In our Radix Fidem community, we consistently focus on the Law of Christ: Love your fellow believers as Christ does. That’s the crux of the Covenant of Christ. We teach what that should look like, and how standard mainstream church behavior falls far short of that standard.

Boiled down to its essence, “love” means seeking the welfare of another. It further means doing so according to your resources and capabilities. While it has become trite to say that it’s a command, not a feeling, we find the vast majority of American church folks still operate on a western psychology of false guilt about such things. It’s feelings again, in which they feel obliged to build up feelings, which is most certainly not what Jesus meant when He declared His Covenant Law at His Last Seder.

We are striving to see things through the Hebraic mindset of Jesus. Being nice is not good enough. Jesus could be a dick about certain things. Holding someone in positive regard is not the point at all. Positive feelings will arise from time spent with others as a natural side-effect, not as an objective. Hebrew people knew this. The foundation is your faith/commitment to walk in your master’s ways. It’s feudalism, a fundamental assumption behind the Bible.

We’ve talked at length about how your feelings are rooted in the fleshly nature. While they are informative, telling you things about your fallen nature, your feelings do not serve as the basis for decisions. You decide something because your convictions demand it from you. Guilt is also just a feeling, and way too many Americans assume that guilt is the voice of conviction. We need to work on that.

At any rate, it is not necessary to hold people in positive regard in order to walk as Christ commanded. It is not necessary to find their company pleasant. All of that is fleshly nature. What is necessary is your commitment to keeping Jesus alive in this world by acting as His proxy. Not the fake Jesus of western mythology; Jesus was the quintessential Hebrew man. We are supposed to be the incarnation of our Risen Lord. Let your feelings drag along behind, cooperative or not. Frankly, they get in the way of doing what He commands. You really need a clear conviction about what you can and should do.

That’s how love works in the Body of Christ. How does it work for those outside?

It’s quite fashionable in our self-improvement therapeutic church chatter to shove at some people the command of Christ to “love your enemies”. The problem is that they load this Hebrew declaration with western misconceptions.

A genuine Hebraic mind sees no problem with taking the lives of people you are obliged to love. Sometimes the best thing you can possibly do for someone is to remove them from the scene. This has nothing to do with silly western ethics about assisted suicide, for example. That’s another manifestation of self-centered individualism; it’s all about how the patient feels. The issue is that the love of Christ does not select targets at all. It’s about loving God’s Creation as a whole, and then identifying your contextual responsibilities within that broad framework.

Thus, if someone crosses certain boundaries, they find themselves in a free-fire zone. If you die from what’s happening in that zone, it’s your own fault. The boundaries God has decreed are more important than any individual. Why do you think the Watchers, the bene elohim, are being held in prison? They crossed the one most important boundary in all of Creation; they willfully stepped into a free-fire zone. God has decreed numerous lesser boundaries that apply to humans. As the ultimate feudal sovereign master, God has handed each of His children a domain, a sense of obligation and duty. He expects His children to operate on His behalf within those domains.

If someone desperate to sate some fleshly appetite tries to intrude on the domain God has given me, it could be fatal for them. Rape my family members? Steal our necessities for survival? Not if I can stop it. I’ll use all of my resources, training and experience to seek the most effective defense, but if the invader cannot be convinced to back off, they could well die. It’s in Creation’s best interest to handle things that way. The intruder’s welfare is not above my duty to guard what God has given me.

That’s a Hebrew outlook. It’s not about the material things themselves. It’s a question of the boundaries God has drawn for me; it all belongs to God. I give by His command, but I also take at His command. The history of Israel’s conquest of Canaan should explain that well enough. That the flesh can get in the way does not change the underlying moral truth.

In this world, there will inevitably be humans who hold a higher worldly domain than I. The typical American concept of this is utterly false. I’m not going to argue about Romans 13. The second half of that chapter says flatly that obeying the Law of Christ in loving my brothers and sisters, and of due care for His Creation, is the fulfillment of my duty to any human government. Government officials are viewed as a necessary annoyance. We do our best to stay out of their way. But the US government is not the same as the Roman government Paul faced in his day; the US is morally inferior to Rome. We’ve said enough about that.

My convictions will tell me how to handle conflicts between government and faith. The same goes for religious leaders who, suffering seriously from western cultural mythology, assert their particular reading of Scripture. Your pontifications mean nothing to me. If my convictions don’t agree with you, then you’ve wasted your time. Before I was born, God wrote on my heart what I must do to please Him, and I’m spending the rest of my life trying to discover what He wrote there. The same goes for you. We have way too many scolding false prophets who operate from the flesh, trying to use fleshly means to get their way.

In actual practice, I tend to play along with others, even when I know for certain it’s going to turn out very badly and might even cost me something. That’s one of my teaching methods. I’ll be there to support your efforts despite my certainty, because I want to be there to catch you when you fall. I’ll help you clean up the mess, too. And I’ll do all of that even when my flesh doesn’t like you at all. By God’s mercy, I learned long ago to ignore my feelings on a lot of things. I want you to learn the same thing.

God put limits on our mortal situation. There are people in this world you cannot target for ministry. He made people in this world that you must treat as mere machinery. He decides who is family for you, who is an ally but not family, who is machinery and scenery, and who is your enemy. He decides how you will handle each of them when the time comes. The enemies Jesus was indicating in that quote refers to people who get close enough to require your ministry.

Human need is a bottomless pit. Worse, American church people are generally lost about what God says people need. Our human evaluation of what they need is useless. The only question is what will boost our Lord’s reputation. His glory is the answer to all human need.

At any rate, most of the time when I see a public pronouncement on “love your enemies”, I can guess what’s coming. I’ll take a look if I have time, even though I’ve rarely been blessed by it. Most people are simply plastering a Bible verse on top of their bogus western social mythology about being nice to people who might actually be a real threat to your mission in Christ. This helps me to mark unreliable sources for spiritual wisdom. They become background noise.