“In the Image and Likeness of God, Part 3” by Romans
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Two weeks ago, I began a Series called, “In His Image and Likeness.” We saw in the previous two installments how, in the Creation Account in Genesis, for each new introduced life form, God simply spoke and it appeared and filled the earth. But something very different took place for the creation of mankind: there was a pause, there was contemplation and there was consultation: “Let us make man in Our Image, and after Our Likeness...” (Genesis 1:26).
Tonight, I will be going into Part 3 of our Series, and pick up where we left off last week. Last week, we had concluded with Jesus' command to us ~ and yes, it was a command ~ “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” (Matthew 5:44-45).
Alexander MacClaren writes of this: “The last of the five instances of our Lord’s extending and deepening and spiritualising the old law is also the climax of them. We may either call it the highest or the deepest, according to our point of view. His transfiguring touch invests all the commandments with which He has been dealing with new inwardness, sweep, and spirituality, and finally He proclaims the supreme, all-including commandment of universal love.
‘It hath been said, Thou shalt love thy neighbour’-that comes from Leviticus 19:18; but where does ‘and hate thine enemy’ come from? Not from Scripture, but in the passage in Leviticus ‘neighbour’ is co-extensive with ‘children of thy people,’ and the hatred and contempt of all men outside Israel which grew upon the Jews found a foothold there.
‘Who is my neighbour?’ was apparently a well-discussed question in the schools of the Rabbis, and, whether any of these teachers ever committed themselves to plainly formulating the principle or not, practically the duty of love was restricted to a narrow circle, and the rest of the wide world left out in the cold.
But not only was the circumference of love’s circle drawn in, but to hate an enemy was elevated almost into a duty. It is the worst form of retaliation. ‘An eye for an eye’ is bad enough, but hate for hate plunges men far deeper in the devil’s mire. To flash back from the mirror of the heart the hostile looks which are flung at us, is our natural impulse;
but why should we always leave it to the other man to pitch the keynote of our relations with him? Why should we echo only his tones? Cannot we leave his discord to die into silence and reply to it by something more musical? Two thunder-clouds may cast lightnings at each other, but they waste themselves in the process. Better to shine meekly and victoriously on as the moon does on piled masses of darkness till it silvers them with its quiet light.
So Jesus bids us do. We are to suppress the natural inclination to pay back in the enemy’s own coin, to ‘give him as good as he gave us,’ to ‘show proper spirit,’ and all the other fine phrases with which the world whitewashes hatred and revenge. We are not only to allow no stirring of malice in our feelings, but we are to let kindly emotions bear fruit in words blessing the cursers, and in deeds of goodness, and, highest of all, in prayers for those whose hate is bitterest, being founded on religion, and who are carrying it into action in persecution.
We cannot hate a man if we pray for him; we cannot pray for him if we hate him. Our weakness often feels it so hard not to hate our enemies, that our only way to get strength to keep this highest, hardest commandment is to begin by trying to pray for the foe, and then we gradually feel the infernal fires dying down in our temper, and come to be able to meet his evil with good, and his curses with blessings.
It is a difficult lesson that Jesus sets us. It is a blessed possibility that Jesus opens for us, that our kindly emotions towards men need not be at the mercy of theirs to us. It is a fair ideal that He paints, which, if Christians deliberately and continuously took it for their aim to realise, would revolutionise society, and make the fellowship of man with man a continual joy.
Think of what any community, great or small, would be, if enmity were met by love only and always. Its fire would die for want of fuel. If the hater found no answering hate increasing his hate, he would often come to answer love with love. There is an old legend spread through many lands, which tells how a princess who had been changed by enchantment into a loathsome serpent, was set free by being thrice kissed by a knight, who thereby won a fair bride with whom he lived in love and joy.
The only way to change the serpent of hate into the fair form of a friend is to kiss it out of its enchantment. No doubt, partial anticipations of this precept may be found, buried under much ethical rubbish, elsewhere than in the Sermon on the Mount, and more plainly in Old Testament teaching, and in Rabbinical sayings;
but Christ’s ‘originality’ as a moral teacher lies not so much in the absolute novelty of His commandments, as in the perspective in which He sets them, and in the motives on which He bases them, and most of all in His being more than a teacher, namely, the Giver of power to fulfill what He enjoins. Christian ethics not merely recognises the duty of love to men, but sets it as the foundation of all other duties. It is root and trunk, all others are but the branches into which it ramifies.
Christian ethics not merely recognises the duty, but takes a man by the hand, leads him up to his Father God, and says: There, that is your pattern, and a child who loves his Father will try to copy his ways and be made like Him by his love. So Morality passes into Religion, and through the transition receives power beyond its own. The perfection of worship is imitation, and when men ‘call Him Father’ whom they adore, imitation becomes the natural action of a child who loves.
God loves all men apart altogether from any regard to character, therefore He gives to all men all the good gifts that they can receive apart from character, and if evil men do not get His best gifts, it is not because He withholds, but because they cannot take. There are human love-gifts which cannot be bestowed on enemies or evil persons. It is not possible, nor fit, that a Christian should feel to such as he does to those who share his faith and sympathies;
but it is possible, and therefore incumbent, that he should not only negatively clear his heart of malice and hatred, but that he should positively exercise such active beneficence as they will receive. That is God’s way, and it should be His children’s. The thought of the divine pattern naturally brings up the contrast between it and that which goes by the name of love among men. Just because Christians are to take God as their example of love, they must transcend human examples.
Here, again, Jesus strikes the note with which He began His teaching of His disciples’ ‘righteousness’; but very significantly He does not now point to Pharisees, but to publicans, as those who were to be surpassed. The former, no doubt, were models of ‘righteousness’ after a rigid, whitewashed-sepulchre sort, but the latter had bigger hearts, and, bad as they were and were reputed to be, they loved better than the others.
Jesus is glad to see and point to even imperfect sparks of goodness in a justly condemned class. No doubt, publicans in their own homes, with wife and children round them, let their hearts out, and could be tender and gentle, however gruff and harsh in public. When Jesus says ‘even the publicans,’ He is not speaking in contempt, but in recognition of the love that did find some soil to grow on, even in that rocky ground. But is not the bringing in of the ‘reward’ as a motive a woeful downcome? and is love that loves for the sake of reward, love at all?
The criticism and questions forget that the true motive has just been set forth, and that the thought of ‘reward’ comes in, only as secondary encouragement to a duty which is based upon another ground. To love because we shall gain something, either in this world or in the next, is not love but long-sighted selfishness; but to be helped in our endeavours to widen our love so as to take in all men, by the vision of the reward, is not selfishness but a legitimate strengthening of our weakness.
Especially is that so, in view of the fact that ‘the reward’ contemplated is nothing else than the growth of likeness to the Father in heaven, and the increase of filial consciousness, and the clearer, deeper cry, ‘Abba, Father.’ If longing for, and having regard to, that ‘recompense of reward’ is selfishness, and if the teaching which permits it is immoral, may God send the world more of such selfishness and of teachers of it!
But the reference to the shrunken love-streams that flow among men passes again swiftly to the former thought of likeness to God as the great pattern. Like a bird glancing downwards for a moment to earth, and then up again and away into the blue, our Lord’s words re-soar, and settle at last by the throne of God. The command, ‘Be ye perfect, even as your Father which is in heaven is perfect,’ may be intended to refer only to the immediately preceding section...
but one is inclined to regard it rather as the summing up of the whole of the preceding series of commandments from Matthew 5:20 onwards. The sum of religion is to imitate the God whom we worship. The ideal which draws us to aim at its realisation must be absolutely perfect, however imperfect may be all our attempts to reproduce it. We sometimes hear it said that to set up perfection as our goal is to smite effort dead and to enthrone despair.
But to set up an incomplete ideal is the surest way to take the heart out of effort after it. It is the Christian’s prerogative to have ever gleaming before him an unattained aim, to which he is progressively approximating, and which, unreached, beckons, feeds hope of endless approach, and guarantees immortality.”
As we move ahead in Matthew's Gospel, we read a lawyer's question to Jesus beginning in Mat 22:36, “Master, which is the great commandment in the law? Jesus said unto him, Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind. This is the first and great commandment. And the second is like unto it, Thou shalt love {Greek, agape`} thy neighbour as thyself. On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.”
I would like to share with you something that I heard in person in a local Church I attended. The minister was commenting on the idea of forgiveness which, not only is to be shown towards enemies, but also to our friends, family members and loved-ones. He commented on the dubious phrase, “I'll forgive, but I will never forget.”
That is not forgiveness. I say that because, first, we are supposed to be in the Image and Likeness of God. And second, when God forgives, we read of Him, “I, even I, am he that blotteth out thy transgressions for mine own sake, and will not remember thy sins” (Isaiah 43:25), and “As far as the east is from the west, so far hath he removed our transgressions from us” (Psalm 103:12).
The minister then acknowledged the difficulty of forgetting an offense, even an unintentional offense. But then he said something that I thought was truly profound. He married the idea of forgiveness with Jesus' command to love, do good to and pray for our enemies. He said, “When someone sins against you, or in some way wounds or offends you, you may not forget that transgression. But if you are praying for that person from the heart, you won't remember it the same way.”
We are to love and do good to and bless and pray for our enemies, but I believe that God-loving our neighbor asks even more. We are to love our neighbors as we love ourselves. That goes beyond even doing good and praying for them. If, with God's help, we love our enemies, we still are apt to keep a fairly tight leash on just how good we are, and how fervent our prayers for an enemy might be, at least as we begin to try to do that. That is my personal opinion on the matter.
Adam Clarke writes of this, “The love of our neighbor springs from the love of God as its source; is found in the love of God as its principle, pattern, and end; and the love of God is found in the love of our neighbor, as its effect, representation, and infallible mark. This love of our neighbor is a love of equity, charity, succor, and benevolence. We owe to our neighbor what we have a right to expect from him - “Do unto all men as ye would they should do unto you,” is a positive command of our blessed Savior. By this rule, therefore, we should speak, think, and write, concerning every soul of man:
put the best construction upon all the words and actions of our neighbor that they can possibly bear. By this rule we are taught to bear with, love, and forgive him; to rejoice in his felicity, mourn in his adversity, desire and delight in his prosperity, and promote it to the utmost of our power: instruct his ignorance, help him in his weakness, and risk even our life for his sake, and for the public good. In a word, we must do every thing in our power, through all the possible varieties of circumstances, for our neighbors, which we would wish them to do for us, were our situations reversed.
This is the religion of Jesus! How happy would Society be, were these two plain, rational precepts properly observed! Love Me, and love thy Fellows! Be unutterably happy in me, and be in perfect peace, unanimity, and love, among yourselves. Great fountain and dispenser of love! fill thy creation with this sacred principle, for his sake who died for the salvation of mankind!”
Matthew Henry adds to the discussion, “To love our neighbour as ourselves is the second great commandment” (Matthew 22:39); It is like unto that first; it is inclusive of all the precepts of the second table, as that is of the first. It is like it, for it is founded upon it, and flows from it; and a right love to our brother, whom we have seen, is both an instance and an evidence of our love to God, whom we have not seen, from 1 John 4:20.
[1.] It is implied, that we do, and should, love ourselves. There is a self-love which is corrupt, and the root of the greatest sins, and it must be put off and mortified: but there is a self-love which is natural, and the rule of the greatest duty, and it must be preserved and sanctified. We must love ourselves, that is, we must have a due regard to the dignity of our own natures, and a due concern for the welfare of our own souls and bodies.
[2.] It is prescribed, that we love our neighbour as ourselves. We must honour and esteem all men, and must wrong and injure none; must have a good will to all, and good wishes for all, and, as we have opportunity, must do good to all. We must love our neighbour as ourselves, as truly and sincerely as we love ourselves, and in the same instances; nay, in many cases we must deny ourselves for the good of our neighbour, and must make ourselves servants to the true welfare of others, and be willing to spend and be spent for them, to lay down our lives for the brethren.
2. Observe what the weight and greatness of these commandments is: On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets; that is, This is the sum and substance of all those precepts relating to practical religion which were written in men's hearts by nature, revived by Moses, and backed and enforced by the preaching and writing of the prophets. All hang upon the law of love;
take away this, and all falls to the ground, and comes to nothing. Rituals and ceremonials must give way to these, as must all spiritual gifts, for love is the more excellent way. This is the spirit of the law, which animates it, the cement of the law, which joins it; it is the root and spring of all other duties, the compendium of the whole Bible, not only of the law and the prophets, but of the gospel too, only supposing this love to be the fruit of faith, and that we love God in Christ, and our
neighbour for his sake.
All hangs on these two commandments, as the effect doth both on its efficient and on its final cause; for the fulfilling of the law is love (from Romans 13:10) and the end of the law is love, (from 1 Timothy 1:5). The law of love is the nail, is the nail in the sure place, fastened by the masters of assemblies, on which is hung all the glory of the law and the prophets, a nail that shall never be drawn;
for on this nail all the glory of the new Jerusalem shall eternally hang. Love never faileth. Into these two great commandments therefore let our hearts be delivered as into a mould; in the defence and evidence of these let us spend our zeal, and not in notions, names, and strifes of words, as if those were the mighty things on which the law and the prophets hung, and to them the love of God and our neighbour must be sacrificed; but to the commanding power of these let every thing else be made to bow.”
Let's take a closer look at one of Matthew Henry's cross-references: 1 John 4:20-21: “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.”
Matthew Henry comments, “As love to our brother and neighbour in Christ; such love is argued and urged on these accounts: - 1. As suitable and consonant to our Christian profession. In the profession of Christianity we profess to love God as the root of religion: “If then a man say, or profess as much as thereby to say, I love God, I am a lover of his name, and house, and worship, and yet hate his brother, whom he should love for God's sake, he is a liar (1 John 4:20), he therein gives his profession the lie.”
That such a one loves not God the apostle proves by the usual facility of loving what is seen rather than what is unseen: For he that loveth not his brother, whom he hath seen, how can he love God, whom he hath not seen?
1 John 4:20. The eye is wont to affect the heart; things unseen less catch the mind, and thereby the heart.
The incomprehensibleness of God very much arises from his invisibility; the member of Christ has much of God visible in him. How then shall the hater of a visible image of God pretend to love the unseen original, the invisible God himself?
2. As suitable to the express law of God, and the just reason of it: And this commandment have we from him, that he who loveth God love his brother also. As God has communicated his image in nature and in grace, so he would have our love to be suitably diffused.
We must love God originally and supremely, and others in him, on the account of their derivation and reception from him, and of his interest in them. Now, our Christian brethren having a new nature and excellent privileges derived from God, and God having his interest in them as well as in us, it cannot but be a natural suitable obligation that he who loves God should love his brother also.”
Let us consider another of Jesus' Commands to His followers: This time from the Gospel of John we read in John 13:34-35, “A new commandment I give unto you, That ye love one another; as I have loved you, that ye also love one another. By this shall all men know that ye are my disciples, if ye have love one to another.”
Has it occurred to you all the alternate and incompatible ways that various denominations have attempted to demonstrate that they are God's one and only “true church”? One claims that they, and only they address God by calling Him by the only Name He will accept: “Jehovah.” They go on to teach that everyone else is lost.
Another church claims that they are accepted as God's one and only “true church” because they worship Him on the only correct day of worship: the Seventh Day. They also go on to teach that everyone else, including the church which has claimed that they are exclusive name-pronunciation rights, is lost. I have never read of such proofs of identity being pronunciation or specific days of worship.
What is the only identifying mark regarding Jesus gave as proof of discipleship? I just read to you. Let's read it, again: “A new commandment I give unto you, That ye love one another; as I have loved you, that ye also love one another. By this shall all men know that ye are my disciples, if ye have love one to another.”
John Gill writes, “A new commandment I give unto you,.... As parents, when they take their leave of their children, in their dying moments, give them proper instructions and orders, and lay their dying injunctions on them, so Christ taking his leave of his disciples, gives them his; which were, that they love one another: as brethren in the same family, children of the same Father, and fellow disciples with each other;
by keeping and agreeing together, praying one for another, bearing one another's burdens, forbearing and forgiving one another, admonishing each other, and building up one another in faith and holiness: and this he calls "a new commandment"; that is, a very excellent one; as a "new name", and a "new song", denote excellent ones; or it is so called, because it is set forth by Christ, in a new edition of it, and newly and more clearly explained, than before; and being enforced with a new argument and pattern, never used before.”
In the same way Jesus explained to us how to love our enemies, by doing good to them, blessing them and praying for them, Jesus also provided us with the “how” of how to love each other: John Gill continues, “as I have loved you; and to be observed in a new manner, not "in the oldness of the letter, but in the newness of the spirit": besides, though this commandment, as to the matter of it, is the same with that of Moses, (Leviticus 19:18);
yet it takes in more, and "new" objects; since by "neighbour" there, seems to be meant "the children of their people", the Jews; and so they understood it only of their countrymen, and of proselytes at furthest, whereas this reaches to any "other" person; (see Romans 13:8, which states: “Owe no man any thing, but to love one another: for he that loveth another hath fulfilled the law.”)
and as the measure, as well as the motive is new, for it is not now "as thy self", but "as I have loved you", the Jew has no reason to object as he does, to its being called a "new commandment": and its being "new", carries in it a reason or argument, why it should be observed, as does also the following clause: as I have loved you, that ye also love one another; than which, nothing can, or should, more strongly engage to it:
as Christ has loved his people freely, notwithstanding all their unworthiness and ungratefulness, so should they love one another, though there may be many things in them observable, which are disagreeable; as Christ loves all his children without any distinction, so should they love one another, whether poor or rich, weaker or stronger, lesser or greater believers; and as Christ loves them not in word only, but in deed and in truth, so should they love one another with a pure heart fervently, and by love serve one another.”
As we close, tonight, let's further examine the cross-reference in Romans 13:8: “Owe no man any thing, but to love one another: for he that loveth another hath fulfilled the law.”
Of this Matthew Henry writes, “Owe no man any thing; or, you do owe no man any thing; so some read it: “Whatever you owe to any relation, or to any with whom you have to do, it is eminently summer up and included in this debt of love. But to love one another, this is a debt that must be always in the paying, and yet always owing.”
Love is a debt. The law of God and the interest of mankind make it so. It is not a thing which we are left at liberty about, but it is enjoined us, as the principle and summary of all duty owing one to another; for love is the fulfilling of the law; not perfectly, but it is a good step towards it. It is inclusive of all the duties of the second table, which he specifies, Romans 13:9, and these suppose the love of God.
If the love be sincere, it is accepted as the fulfilling of the law. Surely we serve a good master, that has summed up all our duty in one word, and that a short word and a sweet word - love, the beauty and harmony of the universe. Loving and being loved is all the pleasure, joy, and happiness, of an intelligent being. God is love (1 John_4:16), and love is his image upon the soul: where it is, the soul is well moulded, and the heart fitted for every good work.
Now, to prove that love is the fulfilling of the law, he gives us, 1. An induction of particular precepts, (Romans 13:9). He specifies the last five of the ten commandments, which he observes to be all summed up in this royal law, Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself - with an as of quality, not of equality - “with the same sincerity that thou lovest thyself, though not in the same measure and degree.”
He that loves his neighbour as himself will be desirous of the welfare of his neighbour's body, goods, and good name, as of his own. On this is built that golden rule of doing as we would be done by. Were there no restraints of human laws in these things, no punishments incurred (which the malignity of human nature hath made necessary), the law of love would of itself be effectual to prevent all such wrongs and injuries, and to keep peace and good order among us.”
This concludes this evening's Discussion, “In the Image and Likeness of God, Part 3.”
This Discussion was presented “live” on February 2nd, 2022
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