LOOKING FOR TRUTH IN THE BIBLE? HERE IS ONE INDISPUTABLY TRUE PASSAGE

 

4/27/22

Take a look at Luke 6, 35-36, especially the portion I have italicized and highlighted:

“But, rather, love your enemies and do good to them, and lend expecting nothing back; then your reward will be great and you will be children of the Most High, for He Himself is kind to the ungrateful and the wicked.   Be merciful, just as your Father is merciful.”

Most of this teaching of Jesus, a part of what Luke refers to as “The Sermon on the Plain,” and Matthew refers to as “The Sermon on the Mount,” is difficult.  Loving one’s enemies is nearly impossible.   Lend expecting nothing back?  If we were to follow this admonition literally, the banking and financial system would collapse, rendering the world immeasurably poorer.  This is something Jesus surely would not want and is yet another example of the danger of taking much of the Bible, including Jesus’s teachings, literally.   Being merciful is only slightly easier than loving one’s enemies.  Once mercy is shown, however, the rewards to the forgiver are greater than the rewards to the forgiven, but I digress, and all this is grist for another mill.   What this piece focuses on is the italicized portion of this passage, found at the end of verse 35:

 

“…for He Himself is kind to the ungrateful and the wicked.”

 

Who can argue with that?   We see it all the time…scoundrels obtain wealth, fame, and power through crooked means and suffer no punishment but instead are seemingly rewarded with more wealth and power.  Meanwhile, people of faith, or even people of little or no faith, who are good, upright people suffer unimaginable horrors.   Even outside those extremes, we see in everyday life people who are dishonest, amoral, or downright immoral leading apparently (a very key adverb here, by the way) terrific lives while honest, salt-of-the-earth types lead apparently hum-drum, prosaic lives, scratching out a living until they die to be largely forgotten within a few generations.  

 

I remember a situation, many years ago, when I was seemingly locked with no escape in a situation that seemed insurmountable at the time.   It was not a situation of great import; in fact, it was something of a high-class problem.  But it was a problem that I was thrust into due to a lie that I had been told, and that, admittedly, I fell for.   Further, it was one of those problems about which I could do nothing at the time; I just had to wait it out.   I was so angry that I was getting, to use a technical and more family- friendly term, screwed, while the liar was enjoying the fruits of his dishonesty, that I found myself pounding the dashboard of my car, saying, out loud

 

“God rewards those who p*%# in His face!”

 

In an earlier post (“SIGN, SIGN, EVERYWHERE A SIGN…”, 3/22/22), I wrote “It’s understandable to be frustrated and angry with God, whether one is of great faith or one is of little faith.”   This was surely one of those times.   The problem was resolved soon enough and, in retrospect, it wasn’t much of a problem at all, but after a long and frustrating week, it seemed much larger to a sleep deprived yours truly.  Further, as I look back at it, what I was ranting was indeed true:  God does reward those who p*%# in His face,” though not necessarily for  p*%#ing in His face.  I was an avid Bible reader even back then and, had I remembered Luke 6, 35-36, I would have realized that God’s response to my rant, if indeed it merited, or even expected, a response, was probably something like

“Yeah, I do.  So what?   I’m only following the advice I gave you.”

 So yes, what Jesus said to his listeners on the plain is true; He is kind to the ungrateful and the wicked.  He is loving His enemies and being good to them, as He advises us to do.  He is also, less frequently, it sometimes seems, kind to the grateful and the good, by the way.  God’s counter-intuitive, in our estimation, behavior angers those of us who try to do the right thing, who try to be good and try to be grateful.   We don’t understand it and we don’t like it.   We ask, sometimes we scream “Why?!”  But that’s okay; God understands our feelings, even though we don’t understand His.  This is one of the conditions of life that requires one of life’s least satisfying answers, to wit, we don’t need to understand God; indeed, we can’t understand God.   We just need to trust and to have faith.


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