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Transcript 288C
Hating Mother, Father, Wife, etc. [Lu 14:26]
HC: Good evening. Welcome to Open Forum.
CALLER: Mr. Camping, good evening. I have a question to ask. Would you explain to me, Luke 14:26? I know we have to love, but I don't understand this where Jesus is telling the people that we have to hate our mother, brother, sister, and so on. If you will explain it to me, I'll take it on the air.
HC: You don't think it's a very good idea to hate your mother and father.
CALLER: You see, I have a friend that called me today, asking me this question. And I didn't exactly know how to explain it to her.
HC: All right. I'll try to help you. If you'd like to hang up, you may.
Actually, Jesus is teaching here the price that we must pay if we are going to be a child of God. You see, there are two kingdoms in this world, and only two, only two. Oh yes, there are many political nations. But sprinkled through these political nations there are two kingdoms, and only two. One is the dominion of darkness, headed up by Satan. Most of the peoples of the world belong to this.
The other is the Kingdom of the Lord Jesus Christ. The remnant chosen by grace, from all the nations of the world, belong to this.
Now these two kingdoms are absolutely poles apart. They're totally antithetical to each other. Satan is the head of the first kingdom, and he is in complete rebellion against Christ. He hates Christ. He wants to destroy Christ and all that He does. He is at war with Christ.
Christ, on the other hand, in His program, is going to get total victory over Satan. And finally all of the wicked, all who follow Satan, will be vanquished and cast into hell.
So that's the conflict that exists. Now if you are in an unsaved family, if your father and mother and brothers and sisters are all unsaved, as well as yourself, you're all citizens of the dominion of darkness. You're all slaves of Satan. And so while you may bicker and fight among yourselves to some degree, nevertheless there is common agreement. None of you love God at all, none of you are concerned about the Lord Jesus Christ, none of you are on God's side at all. Characteristic of every unsaved person, you are deep in your heart in rebellion against God.
And so there can be really filial love, and relationships existing in an unsaved family, under God's providential care. But now something dreadful happens. One of you becomes a traitor. One of you goes over to the enemy's side because, you see, the unsaved are under the rule of Satan. And Satan is at enmity with Christ.
So, therefore, whether the unsaved know it or not, they also are enemies of Christ. When God says, "Love your enemies," He's speaking of the unsaved. He's not speaking about those whom we happen to single out as being "so and so's." He's actually speaking about any unsaved person. They are our enemies.
So now you become a believer in the Lord Jesus Christ. You've become a traitor to the dominion of Satan. You've gone over to the kingdom of light, the Kingdom of the Lord Jesus Christ.
Now how is this going to relate then to the rest of your family? You have two rules that apply. First of all, you are to love your enemies. And so you have to continue to love your parents, and love your brothers and sisters, simply because that is God's program for you.
But in another sense you have to make a decision. Now these decisions aren't faced very regularly in our land, because we tolerate almost all gospels and religions. We live in that kind of a land, and we can praise God for this. But in many lands this is not so.
In many lands, for example, if this family that we're talking about were a Mohammedan family, and now one of that family became a Christian, immediately he would be faced with a terrible choice. His parents would come to him and say, "Look. You're an infidel Christian. And if you remain a Christian, if you don't renounce this, then you are no longer our child. We will ostracize you. We will cut you off. We will drive you from the village. You cannot be a Christian and remain in our family." So you have to make a decision. Do I love God more, or do I love my parents more? Am I going to throw in the towel and say, "Well, that's too big a price to pay. I can't leave my father and mother. I must repudiate this Gospel that I have been hearing about. I really can't go through with this, to be a Christian"? And so in that case you hate Christ yet. And you haven't learned to turn away from your father and mother.
On the other hand, if you became a Christian, and your parents come to you this way, effectively you're saying, "I love Christ, and therefore I am at war with you. And I have to leave you, if you want me to. I want to be here to witness to you and to pray for you and to help you. But you don't want me here. You're an enemy now. And even though deep in my heart I still love you, I have to live as if I hated you, because you hate me now that I have gone over to the other side."
And so you see, in another place Jesus said that He did not come to bring peace upon the earth, but a sword. Now He did come to bring peace upon the earth in the sense that He came to bring peace with God. But as He brings peace with God, He brings the sword, because the moment that we become saved, then there is a division between us and our family. And there is no longer peace. There was peace as long as we were all unsaved. We were all in agreement in our rebellion against God. And there was that kind of peace. But we were not at peace with God.
The moment we became saved, we came to a point where we were at peace with God, but we were at sword's point with our family, because now they are the enemy. They are in Satan's kingdom while we are in Christ's Kingdom.