with kindness…Later we read that the memory of the Amalekites was to be blotted out from under heaven because of certain things they had done….But perhaps the main difficulty which people encounter as they face this subject is the whole problem of the so-called imprecatory Psalms in which curses are called down upon certain people.

How are we to make sense of this? Is this in contradiction to what Christ is preaching in Matthew 5?

In short, no.

Because God loves unconditionally, it does not follow that man’s sin does not matter. Matthew 5:45 states, “For He makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the just and the unjust.” This does not mean that everyone is going to heaven, or that God can never punish. So, God loves unconditionally, and He judicially acts according to His will and glory.

These two things are not in contradiction to one another. In fact, we see them meet on the cross. God sent His only Son as a gift to the world, Jew and Gentile, for salvation to all who believe in Him, and Christ atoned for our sins on the cross, satisfying God’s judgement of our sin. God does bless the good and the evil in this life, but at the same time He promises that unless a man repents, he will finally be destroyed. There is a coming judgement. The rain and sun will stop for some. The love of God is meant to lead man to repentance.

In the Old Testament, God pronounced judgment on those nations and peoples who hated Him, His people, and His ways, and as God, He has the prerogative to do that. Because He is the eternal Judge, God is the only one with the right to pronounce judgment on those who are evil when and where He wants to.

But we are not God.

God calls us to love as He loves, with the understanding that a final judgment is coming for all who do not repent and believe in Jesus.