Snakes! Sons of vipers! How will you escape the judgment of hell?

-Matthew 23:30, NLT

But I tell you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, that you may be children of your Father in heaven.

-Matthew 5:44-45a, NIV

Recently, I have been meditating on the different ways Jesus handled people who acted in opposition to him.

These two passages–both from Jesus’ own mouth–quoted above demonstrate the stark contrast.

The first verse is directed at religious leaders who are teaching and acting in opposition to God’s Kingdom. In contrast, I share the famous words from the Sermon on the Mount where Jesus calls us to love our enemies.

Are cheaters like the religious leaders or the enemies Jesus calls us to love?

I do not recall ever hearing a sermon over the years tackling this contrast. The usual message is to love everyone. However, only a willfully blind individual would deny that the words in Matthew 23:30 are a curse, not a blessing.

How do we make sense of this?

I think context matters:

These sense I get from the first command to love our enemies is in the context of loving the Roman overlords that the Jewish people hated. These are not people who were given the revelation.

However, the religious leaders have no excuse for opposing God’s kingdom. They DO have His revelation. Yet they are actively partnering with the kingdom of darkness.

Throughout the Bible, I see God holding people accountable to the level of the revelation given to them. Hence, I see Jesus especially harsh on the religious leaders here. They should have known better!

Returning to the question of our cheaters, I believe many of us would likely place them in the same camp as the religious leaders.

They know better. In fact, they might even try using religious language to falsely “justify” their sins. The destruction they are creating is more akin to the Pharisees here than the Romans of Jesus’ day.

Like Jesus, our job isn’t to go out of our ways to destroy this modern day Pharisees. However, we need to be able to refute the false teachings they are offering as these stand in direct opposition to God’s Kingdom–adultery is NEVER acceptable in God’s kingdom!

Such people have just a bleak spiritual future, in my opinion, as those religious leaders Jesus takes to task in Matthew 23.