I’ve been looking for love all over the place and discovered it yesterday on The shelves of our local B&N store – John Piper’s new book called Love Your Enemies. It is actually a re-publication of his doctoral dissertation and taught me the wordparaenesis (why can’t we just say ‘command’?). Desiring God has kindly offered a free download, which you can find here.
Here is what Piper says about the command to love our enemies – what I think of as ‘the otherwise impossible love,’ since there’s no way we could obey this command in our own strength.
“Our only hope for loving our enemy is to be a new creation in Christ. And our only hope for being a new creation in Christ is to be reconciled to God through the death of his Son. ‘If anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation. The old has passed away; behold, the new has come. All this is from God, who through Christ reconciled us to himself’ (II Cor 5:17–18).
The only hope that we might love our enemy is that God loved us when we were his enemy. ‘If while we were enemies we were reconciled to God by the death of his Son, much more, now that we are reconciled, shall we be saved by his life’ (Rom 5:10). This is the great root of the good tree we are becoming: ‘Forgive one another, as God in Christ forgave you’ (Eph 4:32).
Turn the other cheek—seventy times seven (Mt 18:22). Love does not keep an account of wrongs (I Cor 13:6). ‘Bless those who persecute you; bless and do not curse them’ (Rom 12:14).
Jesus is the great example here, and the inimitable substitute: ‘When he was reviled, he did not revile in return; when he suffered, he did not threaten, but continued entrusting himself to him who judges justly’—that’s the example (I Pt 2:23). And ‘he himself bore our sins in his body on the tree, that we might die to sin and live to righteousness’—that’s the substitution (I Pt 2:24).
What he has done for us is the ground for what he does in us. We can become a good tree only because he was cursed for us on a horrible tree (Gal 3:13).” John Piper, Love Your Enemies
