Stephen
Terry, Director
Love
Is the Fulfillment of the Law
Commentary
for the March 29, 2025, Sabbath School Lesson
"For the entire law is fulfilled in keeping this
one command: 'Love your neighbor as yourself.'" Galatians 5:14, NIV
In
the news this week has been the controversy over the rights of resident
foreigners in the face of American justice and constitutionally defined fair
play. At the heart of that controversy has been two plane loads of Venezuelans
deported from the United States, not to their own country, but to a prison in
El Salvador, far from their homeland and far from any possible expectation of a
court trial in the United States where they were apprehended. As can be seen from the accompanying photo, these men are already
sentenced and imprisoned through an offshore renditioning engineered by United
States Immigration and Customs Enforcement at the direction of the President of
the United States. Deprived of a trial and its findings, it is impossible to determine
if all these individuals are guilty of serious crimes that would justify
incarceration in a rendition prison.
I am
not naïve enough to believe that all are innocent simply because they protest
that they are, but the legal standard in the United States for centuries,
derived from English Law, is that the accused is innocent until proven guilty. This
is usually understood to mean the right to a trial to determine guilt or
innocence. This is not only taught in thousands of civics classes across our
nation. It has also been reinforced by hundreds of thousands of television
episodes and movies for well over a century and in literature before that. Whether
it is the good guys in white hats fighting the bad guys in black hats, cowboys
fighting Native Americans, the allies fighting the Axis in World War II, or
Elliot Ness fighting gangsters during the depression, the good guys were always
about fair play and justice, never stooping to the methods of the bad guys, and
justice always triumphed in the end.
Now those
beliefs are being shredded as we decide to abandon due process to take our
pound of flesh in retribution. The Amazon Prime series, "Reacher," epitomizes
our new sentiment as a nation. Any evil, any means is justified to counter evil
if the bad guys are dead at the end, so they are not able to testify about the
evil the "good guys" perpetrated in the interests of "justice." As Reacher states
in an episode late in the third season, "I don't want justice; I want
vengeance." In the past, superheroes would typically deliver the bad guys in
one piece to the police for eventual trial. Now it is a waste of time; it is deemed
better to pass judgment and execute sentences on the spot.
This
is based on the idea of a broken justice system and the fear that a lenient
judiciary will allow the accused to remain free or quickly regain freedom with
an especially light sentence. All those television shows and movies that encourage
fair play by the good guys also taught us that the bad guys will never give up
seeking revenge. The choice then is either living one's life constantly looking
over the shoulder for bad guys looking to get even or using extrajudicial means
to solve the problem, eliminating fear and worry. This fear and perceived
solution drive the huge volume in gun sales in the United States. Again, all
those same television shows and movies also teach that when justice fails, guns
are usually the only solution. As Major Reacher also has said, "We need more guns!"
Typically,
during the Cold War, when one side increased their military capabilities, the
other side followed suit through an endless cycle of escalations. Rarely does
anyone step in and say this is nonsense and work to de-escalate all the armaments
aimed back and forth across the globe. While there have been moments of détente,
they do not last. As a species, we seem bent on our own destruction through
mutually inflicted violence. Are we destined for mutual obliteration in an
earth-wide nuclear inferno as the unavoidable climax to vengeance that masquerades
as justice?
Sadly,
there are those who call themselves Christians who say, "Bring it on so evil
will finally come to an end." Some even attribute the destruction to God who
finally gets so angry with humanity that he reduces everything to cinders. This
does not seem to be the character of a God who would die as Jesus, incarnate,
on a cross to save as many as possible from such a grim fate. In fact, the Apostle
John tells us, "God is love." (1
John 4:8) So who is right? Is God like General Sherman marching through
Georgia to the sea, burning everything in his path, or is he like Jesus,
refusing to bring down fire on a Samaritan village when they slighted him and
his disciples? (Luke
9:51-56) How we answer that question determines how our Christian faith
will play out. It can be said that the Bible reflects how humanity sees God. If
so, humanity's faith is schizophrenic. At times, we see God as hating all the
same people we do, while at others, we see him loving those we want nothing to
do with. (Matthew
5:43-48) In the first instance, we have created God in our own image,
facing the same problems and foes we face, foes which we may have been responsible
for creating. In the latter instance, God asks us to take on his image as we
were created to have in the beginning. (Genesis
1:26-27) If John is correct that "God is love," then we were created to
love.
But
what about all the violence and draconian laws in the Old Testament? Jesus
answered that question when he was quizzed about divorce. He said things were
the way they were back then because of the hardness of our hearts. (Matthew
19:3-9) Even in the Old Testament, the prophet Ezekiel brings up the
subject of our hard heartedness more than once. (Ezekiel
11:19 & 36:26)
Our hearts develop this stony hardness from fear. The evil one wants to keep us
in a state of fear because fearful people are easy to manipulate. To that end,
it serves his purpose to introduce as much chaos and evil into the world as
possible to create that fear. Jesus warned us that this would be the case, but
our survival depends upon our ability to keep on loving despite the evil so
that our hearts do not also become hardened, and we lose our salvation. (Matthew
24:12-13)
Innately,
those who are truly seeking to bear the image we were created to bear, the
image of love, are deeply offended when we see vengeance masquerading as
justice. We know that justice without compassion, without love, is Mount Sinai
without the cross. It means living forever in the mire of our sinfulness
without the hope of deliverance from that sorry state. The laws of both man and
God condemn us. We have no hope of salvation unless we know God, and John tells
us if we claim to know and love God but hate others then we are liars. (1
John 4:19-21) The Devil knows that if he can keep us fearful, we will never
be able to be loving. We will be too afraid to be vulnerable, and he tells us
that being vulnerable is dangerous. This is why it is so important to give God
access to our hearts. His strength and love will remove that feeling of
vulnerability and with it the fear it brings. The more love that enters our
hearts, the more fear leaves for greener pastures. (1
John 4:18)
The
Devil tempts us with FOMO or fear of missing out. He does this because he knows
that the more we have in this life, the greater our fear of losing it will be.
The wealthy have this fear in spades. When they look around them, they have difficulty
believing that everyone else is not out to take what they have. To the degree
that others are driven by that same fear of missing out, they may be right.
However, no matter how great that fear is, they will eventually be consigned to
the grave, and all they have accumulated will pass on to others who did little
to earn it. All that remains then is judgment. Be assured that judgment will
not place what we have gathered in our greedy hands in the scales in our favor
at that judgment. Instead, the only thing that will weigh in our favor on those
heavenly scales is compassion, empathy, and love. For too many, what is placed on
that side of the scale will weigh less than a feather. It would have been
better to use our wealth to care for the needs of the oppressed and suffering
during life than to pass on the wealth to someone who neither cares about nor
desires our salvation.
Though
I have faith in God, I am deeply troubled that so many are choosing to walk
away from God, attracted by glitter of the ersatz treasure this world offers.
They believe it will give them joy, but such joy is hollow and can even lead to
situations worse than those immigrants who ended up in a Salvadorian prison
faced. If we decide to get on that carousal to chase that golden ring, others
are chasing it as well. It is the nature of such treasures that not everyone
can have them though they all desire them. Therefore, those who obtain it must
live in constant fear of losing it to all those who will use any means to take
it for themselves. They will use whatever means they have to take it, both legal
and foul. They may even obtain the power to change what is legal and then use
that power to not only take the ring but everything else leaving us destitute
in the end. This is the crop of the garden of fear that the Devil sows and we
harvest.