Enemy Love in the Old Testament

In the New Testament, in the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus challenges believers with this: "You have heard that it was said, 'You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.' But I say to you, Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you..." (Matthew 5:43-44). Jesus turns the wisdom of the world upside down. He also provides the ultimate example of this in what he does for the world on the Cross. Through the Cross, Jesus turns his enemies into his friends, because of his love.

But we can also find precursors to Jesus' counter-intuitive enemy-love in the Old Testament. I think specifically here of King David, Jesus' ancestor. Consider King David's relationship with Saul. I have written about that some here. King Saul is filled with jealousy toward David, and over half the book of 1Samuel we see King Saul seeking David's life. The people chant that Saul has killed his thousands... but they also chant that David has killed his ten thousands. This drives Saul to madness. He attempts to kill David on multiple occasions, and he pursues David over miles and various locations. Only through God's providence does David escape with his life.

Saul has effectively made himself to be David's enemy. What else could he have done to make himself more of an enemy?

How does David deal with the fact that Saul has made himself to be an enemy? For one thing, he does not act in self-defense. He does not act in revenge. He does not do those things which would make most sense from a worldly perspective. Multiple times his enemy falls into his hands and he lets him escape. He treats the Lord's anointed, Saul, with great respect. For the man who killed Saul, who did not fear to put Saul out of his misery, David has nothing but swift justice and death. When Saul, who has been trying to kill him has just died, David reacts not with rejoicing but with mourning. What upside-down logic!

What happens after Saul dies? David does not automatically become King of all the tribes of Israel. He becomes King of Judah, but Saul's son Ish-bosheth becomes King of Israel. Ish-bosheth was made king "over Gilead and the Ashurites and Jezreel and Ephraim and Benjamin and all Israel." For a number of years there remained strife and war between the tribes of Benjamin and the house of David. In chapter 4 Ish-bosheth is murdered by two captains of his own raiding bands, Rechab and Baanah, stabbed in the stomach. They cut off Ish-bosheth's head and brought his head to David saying, "Here is the head of Ish-bosheth, the son of Saul, your enemy who sought your life." It sounds like they were expecting some praise or reward from David. This was not to be. David reminds them of the fate of the man who brought news of Saul's death - swift justice to the man who laid the sword to the Lord's anointed - and once again David meets the wickedness of these murderers with swift justice. Beyond Saul's death, David continues to treat Saul's descendants with respect and justice.

King David is soon thereafter taken to be King of Judah and Israel together. David reigns, and he wins victories, and in chapter 9 of 2nd Samuel he comes to ask a telling question: "Is there still anyone left of the house of Saul, that I may show him kindness for Jonathan's sake?" There was found Mephibosheth, who was a child of Jonathan. Mephibosheth was crippled because when news of his father and grandfather's deaths came, he was only five, and his nurse left with him in haste and he fell, permanently injuring his feet. David's kindness seeks out Mephibosheth. King David invites Mephibosheth to come eat at his table as if he were his own son. "So Mephibosheth lived in Jerusalem, for he ate always at the king's table." David's kindness to Saul and Jonathan's descendant is even mediated through Ziba, one of Saul's servants who David gives to Mephibosheth in service.

In King David we see honor. We see goodness. We see loyalty. We see a good example of enemy-love. The love of God is not just a passive love. It is a love that is active, that roams around seeking not to devour as sin would, but seeking ways to do good to people, even to the grandchild of your mortal enemy.

I should not assume that we all take seriously the imperative from Jesus to love our enemies. To some that might sound like an absurdity, and because of that it bounces right off us. But there it remains in all its glorious challenge. When confronted with an impossibility like this, it should lead us to prayer to the God who makes the impossible possible. And I believe a means by which God makes this impossibility possible is through the changing of our hearts. I believe God changes our hearts by lifting up for our admiration Jesus, and those who reflect Jesus well, like David as he related to Saul.

What David Feared to Touch

Self-defense is a very natural response when a person is attacked. It is an understandable response. If someone is coming at you, your fight or flight response kicks in. And the law says that you are justified in using self-defense, provided that it is reasonably appropriate and proportional to the perceived threat. You are legally justified to meet deadly force with deadly force to protect yourself or someone else. Back to that in a minute.

If you read the book of 1 Samuel, you will read many interesting historical stories about early history in Israel when they first started getting kings. Just before this are the events recorded in Judges, in which Israel went through several cycles of peace, followed by sin, followed by invasion and subjugation, followed by cries to God for deliverance, followed by God raising up strong men and women called judges to bring about that deliverance, followed by peace just before the cycle restarts. Eventually the people of Israel, surrounded by other peoples that they failed to drive out of the Promised Land, decide that instead of having the Lord as King, it would be preferable to have regular kings, human kings, to rule over them and go to battle for them. While this is not ideal, God warns the people about what they're getting into, and then he lets them have what they want.

The first King that Israel gets is Saul, who is a mix of good and bad. He is tall and handsome, strong in battle, he unexpectedly spends some times prophesying. But he is presumptuous, he does things his own way, and he expects his partial obedience and good intentions to substitute for actual obedience. As I read the stories involving Saul, I don't generally get the sense that he is pure evil, as much as I get the sense that he is continually digging ditches that he promptly falls into. Saul is hot and cold, angry and remorseful and unsure. One minute chasing David, the next welcoming him.

David is Israel's second king. He is anointed by Samuel. To be king is his destiny before the Lord, a coming reality even while Saul is yet king. The blessing leaves Saul as he offers a premature sacrifice, and especially later when he is commanded to go against the Amalekites in battle and to devote them completely to destruction, down even to the cattle and livestock. This he doesn't do. "What then is this bleating of the sheep in my ears and the lowing of the oxen that I hear?" This is Samuel's question to Saul when he hears alive what God commanded Saul to destroy. But I saved the best to later offer in sacrifice, says Saul. But as Samuel says, God delights more in obedience than in sacrifice. Through all this we see the kingly line passing from the house of Benjamin to the house of Judah. 

There are multiple instances in which Saul throws a spear or some object at David, aiming to take his life. He misses. Consider not just David's life spared at those moments, but all that will flow through David through his lineage. Jesus is a descendant of David, the coming King of Kings, and God's preservation of David's life in all those close calls, including his battle with Goliath, may be seen not just as God protecting David's life, but also God providentially preserving his plan to save people through David's descendant. It is not uncommon for God's people to die in battle, to die as martyrs, to die horrific deaths. (You don't have to look farther than Jesus.) But in David's instance God has very specific plans on his life. He was anointed for a purpose that had not yet been fulfilled, and God's plans are rock solid no matter how things look.

David was God's anointed. But so was Saul. David firmly believed that. When Saul was pursuing David, when Saul was literally throwing deadly objects at David, common sense would say that David had a right to defend himself. David could have acted in self-defense. David could have potentially believed that Saul was a false-king who had forfeited his anointing by disobeying God, and who no longer deserved honor or obedience as King of Israel, especially since David himself had already been anointed by Samuel to be king. (David is actually anointed by Samuel even before he confronts Goliath in battle.)

David continues to honor Saul as the Lord's anointed, and he is supremely conscientious against raising his hand against Saul, no matter how grievously Saul comes against him. At one point David holds Saul's life in his hands when Saul unwittingly goes to the bathroom in a cave where David and company are hiding. David cuts a piece of Saul's garment to later prove that, yes, he could've taken Saul's life but instead spared it. On another occasion David and his men come upon Saul in his camp while he is asleep, and in a similar move he takes Saul's spear but spares his life. David has in his power to end this terrible chase and stress and bring about what will eventually come about: his kingship. But he declines because he has such supreme respect for the fact that Saul carries the Lord's anointing. David feared to touch Saul.

Saul does eventually die in battle. In the beginning of 2 Samuel, David hears of Saul's death from an Amalekite from the battle who says he killed an already fallen Saul who essentially asked the Amalekite to put him out of his misery. David rends his clothes and mourns at the death of his king and of his friend Jonathan. And then David says to the Amalekite: "How is it you were not afraid to put out your hand to destroy the LORD's anointed?" And then David has this man killed. To David, to touch the Lord's anointed is an outrage.

I am struck by this. By the severity of David's conviction. It leads me to believe that I do not esteem the Lord's anointed as highly as I ought to. The Roman government and Jewish people hundreds of years later conspired to put David's descendant Jesus, the Christ, the Lord's anointed to death. And they had him crucified on a tree. They put out their hand against the Lord's anointed. But the truth is that while on one level, yes, the Romans and the Jews did that, ultimately I do that by my own sin. It is my own rebellion against God, my own sin, that required a perfect sacrifice and that sent Jesus to that cursed tree. An accurate way to view my sin is that it is a striking of the Lord's anointed. How dare I?! And what does such action deserve? As in this story, it deserves a swift death. David's response of righteous anger is an echo of God's righteous wrath toward sin, the flip side of the coin of his love for his beloved Son. This story should drive us to our knees in repentance. It shows us what we deserve. Swift justice. But I am thankful, in looking at the cross, for how patient and long-suffering and forgiving and overflowing with unexpected goodness our God is towards even the worst of sinners. Grace.

Finding Some Gospel in Deuteronomy

The story of Balaam is told in Numbers. Numbers is about the Israelites wandering around in the desert after the Exodus from Egypt and before their entrance to the Promised Land. Balak, the King of Moab, sees how Israel and its God defeated the Amorites, and he wants to do something in protection of his people. Balak attempts to hire Balaam, a non-Israelite sort of prophet or diviner, to curse the people of Israel. Though he is hired to curse Israel, when it comes down to it, he can only speak the words allowed by the Lord, which are words of blessing. This happens on three separate occasions, where Balaam looks down on the people of Israel with Balak expecting him to curse them, but all Balaam can speak are blessings upon God's people.

The book of Deuteronomy consists of sermons and words of encouragement from Moses to the Israelite people. He speaks these words to them as they are on the plains of Moab, on the verge of entering into the Promised Land. They are words that he wants them to especially remember as they enter into the next phase of their life as God's people.

In Deuteronomy 23:4-5, Moses reminds them of Balaam: "...[The Moabites] hired against you Balaam, the son of Beor from Pethor of Mesopotamia, to curse you. But the LORD your God turned the curse into a blessing for you, because the LORD your God loved you."

What a beautiful encapsulation of what God does through Christ in the Gospel! The Lord turns a curse into a blessing for us because he loves us.

Only two chapters earlier, in Deuteronomy 21:22-23, Moses says this: "And if a man has committed a crime punishable by death and he is put to death, and you hang him on a tree, his body shall not remain all night on the tree, but you shall bury him the same day, for a hanged man is cursed by God. You shall not defile your land that the LORD your God is giving you for an inheritance."

Israelites in Jesus' day, if they knew their Bible, would have been familiar with this verse. Hanging on a tree. That is an apt description of crucifixion, a practice not yet invented at the writing of Deuteronomy. A Bible-literate Israelite would have had trouble believing Jesus was King or Divine or the Son of God precisely because Deuteronomy would've told him that Jesus was also cursed. How could the Son of God be cursed of God?

The Son of God being cursed, taking our punishment in our place, is the way by which God turns our curse into a blessing out of his love for us. Jesus took our curse out of love; from his shed blood we find eternal blessing. Grace.