Kill my Son and I will still love you

Mat 5:2 And he opened his mouth, and taught them, saying…

Mat 5:38  Ye have heard that it hath been said, An eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth:

Mat 5:39  But I say unto you, That ye resist not evil: but whosoever shall smite thee on thy right cheek, turn to him the other also.

TRUTH.

We are being taught TRUTHS, real truths that we need to LIVE BY.  Our lives MUST be lived by JESUS' teachings.  If we choose to read but not learn what good is it? Are we being taught if we aren't truly learning. If we don't live what we learn is the knowledge any good to us? If you learn how to fly a plane but never get in a plane to fly was the knowledge of your learning to fly any good at all? No. 

We go to school and often learn a lot of stuff we'll never use in our lives and more often than not we forget the majority of that stuff we learned and never utilized. We cannot afford to learn but not use what our Savior is trying to teach us. Our life depends upon learning and utilizing our knowledge, not learning and letting what we learn simply slip away unused.

Do you think for one moment that our Savior taught us things we didn't need to learn? He never spoke just to hear Himself, never. Every word was precious, every word was and is worthy of intense study. 

Resist not evil- whosever shall HIT you on one cheek let them HIT the other cheek.

What?!

Let them hit the other cheek? Wow.

Don't fight back? Hmn.

Really, let them hit us again without returning a single blow? Seriously?

Get beat without defending yourself? Come on.

What is the lesson here? It goes beyond simply letting someone hit us, doesn't it? It has to.

Resist not evil.  This isn't saying we are to commit evil, this is saying if evil is bound and determined to attack us we are NOT TO RETURN EVIL.  We are not to let evil CAUSE us to be evil.  It's better to be attacked by EVIL and do NOTHING than to use evil to defend ourselves.

There is truly NO good excuse for us to be EVIL, not even in response to evil. So often we love to justify our bad behavior by others bad behavior.  We use the much heralded justification of - THEY STARTED IT.

We use this to justify a lot of our actions, don't we?

We would not have been bad if THEY hadn't been bad first.

Think about this and carefully ask yourself whether you've done this in the past.  Has anyone ever hurt you - not just physically but maybe emotionally and mentally as well - and you hurt them back- just to hurt them because they hurt you?

It's common, very, very common. We have gangs all over that run their entire gang on this principle. The eye for an eye is a concept that people love because it lets them believe their evil act is somehow less evil than the original evil act that caused their response.  If that first evil act hadn't occurred you wouldn't have been put in a position of committing your evil.

Jesus was teaching us that NO EVIL is what is right, what is love, what is what He wants from us. No evil.

NO EVIL!

Giving evil for evil is still evil. You cannot call killing someone good because they killed, it just makes you a killer too. You are a bully if you bully a bully.  Yet we JUSTIFY our actions because they were provoked. We call them good and right because they were a result of another's evil.

No more. Jesus say's no more. Stop the self-justification. Stop the evil- enough is enough. No more, no more using this concept for our own evil.  Even in justified eye for and eye behavior that taking of the eye by the righteous person leaves a mark on that person who commits the same evil- though justified. People are to extend compassion. When you take an eye for an eye you do not show compassion. We limit our compassion when we seek even justified retribution.  Jesus didn't want us to limit our compassion. Jesus did NOT want us to lose any of our compassion, not the smallest bit of it. He knew that living in the world we would be subject to evil over and over and over, and He knew that rendering evil for evil would take the compassion we need from us.

Jesus is the greatest example of our compassion.

 No longer an eye for an eye, but compassion for an eye.

Take my eye but I will still show love to you, God's love.

Because God said- Kill my Son, my ONLY Begotten Son, and I will still love you.

This compassion goes beyond our full comprehension, but we are allowed a glimpse into it and Jesus is TEACHING us to learn this compassion.

This compassion is what makes it possible for us to be loved undeservedly.

Please Lord, please help us to learn these lessons, to learn compassion, to learn to turn the other cheek rather than retaliate in kind.

ALL IN YOUR AMAZING LOVE!