Overcoming The World Series

I think I was seven or eight years old when my mother became concerned enough about the lack of a church background for my younger sister and I that she began to take us to church. We drove 20 minutes to the nearest Presbyterian Church and on one of those first Sundays I found myself in a large Sunday School class full of kids my age. And the lesson was on the Golden rule.

I remember the charge: Do unto others as you would have other do unto you. And I think Matthew 5:39 may have been quoted. “But I say to you, do not resist an evil person; but whoever slaps you on your right cheek, turn the other to him also.” She then assigned us to draw a picture of an act that would demonstrate that truth.

Well, somehow, there was a mistranslation and misapplication of that vital truth in my young unregenerate mind. Because the picture I drew represented what I thought was a just outcome. It was a picture of one kid slugging the other kid with his right hand, and the other kid returning the favor. I mean, justice was fulfilled wasn’t it? The slugger got slugged and by the person who slugged him. Made sense to me. An for an eye, a slug for a slug? What could feel more right. I thought I had drawn a pretty darn good picture, and it felt right. So I showed it to my teacher as I was leaving class. I think she complimented the picture but explained that what I had drawn was exactly the opposite of what the Bible taught. That didn’t feel right. No retaliation, well, where was the justice in that?

It took years, and something called conversion to make sense out of the Golden Rule. To say that spiritual things don’t make sense to a natural man is an understatement. It’s the spiritual man, the saved and transformed man who only begins to understand why in the world someone who had been slapped on one cheek, would expose the other one for the same kind of abuse, without an attempt to retaliate. In fact, I’ve seen attempts even by spiritual men to somehow explain away the heart of Christ’s teaching in this passage. But what He said is exactly what He meant, because Jesus was all about overcoming the world’s evil, and doing so by, of all things, returning the world’s evil with good.

That fact was demonstrated once and for all at the cross—the ultimate demonstration of Christ’s love for us and how we would overcome the world’s evil. As the world was murdering Jesus Christ for His righteousness, at that very moment He was dying to save the world from its sins. As the world was taking the life of Jesus, He was giving His life and the opportunity for life to the world. What a contrast! And what a way for God to reconcile the world to Himself?

And so, for us who were once God’s enemies and deserved His wrath but were brought to repentance and faith by His incredible act of mercy, returning ultimate good for ultimate evil, it’s not surprising then, that as His followers, He would ask the same thing of us. That we would also be involved in His work—overcoming the world’s evil by returning evil for good.

And that seems to be the main theme of the last eight verses of Romans 12. Remember, the Apostle Paul is telling us what our reasonable worship of God now involves. Since Christ gave his life as a sacrifice on the cross for us, it is now only reasonable that we offer our bodies as living sacrifices back to Him, for His purposes. That is to be accomplished when we are transformed by the renewing of our mind by the Word of God and begin to act as Christ would by demonstrating His unconditional self-sacrificing love in service first to the body of Christ, the church, and then to the world.

Remember, in verse 9, he begins to describe what this love—the love, the agape—as he calls it, would look like. In verse 14, the focus seems to now turn to how we respond to the world of unbelievers who might wrong us, especially in light of what we believe. But the principles apply equally to a believer’s treatment of unbelievers Of course, the instructions also deal with how he ought to deal with believers as well, should they be offensive, or experience the circumstances we find described in these verses.

His first instruction is to pray for, and not against your persecutors.

Verse 14: “Bless those who persecute you, bless, and curse not.”

Now most of us in this country have little experience with this matter of persecution. Once in a great while someone might criticize us these days for our stand on abortion or gay rights. But we have no idea of what the Romans were facing when this was written and what many Christians around the world are experiencing today. This was written by the Apostle Paul to the Church at Rome in 57 A.D. Nero was Caesar at that time, and he would soon be putting this command to the test for believers by throwing thousands of them to the lions in the Colosseum for entertainment and lighting his gardens by using their bodies as torches. And so it remains today, in places like Nigeria, and Muslim countries, and Communist countries that there is actually a great price to be paid for following Christ. I have here the latest edition of Voice of the Martyrs magazine, which features interviews with women and children who have lost their fathers and husbands to the murderous Islamic terrorists in their land, who continually prey on and against Christians in an attempt to exterminate Christianity. They live in constant fear and danger but continue to follow Christ, and they have this command, and Christ’s clear commands to love their enemies and pray for those who persecute them, in spite of just how severe their losses have been at the hands of their persecutors.