Main news for 11 April 2022

In the Book of Psalms one often finds wishes of evil and even curses against the wicked. One often hears the question: how does this fit with the Gospel call to love enemies? At first glance it may appear to be an insoluble contradiction. But what is love for enemies, of which the Savior speaks?

Love in the Bible is always, first of all, relationship and intention, not evaluation and not emotion. We love a person not when he pleases us or when we agree and stand in solidarity with him, but when we want good for him. What then is good if the issue is a sinner and his sin? In other words, how could we help a sinner if we truly wanted good for him?

It is self-evident that destroying the sinner, making him disappear from sight, isolating him from society, or making him an outcast will not solve the problem. By this the sinner will not stop sinning, unless all of this is accompanied by a completely different, spiritual action on his heart.

The supreme task in this case would be to make the sinner stop sinning, not under compulsion, not by necessity or lack of opportunity, but by good will, as a result of repentance and conversion. It would seem that the threat of destruction is not the best argument here.

Of course, under threat of death a sinner may stop, but sincerely repent? Hardly. Yet in this case the issue is not only a physical threat, but also what is called God's judgment. It would seem that judgment is judgment; in any case it remains an instrument of coercion, and nothing more.

An unrepentant criminal always perceives judgment as an instrument of violence against himself, and his opinion will hardly change even if he knows that there is and can be no court higher than the one before which he stands at that moment.

And yet there is a difference between human judgment, even the most just, and God's judgment: God's judgment is not only evaluation and sentence, but also a meeting with God face to face. Here it no longer matters what this meeting looks like outwardly or what physical consequences it brings. Something else matters: this meeting becomes for the person a moment of truth, and therefore a chance for repentance, a chance that no human being can provide him.

A human being can only testify about God, about His judgment and His mercy, while God can manifest all this visibly. Of course, a person may fail to use even such a chance: freedom is freedom. But in that case he will most likely have to forget salvation forever.