Love Your Enemies

One of Jesus’ most misused statements is “love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you.” For the forty-fifth-umpteenth-hundredth time I had some well-meaning believer try to apply that to international political policy. “We shouldn’t fight Iran. We should just love them.” I heard this same nonsense during the Iraq wars. “Jesus said to love your enemies not fight them.” Having taught collegiate-level hermeneutics, this makes me crazy. At no time did Jesus intend this to apply to nor did he apply this to political governments. These “enemies” are your personal enemies. These are your neighbors that pull up your political signs, who falsely accuse you of wrong, who egg your house, who gossip about you at church. In more rare cases you face religious-based opposition from government officials or neighbors. When we lived in Canada, Jim Tune established Churchill Meadows Christian Church in Mississauga. It met in a school gym. One of the neighbors would harass the local authorities just because it was a church meeting. In some cases Jim met resistance from local authorities as well. These are the “enemies” that Jesus had in mind. He was not addressing international relations between countries.

Nowhere in the New Testament do we have anyone teaching about how a predominately Christian nation should be governed. The assumption is always that Christians are a persecuted minority living in the Roman Empire. A Christian is responsible for his own relationship with his neighbors. A government is responsible for the general safety and well-being of everyone regardless of whether the people are Christian or not.

A Clear and Present Danger

Iran bragged to the United State’s diplomats that they were ten days away from having eleven nuclear weapons. We subsequently discovered that they had missiles that could reach Diego Garcia and endanger nations within 4,000 km. They were halfway to having an ICBM (Inter-continental ballistic missile) that could reach the continental United States. Iran has already killed more than 1,000 US soldiers and citizens and injured many more through its proxies of Hamas, the Houthis, and Hezbollah. The regime was a known danger which had killed and was intent on further killing.

Regime Psychology

In the ideal world of this Shia religious death cult, genocide of the Jews, the elimination of Israel, the death and destruction of America and the death and destruction of Western civilization is their fantasy. Because they are apocalyptic religious fanatics, it does not matter to them whether they kill or are killed. To be killed simply means they go to paradise with seventy-two virgins. They want to cause the end of the world which will usher in an Islamic paradise for them. In their minds, if they “win” they “win” and if they “lose” they “win”. Iran is unlike other sane enemies such as Russia, China, and even North Korea who want nuclear weapons to preserve their own states. Iran would relish a nuclear war and think that they were doing Allah’s will.

Responsibility

No US President would be responsible to allow this regime to carry out its plans of world conquest. The people of the United States depend on him for protection. It would be a shirking of duty to wait until Iran could launch a nuclear weapon into the continental United States before taking any action against them. Millions would die and the world economy would crash like nothing ever seen before. There is no “speculation” involved here. We know what they have done. We know what they are trying to do and they tell us what they want to do. “Death to America” is not an empty slogan. It is active regime policy. It is their goal.

President Trump had no choice but to take preemptive action. The safety of the whole world and the world’s economy was on the line. He could not simply say, “We’ll pray about Iran” when the practical reality of a nuclear weapon was ten days away. While this popular misconception of Jesus’ words is widespread among the laity, not all Christians accept this spin. Not everyone in the United States is a Christian and they, also, would like to be protected from Iran’s lunatics. To force them to suffer for a misreading of Scripture and a misapplication to international policy would be horrendous.

I could go on citing Scripture and explaining it but, instead, let me use this opportunity to teach a lesson on how to constructively use AI to research and reply to such common mistakes. Below is the prompt that I gave Grok and the reply.

Prompt

Jesus teaches to love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you. People very often apply this to how one government should treat another one, such as the United States and Iran. This is full of hermeneutical errors because the context is about personal enemies to a Christian not about national enemies. Can you elaborate on what this text means and how it’s an intellectually faulty to try to apply it to modern governments?

Grok

The teaching in Matthew 5:43–48 (and the parallel in Luke 6:27–36) is a directive about personal conduct for Jesus’ disciples, not a blueprint for statecraft or inter-governmental relations.

What the text actually says and means

Jesus is speaking in the Sermon on the Mount to his followers (disciples and the listening crowds). He quotes a common Jewish formulation—“Love your neighbor and hate your enemy”—then overturns the second half: “But I tell you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, that you may be children of your Father in heaven. He causes his sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous.” He continues by noting that reciprocal love is ordinary (even “tax collectors” and “pagans” do that) and calls his hearers to a higher standard that reflects God’s indiscriminate common grace, culminating in “Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect.”

Key elements of the meaning:

• Audience and scope: Individual disciples facing personal hostility, insult, or persecution. The surrounding unit (Matthew 5:21–48) radicalizes the Mosaic law on anger, lust, divorce, oaths, and retaliation—all interpersonal ethics. “Enemy” and “those who persecute you” refer to people who wrong you as a person, not collective geopolitical adversaries.
• Content of “love”: Agape here is active goodwill and prayer, not sentimental affection or pacifist surrender of justice. It mirrors God’s provision of sun and rain to the undeserving. It does not abolish the legitimacy of self-defense, courts, or protective force in other contexts; it forbids personal vengeance and the restriction of neighbor-love to one’s own group.
• Purpose: To form character that exceeds the righteousness of the scribes and Pharisees and anticipates the ethics of the kingdom of heaven. Jesus is forming a community whose members refuse to mirror the hostility they receive, thereby displaying their Father’s character.
• Immediate historical setting: First-century Jews under Roman occupation experienced national oppression, yet Jesus does not pivot to foreign policy or resistance strategy. He addresses how individuals respond to personal enemies. Elsewhere he distinguishes his kingdom (“not of this world,” John 18:36) from political rule and affirms rendering to Caesar what is Caesar’s.

The same pattern appears in the rest of the New Testament: personal non-retaliation (Romans 12:17–21, “Do not take revenge… leave room for God’s wrath”) sits alongside affirmation of the state’s God-ordained role to “bear the sword” as an agent of justice (Romans 13:1–4). The two are not collapsed into one.

Why applying it to modern governments (e.g., United States–Iran relations) is a hermeneutical error

This is a classic category mistake and proof-texting failure. Hermeneutics requires attention to literary context, genre, original audience, authorial intent, and the distinction between the ethics of persons and the responsibilities of institutions. Treating Matthew 5 as a foreign-policy mandate violates those principles for several interlocking reasons:

1. Wrong audience and wrong sphere. Jesus is not addressing magistrates, armies, or nation-states. The Sermon on the Mount is not legislation for civil government. Governments exist to protect the governed, restrain evil, and administer justice—functions the New Testament explicitly assigns them and which the Old Testament models in Israel’s national life (including authorized warfare). Personal ethics of non-retaliation do not transfer unchanged to the institutional duty to deter or respond to aggression.
2. Genre and intent ignored. This is wisdom/ethical instruction for disciples, not a treatise on international relations or just-war criteria. Extracting one saying and universalizing it into “no sanctions, no deterrence, no military posture toward hostile regimes” is the same method that produces other distortions (e.g., treating “turn the other cheek” as a ban on all police power). Proper interpretation asks what the text meant to its first hearers before asking what it means for later readers; it did not mean “Rome must disarm relative to Parthia.”
3. Incoherence with the broader biblical witness. Scripture nowhere requires nations to love hostile nations as individuals love personal enemies. Israel is commanded to defend itself and, at times, to execute judgment. Jesus does not revoke the state’s coercive authority; Paul and Peter presuppose it. Christian just-war reflection (Augustine onward) developed precisely because the personal ethic of the Sermon was never understood as abolishing the magistrate’s sword. Collapsing the two produces a selective pacifism that the text itself does not teach.
4. Practical and logical absurdity. If the command governed states, every government would be required to forgo defense, borders, alliances, and deterrence against regimes that persecute their own people or threaten others. That outcome is neither commanded nor illustrated anywhere in Scripture; it would also invert the state’s God-given purpose of protecting the innocent. Personal forgiveness and intercession for persecutors remain obligatory for Christians as individuals; national policy is evaluated by different criteria (justice, order, the common good of citizens).
5. Modern political misuse. Appeals to this text in debates over U.S.–Iran (or any other bilateral) policy typically function as moral shorthand rather than exegesis. They bypass the distinction between the church’s calling and the state’s, ignore the rest of the biblical data on authority and force, and treat a first-century discipleship ethic as if it were a twentieth- or twenty-first-century foreign-policy white paper. That is anachronistic and methodologically faulty.

In short: the text calls followers of Jesus to refuse personal vengeance, to pray for those who harm them, and to reflect the Father’s generosity. It does not instruct modern nation-states how to handle hostile powers. Conflating the two is not “taking Jesus seriously”; it is misreading him by ignoring context, audience, and the larger canonical framework. Christians can (and do) debate the prudence or morality of any particular policy toward Iran or any other state; they simply cannot validly ground a pacifist foreign-policy absolute in Matthew 5.

My Conclusion

AI is not to be trusted entirely. I’ve had good experiences and bad experiences with it from things like coding, troubleshooting, asking general questions, and so forth. It always needs a human to oversee its answers. As one trained in biblical studies and who has taught at the college level, I can verify that this answer from Grok is a solid, reliable answer. We could delve much further into other aspects of this discussion, such as how to apply Christian principles to secular government problems and international relations, but that is beyond the scope of this lesson. Jesus did NOT teach you, as a believer, to simply be a blind, passive victim of the world around you. His teaching, in the context of the Sermon on the Mount, is about how you live with your neighbor in the subdivision or the “Karen” who complains at the restaurant. Never attempt to make United States international policy from it. That is to perpetuate a popular, common misunderstanding and it could have deadly consequences for millions of people and end our civilized way of life.