“If people can be taught to hate, they can be taught to love!” Betsie ten Boom promised her sister, Corrie.
“We must find the way, you and I, no matter how long it takes.”
The two ladies were waiting for the guards to order them to the barracks — long, gray “featureless sheds,” Corrie ten Boom later wrote — in the Vught concentration camp for political prisoners.
Earlier that day, this hero of the faith, arrested for hiding Jews during World War II, hoped the Germans would release her and her sister.
But they didn’t, and Betsie would die a prisoner, just like her and Corrie’s father.
But before Betsie died, she reminded her sister again: People can learn to love.
The man who betrayed the ten Boom family to the Germans could learn to love. The “Snake,” a guard at one camp who viciously beat prisoners, could learn to love.
But Christians must teach them, “no matter how long it takes.”
And no matter how much they must sacrifice. God might even call them to sacrifice their lives, like Betsie ten Boom.
Or He might call them to sacrifice their politics.
This political season, candidates have unleashed the most vindictive of vitriol in their battle to secure Christians’ votes, and they often justify their anger because they promise to fight for Christians’ rights.
And yet rights for the sake of rights easily turn into idols.
And when they turn into idols, people use them to defend riots, mobs, threats, and chaos; they use them to justify sin, corruption, lust, greed, and deception.
But these people can learn to love.
Perhaps, then, Christians should listen less to those who fuel anger and listen to Jesus’ words: “This is My commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you. Greater love has no one than this, than to lay down one’s life for his friends.”
Yes, they can follow this command and still pray, as Paul encouraged in 1 Timothy 2:2, that rulers would allow them to live quiet and peaceable lives, or lives free from political and cultural bullying. Christians certainly don’t have to blindly or foolishly sacrifice their political freedom to live out their faith.
But Paul prioritized this quiet and peaceable life if it best helped Christians fulfill God’s will that “all men … be saved and … come to the knowledge of the truth.”
And whether God answers that prayer with a yes or not yet, Paul ultimately told Timothy to avoid topics that only teach people to fruitlessly debate. Instead, Paul wrote, focus on that which encourages “godly edification which is in faith.”
Let the world argue with itself as they fight opinions with opinions and man’s standards with man’s standards, Paul says. Let the world try to out right each other, Paul says.
Christians should teach others to love God and others through a humble, grateful, practical obedience “from a pure heart, from a good conscience, and from sincere faith,” the apostle writes in his first letter to the young preacher.
And Christians should teach people to love by exalting truth and knowing it well enough to teach it.
In his second letter, Paul writes, “… avoid foolish and ignorant disputes, knowing that they generate strife. And a servant of the Lord must not quarrel but be gentle to all, able to teach, patient, in humility correcting those who are in opposition, if God perhaps will grant them repentance, so that they may know the truth, and that they may come to their senses and escape the snare of the devil, having been taken captive by him to do his will.”
Likewise, in Paul’s letter to the Corinthians, particularly in chapter 13, he describes love that rejoices in truth.
And he describes a love both practical and powerful, one that can unite the feuding factions in the church by first inspiring them to repent.
And he describes a love that starts at Calvary. The cross, he writes, rebukes mankind’s self-righteousness — and it promises that God loved them enough to ensure they could be born again and, by His grace, love Him for now and for eternity.
Because if people can be taught to hate, they can be taught to love.
baumofchet@gmail.com
