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It is appropriate that this Principle follows that of Retaliation as there is a vital link between the two. Without the application of All-Encompassing Love, there can be no proper practice of the Principle of Retaliation. We now come to Matthew 5:4348:

“Ye have heard that it hath been said, Thou shalt love thy neighbour, and hate thine enemy.

But I say unto you, love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you, and persecute you;  that ye may be the children of your Father which is in heaven:  for he maketh his sun to rise on the evil and on the good, and sendeth rain on the just and on the unjust.

For if you love them which love you, what reward have ye? do not even the publicans the same?

And if ye salute your brethren only, what do ye more than others? do not even the publicans so?

Be ye therefore perfect, even as your Father which is in heaven is perfect”.

The term “all-encompassing love” refers of course, to the love that covers everyone and God’s love is just that kind of love.  His love is not turned on and off by our behaviour.  He may disapprove of our behaviour and he may punish us for it, but he never stops loving. The benefits of God’s love are many and they include chastening and punishment.  To understand both how God loves and how we are to practice such love, we need first to understand some things about love itself.

It is regrettable but true that some Christians interpret “loving” as something like covering everything with icing sugar and so their whole approach is a sickly-sweet “Oh, I just love everybody!” Love is based on truth and it is not intended to be a substitute for honesty and reality.  If a child does something wrong and so-called “loving” parents refrain from dealing out the appropriate punishment, they are in fact perverting love and destroying the child. The child who grows up being allowed to do whatever he pleases under the guise of being loved, has not been loved. So we need to understand that love has far more to it than just kisses and cuddles and everyone being nice.

Love and punishment were never intended to be opposites. True punishment should come as a result of love. Do you believe that love is the basis for all that God does? In the Old Testament narrative we read of God often being involved in acts which seem anything but loving.   Was the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah an act of love? Did God turn off his love so that he could exercise judgment? I am sure that he loved the people of those cities with a true love and that it broke his heart to destroy them.

Yet love them as he did, he still found that destruction necessary. Do you think that God turned off his love when he flooded the earth in the days of Noah? Of course he did not but his love in no way prevented him from thus judging those who were disobeying him.

Loving your enemies

The people to whom Jesus spoke, however, did not understand love to be an allencompassing thing. Rather, it made far more sense to them to live by the adage, “Thou shalt love thy neighbour and hate thine enemy”. It was, therefore, revolutionary when Jesus began to teach about loving enemies too!  Imagine blessing those that curse you and doing good to those that hate you! And as for praying for those who despitefully use you and persecute you …! The whole thing must have seemed just so radical and in the light of present day practice it is still radical.   Note that an “enemy” is recognised as such. We are not told to pretend that our enemies are not our enemies but rather we are to love them whilst they are.

There is, of course, no virtue in loving only those who love us. How easy it is for us to act lovingly to those who lavish their attention on us whilst neglecting, or even acting wrongly towards others who do not. Even in the church we find numbers of selfcentred “poor me” people.   These are the ones who esteem others chiefly by how much fuss they make of them. The “good” people in the church are those who lavish attention on them and the “not so good” are those who do not. They are always feeling the need to “be loved” (so long as the love is dished up in a way which they find acceptable), and only find it necessary to respond favourably to those who give them what they want.

Displaying the character of God

In dying for his enemies, Jesus displayed the allencompassing love which he had for everyone. He did not die for a select group of admirers and friends (it seems that there were precious few of those left by then anyway) but rather because he did not stop loving his enemies. To display the right attitude towards our enemies is to display the true nature of God and in so doing we are worthy offspring who embody their Father’s attributes (verse 45). A father who looks at his son and proudly says, “That’s my boy!” is not only remarking on the relationship which exists, but on the fact that there is something about his son which does credit to his father.

In the Hebrew family a worthy son would have one prime aim in life and that would be to be a true reproduction of his father  to live out his father’s life in the next generation. So that when such a father said, “That’s my boy! ” or, as God the Father said of Jesus, “This is my beloved son in whom I am well pleased”, it was because the son had attained to being a true representation of all that his father stood for. The words of God concerning Jesus, therefore, we very typical of those that would have been spoken by many a Hebrew father when he saw that he had a worthy son.

The perfection of love

To be “children of our Father” therefore, is to find that kind of approval from him and in this case in reference to loving our enemies. If we hold grudges against people who do us wrong and are only nice to people who do us right, we are not children of our Father for we give a false representation of God.

Verse 48 speaks of the perfection of love. When we know what love is and what it is to love, and we practice  this we discover the perfection that comes by love alone  the perfection which is God’s character for “God is love”.

A right relationship

To develop this further we need to refer to 1 John 4:1621:

“And we have known and believed the love that God hath to us.  God is love;  and he that dwelleth in love dwelleth in God, and God in him.

Herein is our love made perfect, that we may have boldness in the day of judgment:  because as he is, so are we in this world.   There is no fear in love;  but perfect love casteth out fear: because fear hath torment.   He that feareth is not made perfect in love.   We love him, because he first loved us.

If a man say, I love God, and hateth his brother he is a liar:  for he that loveth not his brother whom he hath seen, how can he love God whom he hath not seen?

And this commandment have we from him, That he who loveth God love his brother also”.

To dwell in love (verse 16) means to “abide” and that speaks about a constancy about our love not an on-again off-again, up and down kind of thing which depends on our mood or our circumstances. Because God is love he is constantly “in love”. True love and God go together and to be constantly “in love” one must be constantly “in God”. It is deceptive for us to think that the only time God really got involved in the nitty-gritty of this world was when Jesus was here in human form. He is not dwelling in an ivory tower divorced from this world’s stark realities.

When we read, “as he is, so are we in this world” (verse 17), we are reminded that God is now totally involved with this world simply because he is totally involved with us. The human race is not one of God’s sidelines like some kind of a hobby he plays around with in between running the universe. We need to realise that the human race is at the centre of God’s plan. In these “enlightened” days scientists laugh at the ancient belief that the earth is at the centre of the universe. How dare we puny humans be so naive as to presume to be so special, they say. Why, our earth is just a tiny speck in some obscure corner of an apparently infinite universe so who are we to think we are at the centre of all things?

I believe with all my heart that we are at the very centre of God’s creation and of God’s plan. There is no need to travel to another planet or to another galaxy to discover “where it’s at”, for it’s right here!  Mankind is the crowning glory of God’s creation and it is in and through men that God has chosen to be glorified. To be a human being in a right relationship with God is second only to being God. Yes, it is even better than being an angel!   God has a consuming interest in us and we as his people in this world are to he true representatives of him  the demonstration of all that God is. I would go even further and say that this demonstration is not only for this world during this period called “time” but also for the whole universe throughout eternity. For the clear teaching of the Bible is that the church is the chosen instrument for the manifestation of God’s glory through all the ages.

Love and fear

The right kind of fear is a healthy thing but the wrong kind (verse 18) is destructive. The fear of God is the beginning of wisdom  but to live in terror and torment  to lack the confidence to freely fellowship with God, is not the true fear of God. If we really know who we are and who God is to us, and if we are confident of our relationship to God, of what do we have to be afraid? Of what is there to be afraid from God, from people, from the devil, from circumstances?

“Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? Shall tribulation, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or sword?

For I am persuaded, that neither death, nor life nor angels, nor principalities, nor powers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature, shall he able to separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord”. (Romans 8:35,3839)

Do we indeed believe that his love takes good care of us? There is no room for fear in love because perfect love casts out fear. When you are in love with the living God, and you are walking in that love  how can you be afraid? If you are having trouble in relating to God in love, you will have trouble in relating to people in love.

Thus you may be hindered and limited by fears, and insecurities and anxieties  whether in your relationship with God, people, the future, the past, your circumstances, or whatever else. In this you are, in fact, disbelieving the Bible and its statement that nothing can separate us from the love of God and you are preferring to believe that there are many things that can. And so you fear those things, “He that feareth is not made perfect in love. Verse 19 of 1 John 4 should more correctly read, “We love because he first loved us”.  This does not mean that all those who are saved because of God’s love automatically know what it is to love.  Sadly, there are many Christians who do not practice love. God loved first so that he could make lovers of us. We learn how to love both God and people by being involved with God and by letting love be the true motivation of our lives. The words of verse 20 are plain, there is no way a person can be a lover of God without being a lover of men.

If you truly love God, you will love your brother also.

Verse 21 leads us into the vital words of Jesus in Mark 12:2931:

“And Jesus answered him, The first of all the commandments is, Hear, O Israel;  The Lord our God is one Lord:  And thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind, and with all thy strength: this is the first commandment.

And the second is like, namely, this, Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself.   There is none other commandment greater than these”.

You cannot love your neighbour unless you love God. But the proof that you love God will be your love for your neighbour. You must learn to love God first and in doing that you will know how to love people. But you cannot say, “I love God but I have a problem with people”, for if you know how to love God, you will know how to relate to people.

God is secure in his love for people, he knows how to love them. We too, can know such a love relationship with God and with people that we can always be secure and confident. Security in love means that we are able to cope with conflict and tension rather than being fearful of anything short of a harmonious relationship.

God has more “problem people” than “non-problem people” but that presents no insurmountable problem to him simply because God’s love is a love that knows how to handle every situation.

Love knows how

If we are living and walking in love we will know how to handle unpleasant situations between ourselves and others for it is with love as his motive that God is able to handle every such situation. A correct theological understanding of “God is love” is no substitute for the practice of all-encompassing love.

About the author

Tony Kostas was born in Melbourne, Australia in 1941, where at the age of seventeen, he committed his life to Jesus at a Billy Graham Crusade. In 1967 he founded the Melbourne Outreach Crusade, a non-denominational evangelistic outreach. This later grew into Outreach International, which is now a worldwide body of believers, who share a God-given calling and are committed to live in love with Him and with one another.

Tony’s life is a true expression of all that God has revealed to him throughout the years, in its purity and focus on loving God. His passion is for God to have the desire of His hears: a people who truly represent Him because they are His and His alone.