Responding to Wrong with Biblical Love

Introduction

As we begin this morning, I would ask that you open your Bibles to the 5th chapter of Matthew. Last week, in verses 38–42, we considered Christ’s command concerning personal retaliation. Once again, verses 17–20 served as the anchor for the passage, reminding us that Christ is not correcting the law of God, but the sinful reductions and interpretations that had been placed upon it. In that section, Jesus showed that a principle given to restrain justice could not be turned into permission for personal vengeance.

The believer who is wronged is therefore not to seize justice for himself, repay injury with injury, or allow retaliation to govern his response. But Christ does not stop with restraint. A person may refuse to strike back and still remain bitter, resentful, and hostile toward the one who has wronged him. Kingdom righteousness requires more than the absence of revenge; it requires the presence of active love.

That is the movement into our text this morning. The one whom we were forbidden to avenge now becomes the one whom we are commanded to love, and the persecutor is not merely someone we must refuse to curse, but someone for whom we must pray. Christ moves from what the believer must not do to the positive action he is required to take.

In Matthew 5:43–48, this section of the Sermon on the Mount reaches its climax. Kingdom righteousness is not satisfied merely when evil is left unanswered; it seeks to answer evil with good. And Christ measures that love not by what others deserve or return, but by the perfect goodness of our Father in heaven.

With that in mind, if you have not already, please turn in your Bibles to Matthew 5:43–48, and having found your place...

Text

Please stand in reverence for the reading of God’s holy, inerrant, infallible, authoritative, sufficient, complete and certain Word.

Matthew 5:43–48 LSB

“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, so that you may be sons of your Father who is in heaven; for He causes His sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous. “For if you love those who love you, what reward do you have? Do not even the tax collectors do the same? “And if you greet only your brothers, what more are you doing than others? Do not even the Gentiles do the same? “Therefore you are to be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect.

Holy and merciful Father, as we come before Your Word, we confess how far our hearts fall short of the love that Christ requires. You have commanded us not only to refrain from vengeance, but to love our enemies, to pray for those who persecute us, and to seek good even for those who wrong us. Yet we are often quick to anger, slow to forgive, eager to defend ourselves, and far too willing to rejoice when those who oppose us suffer.

Lord, expose these sins in us through Your Word. Teach us to see the perfect goodness of our Father in heaven and, in seeing it, to recognize our need for Christ. We cannot produce this righteousness from ourselves. Give us grace to look to the One who perfectly loved His enemies, who bore our guilt, and who now works in His people by His Spirit.

Open our minds to understand Your Word, humble our hearts beneath it, and conform us more fully to the image of Christ. We ask this in His name. Amen.

The Law Narrowed by the Heart

Jesus begins in verse 43: “You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’” The first half comes directly from Leviticus 19:18: “you shall love your neighbor as yourself.” The problem is not the command, nor is Christ correcting Moses. The problem is the addition, “and hate your enemy.”

We should be clear about what Scripture means by “neighbor.” The word does not simply mean friend or someone toward whom we naturally feel affection. In Leviticus 19, the neighbor is the person toward whom we have a God-given obligation to act in righteousness and love. The chapter forbids hatred, vengeance, and grudges toward one’s fellow man, and only a few verses later commands Israel to love the stranger dwelling among them “as yourself” (Leviticus 19:33–34). The law itself therefore prevents neighbor-love from being reduced merely to affection for those within our preferred circle.

The same principle appears elsewhere in the Old Testament. Exodus 23:4–5 commands Israel to return an enemy’s wandering animal and to help when the animal of one who hates him is burdened down. Proverbs 24:17 forbids rejoicing when an enemy falls, and Proverbs 25:21 commands that a hungry enemy be fed and a thirsty enemy be given water. Personal hostility did not remove the obligation to seek another person’s good.

The corruption came by narrowing “neighbor” until love could be confined to those regarded as one’s own people, friends, or allies. Matthew Henry was correct when he observed:

Matthew Henry’s Commentary on the Whole Bible: Complete and Unabridged in One Volume Matthew 5:43–48

by neighbour they understood those only of their own country, nation, and religion; and those only that they were pleased to look upon as their friends: yet this was not the worst; from this command, Thou shalt love thy neighbour, they were willing to infer what God never designed; Thou shalt hate thine enemy; and they looked upon whom they pleased as their enemies

Christ’s words eliminate this corruption. The person we would most naturally place beyond the reach of neighbor-love is precisely the person He brings into view in verse 44: “But I say to you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you.”

The law had never taught that an enemy ceased to be a neighbor toward whom righteousness was owed. Man had narrowed the command; Christ restores its full reach.

What Biblical Love Actually Requires

If we are going to hear Christ correctly, we must understand what Scripture means by love. In our culture, love is often reduced to affection, affirmation, or approval, but that definition cannot survive Matthew 5:44 because Christ commands us to love an enemy.

The Greek verb is agapaō, but its meaning must be established by context rather than by assigning it a fixed theological definition. Here, the force of the command is seen in its object and its expression: we are to love our enemies and pray for those who persecute us. Luke 6:27–28 expands the same command by adding, “do good to those who hate you” and “bless those who curse you.” Romans 12 follows the same pattern by forbidding retaliation and commanding believers to feed a hungry enemy and overcome evil with good. Biblical love, then, is not merely a feeling. It is a God-governed disposition that seeks the genuine good of another person, even when that person opposes us and even when no return can be expected.

Because this love seeks genuine good, it is always governed by truth. It does not require us to approve sin, ignore injustice, avoid necessary confrontation, or remove every consequence of wickedness. Love may require discipline, restraint, boundaries, or lawful justice. The highest good we can desire for an enemy is not merely that his circumstances improve, but that he be restrained from evil, brought to repentance, reconciled to God through Christ, and transformed by grace. Calvin expresses this well when he writes that believers:

Commentary on a Harmony of the Evangelists Matthew, Mark, and Luke Matthew 5:43–48; Luke 6:27–28, 32–33, 35–36

...desire, as far as lies in them, that the wicked should return to a sound mind, that they may not perish; and thus they endeavour to promote their salvation.

That is why Christ immediately connects enemy-love with prayer. Prayer exposes what we truly desire for the one who has wronged us. We may restrain our actions and still harbor resentment, but when we bring that person before God we are forced to ask what we actually want for him. We may pray that God restrain evil, protect those being harmed, and administer justice, while also praying that He grant repentance, mercy, and salvation. These desires are not contradictory. We can ask God to stop wickedness without taking pleasure in the destruction of the wicked.

Spurgeon captures the positive nature of the command when he writes:

The Gospel of the Kingdom: A Commentary on the Book of Matthew Chapter 5:21–48: The King Corrects Traditional Law

Ours it is to persist in loving, even if men persist in enmity. We are to render blessing for cursing, prayers for persecutions. Even in the cases of cruel enemies, we are to “do good to them, and pray for them.” We are no longer enemies to any, but friends to all. We do not merely cease to hate, and then abide in a cold neutrality; but we love where hatred seemed inevitable.

Love Without the Requirement of Return

Christ then exposes what is perhaps the most difficult characteristic of this love: it is not governed by reciprocity. In verse 46 He asks, “For if you love those who love you, what reward do you have? Do not even the tax collectors do the same?” Jesus does not claim that fallen people are incapable of every form of love. Unbelievers love their children. They sacrifice for friends. They show remarkable loyalty to those who have been loyal to them. They give gifts, render assistance, protect one another, form communities, and sometimes make tremendous sacrifices for people within their own circle. The problem is not that all reciprocal affection is evil. Reciprocal love is a genuine good of God's common grace. The problem is that reciprocal love, standing by itself, is not distinctively Christian.

There is nothing supernatural about loving someone because he makes loving him pleasant. When someone praises us, helps us, includes us, agrees with us, and demonstrates affection toward us, the natural response is to return the same. “You love me, so I love you. You support me, so I support you. You remember me, so I remember you. You speak well of me, so I speak well of you.” The world understands that exchange perfectly well. Jesus says even tax collectors know how to operate that way.

Verse 47 makes the same point from another direction: “If you greet only your brothers, what more are you doing than others?” The greeting in view is more than casually acknowledging someone's existence. It represents social recognition, warmth, and peaceful regard. Jesus asks what is extraordinary about extending that welcome only to our own people. The Greek word translated “more,” carries the idea of what exceeds the ordinary measure. The language naturally recalls Christ's demand in verse 20 that the righteousness of His people surpass that of the scribes and Pharisees. The life of the kingdom cannot simply be the world's ordinary system of exchange dressed in religious language.

This is where the passage becomes deeply searching for us, because much of what we call love can quietly function as an unspoken contract. We give, but we expect appreciation. We serve, but we expect acknowledgment. We remain loyal, but we expect an equivalent loyalty in return. We show hospitality, but resentment begins to grow when hospitality is not reciprocated. We forgive, but we expect the other person quickly to behave in a way that makes our forgiveness feel worthwhile. The problem is not that gratitude, mutual affection, and reciprocal love are wrong. They are blessings. The problem begins when our willingness to seek another person's good is dependent upon receiving something in return.

Biblical enemy-love destroys that condition. It says that my obedience to God is not controlled by the other person's response to me. Matthew Henry summarizes the distinction succinctly:

Matthew Henry’s Commentary on the Whole Bible: Complete and Unabridged in One Volume Matthew 5:43–48

In this especially we must do more than others, that while every one will render good for good, we must render good for evil; and this will speak a nobler principle, and is consonant to a higher rule, than the most of men act by. Others salute their brethren, they embrace those of their own party, and way, and opinion; but we must not so confine our respect, but love our enemies, otherwise what reward have we? We cannot expect the reward of Christians, if we rise no higher than the virtue of publicans

His point is not that Christians seek suffering or pretend that evil is harmless. It is that grace introduces a principle of conduct that cannot be explained merely by exchange. I do not seek another person's good because he has first purchased my benevolence with his own. I seek his good because I belong to Christ.

This kind of love does not require us to pretend that sin has not occurred or that every relationship must immediately return to the closeness it once had. Where there has been real wrong, repentance means honestly acknowledging that sin and turning from it; reconciliation grows where that repentance is present, and trust may take time to be restored. But even where repentance has not yet come, Christ does not permit bitterness or revenge to govern the believer. We may need wisdom, boundaries, and patience, but we are still called to seek the other person’s true good. Another person’s sin may change the shape of the relationship, but it does not give us permission to answer hatred with hatred.

The Father as the Pattern of Love

Jesus now gives the reason for this remarkable command in verse 45: “so that you may be sons of your Father who is in heaven; for He causes His sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous.” Christ is not teaching that we earn adoption through extraordinary love. Rather, Jesus is speaking of family resemblance. The children of the Father increasingly display the character of their Father.

Calvin makes this distinction explicitly:

Commentary on a Harmony of the Evangelists Matthew, Mark, and Luke Matthew 5:43–48; Luke 6:27–28, 32–33, 35–36

In short, Christ assures us, that this will be a mark of our adoption, if we are kind to the unthankful and evil. And yet you are not to understand, that our liberality makes us the children of God: but the same Spirit, who is the witness, (

This is precisely the distinction we need. We do not love enemies in order to persuade God to adopt us. We love enemies because those whom God has adopted are being conformed to the likeness of their Father.

And what example does Christ choose to place before us? He points to something so ordinary that we can easily fail to recognize the wonder of it. He points to sunshine and rain. The sun rises in the morning over the home of the believer and over the home of the unbeliever. Rain falls upon the fields of the man who worships God and the fields of the man who curses His name. The wicked person wakes in the morning and receives breath, strength, food, friendship, intelligence, beauty, seasons, laughter, skill, government, medicine, family, and innumerable temporal benefits from the God against whom he rebels.

We should not confuse this providential goodness with saving grace. Scripture does not teach that God's benevolent providence means that His saving purpose is identical toward every person. God's wrath against persistent unbelief is real. Final judgment is real. The distinction between the Father's covenant love for His children and His general goodness toward His creatures must be preserved. Yet we must not protect that distinction by making Christ's own words meaningless. Jesus says that God gives real temporal good to the evil and the unjust. He does not deal with every sinner in every moment according to the full measure of what that sinner deserves.

Every sunrise received by a rebel is undeserved. Every drop of rain is mercy. Every ordinary pleasure enjoyed by an unbeliever testifies that God's providential benevolence is not merely reactive to the goodness of its recipient. Spurgeon observed:

The Gospel of the Kingdom: A Commentary on the Book of Matthew Chapter 5:21–48: The King Corrects Traditional Law

To do good for the sake of the good done, and not because of the character of the person benefited, is a noble imitation of God. If the Lord only sent the fertilizing shower upon the land of the saintly, drought would deprive whole leagues of land of all hope of a harvest. We also must do good to the evil, or we shall have a narrow sphere, our hearts will grow contracted, and our sonship towards the good God will be rendered doubtful.

That is where Christ directs us when reciprocal love fails. He does not tell us to measure our enemy more carefully. He tells us to look at our Father. Our problem is that we constantly calculate according to merit. We remember who thanked us, who disappointed us, who agreed with us, who embarrassed us, who stood beside us, and who abandoned us. We decide how much kindness is appropriate according to the person's record. But the Father causes His sun to rise. His ordinary benevolence flows from His goodness, not from the worthiness of fallen recipients. The children of God are called to resemble Him.

The Perfection of the Father and the Exposure of Our Hearts

Then we reach the final statement of verse 48: “Therefore you are to be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect.” Jesus does not conclude this section by lowering the standard. He does not tell us simply to be kinder than those around us or to measure ourselves against tax collectors, Gentiles, Pharisees, or even other believers. He places the Father before us.

The Greek word translated “perfect,” can carry the sense of completeness, maturity, wholeness, or that which has reached its intended goal. The immediate context matters. In Luke’s parallel, Jesus says, “Be merciful, just as your Father is merciful.” Here in Matthew, the emphasis falls especially upon the completeness of a love that does not stop at the boundary of reciprocity. The Father gives real providential good to the righteous and the unrighteous alike, and His children are called to reflect that same breadth of benevolence.

Yet we must not weaken Christ’s statement. Jesus still says, “as your heavenly Father is perfect.” Throughout this chapter He has been dismantling every lesser standard of righteousness. It is not enough to say that we have not murdered, because God sees anger. It is not enough to say that we have not committed adultery, because God sees lust. It is not enough to say that we kept the oath, because God hears every word. It is not enough to say that we did not retaliate, because God sees whether hatred remains. And it is not enough to love those who love us, because even tax collectors do that.

When the standard is the Father rather than the neighbor, comparison ends.

At that point every claim to self-righteousness collapses. None of us can say that we have loved every enemy with a perfectly pure heart, or that we have always prayed for those who injured us without resentment, or that our kindness has been entirely free from the expectation of return. The command exposes not a defect in God’s standard, but the depth of our sin.

This is why the law must be preached with its full force. Human inability does not diminish divine righteousness. The law shows us what righteousness truly is, and in doing so strips away every hope that our standing before God can rest upon the quality of our own obedience. It leaves us looking outside ourselves for the righteousness we need.

The Father’s Perfection and Our Progressive Sanctification

At the same time, verse 48 must not be distorted into the claim that Christians become entirely sinless at conversion or attain complete moral perfection in this life. The rest of Scripture will not permit that conclusion. Paul writes in Philippians 3:12, “Not that I have already obtained it or have already become perfect, but I press on.” He does not lower the goal because he has not reached it. He acknowledges that he has not reached it and continues pursuing it.

This is where the biblical doctrine of sanctification gives us the proper framework. When God saves a sinner, something real happens. The believer is united to Christ, given a new heart, indwelt by the Holy Spirit, and freed from the dominion of sin. Sin remains, but it no longer reigns. The Second London Baptist Confession, chapter 13, describes this work as the destruction of sin’s dominion while remaining corruption is progressively weakened and mortified and the graces of Christ are increasingly strengthened.

Sanctification, then, is genuine transformation without present sinless completion. The believer is not what he once was, but neither is he yet what he will be. The Spirit produces real repentance, real obedience, real love, and real growth, even while remaining sin continues to require warfare. This guards us from perfectionism, which claims an arrival Scripture denies, and from defeatism, which uses remaining sin as an excuse to stop pursuing holiness.

Paul does not say, “I am not perfect, therefore the command no longer concerns me.” He says, “I press on.” That is the Christian life. The Father’s perfection remains the standard, Christ remains the pattern, and the Spirit supplies the power by which His people increasingly grow in holiness.

And that growth should become visible even here. Perhaps there was a time when you would immediately retaliate against someone who wronged you, but now you restrain your tongue. Perhaps once you could not pray for an enemy, but now you can sincerely ask God to save him. That is sanctification. We should not despise the work of grace because it is incomplete, but neither should we mistake real progress for finished perfection. Even our strongest love remains dependent upon grace and still falls short of the perfection of our Father.

The Perfect Son and the Enemies He Came to Save

If we stop here, however, the weight of this standard will crush us. If the final message of Matthew 5:43–48 is simply, “Love your enemies more completely and become more like God,” then we have been shown a mountain we cannot climb and left standing at its base. The gospel does not deny the mountain. It gives us Christ.

There is One who has loved with the perfection demanded in verse 48. Jesus Christ did not merely teach this righteousness; He embodied it. He loved the Father with complete devotion. He loved His neighbor without defect. He loved His enemies without sin. He was falsely accused, mocked, struck, spit upon, rejected, betrayed, abandoned, and nailed to a cross, yet Peter tells us that while being reviled He did not revile in return, and while suffering He uttered no threats but kept entrusting Himself to the One who judges righteously.

Yet Christ did far more than refuse retaliation. He sought the eternal good of His enemies at the cost of His own life. Romans 5 tells us that Christ died for the ungodly. Paul does not describe us as morally neutral people who needed a little assistance. He says that “while we were enemies we were reconciled to God through the death of His Son.” Before we read Matthew 5:44 and begin immediately picturing the person who has offended us, the gospel forces us to see ourselves. We were the enemies. We were the rebels. We were the ones whose hearts had not loved God with perfect devotion. We were the ones whose love was selective, self-protective, and corrupted by sin.

Christ did not wait for His enemies to become worthy of His love. He did not enter a reciprocal agreement in which we first rendered Him the obedience that would move Him to respond. The love of the cross is the great demonstration of non-reciprocal grace. God does not save us because we first gave Him something of corresponding value. Christ loved sinners according to the gracious purpose of God, and that love pursued our true good at an unimaginable cost to Himself.

He bore the judgment our sins deserved. He rendered the obedience we had withheld. He fulfilled the law that condemned us. And the sinner who trusts in Christ is not justified because he finally learned to love his enemies well enough to satisfy Matthew 5:48. He is justified because the perfect righteousness of Jesus Christ is counted as his righteousness through faith.

This is where the command that destroys self-righteousness becomes precious. The perfection I do not possess is found in the Savior. The obedience I could never render as the ground of my acceptance has been rendered by Another. Christ is not merely the example placed before me; He is the Substitute who stood in my place.

The Family Resemblance Produced by Grace

But the grace that justifies does not leave the believer unchanged. The Christ whose righteousness is counted to His people also gives them His Spirit. The same gospel that tells me that Christ loved me when I was His enemy begins to reshape the manner in which I respond to mine. This transformation does not happen perfectly or instantaneously, but it happens genuinely. The Spirit teaches the Christian to pray where the flesh would curse, to entrust judgment to God where pride would seek revenge, to desire repentance where resentment would prefer humiliation, and to continue doing good even when there is little hope of receiving anything in return.

That is the family resemblance Christ has been describing. It is not sinless perfection now; it is genuine conformity to the Father through union with the Son. The Christian does not look at verse 48 and say, “I have arrived.” Neither does he say, “Since I will not arrive in this life, I need not pursue it.” He looks at Christ, rests entirely in Christ's righteousness, and then rises in the power of Christ's Spirit to pursue the holiness for which he has been saved.

By the time we reach the end of these verses, Christ has carried us far beyond the question of retaliation. He has shown us what righteousness looks like when another person gives us every earthly reason not to love. The question is not whether that person deserves our love. In one sense, that matter is already settled: he does not deserve it, but neither did we when Christ set His love upon us. The better question is whether, before God, we are willing to seek that person’s true good.

That may mean praying for him and doing him good; in other circumstances it may require truthful confrontation, wise boundaries, or lawful intervention where evil must be restrained. The particular form requires biblical wisdom, but hatred and private vengeance are never available to the disciple of Christ. Another person’s sin may affect the relationship, but it cannot become permission for us to answer evil with evil.

Our Father has shown us this love in the goodness He extends even to the evil and the unjust. Our Savior has shown it supremely by dying to reconcile us to God while we were still enemies. And the Holy Spirit is now producing within the people of Christ a love that cannot be explained by ordinary human reciprocity.

This passage therefore does more than expose how far we fall short of the Father’s perfection; it also describes the kind of life that grace increasingly produces in His children. Grace begins to change the very response Christ has confronted in these verses: the hand once clenched in retaliation begins to open in kindness, the mouth inclined toward cursing learns to pray, and the heart that demanded repayment increasingly learns to entrust judgment to God.

When the people whom Christ has redeemed begin to love in that way, the world sees something more than ordinary human reciprocity. It sees, however imperfectly, the family resemblance of our Father who is in heaven.

Closing Prayer

Our gracious Father, we confess that the love Christ requires exposes how far our hearts still fall short of Your perfection. We are often quick to measure others by what they have done to us, to withhold kindness when it is not returned, and to allow resentment to remain where You have commanded us to love. Forgive us for answering wrong with bitterness, for seeking repayment in our hearts, and for failing to pray as we ought for those who oppose us.

We thank You that our hope does not rest in the perfection of our love, but in the perfect righteousness of Jesus Christ. While we were enemies, He loved us, gave Himself for us, bore our judgment, and reconciled us to You. Teach us, by Your Spirit, to increasingly reflect that grace in the way we respond to others. Give us wisdom to seek what is truly good, courage to speak truth when necessary, patience when wronged, and hearts that entrust justice into Your hands. Conform us more and more to the likeness of our Savior, that our lives might display the family resemblance of our Father who is in heaven. We ask this in the name of Christ. Amen.