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WHAT TO DO ABOUT LOVING HATRED
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TOO BIG TO EVER FORGIVE
The late, great Erma Bombeck once articulated the deepest
spiritual cry of many, many people. Here was her daily prayer:
"Lord, if You can't make me thin, then make
my friends look fat."
Can you relate to that? And you know, the Bible is
filled with similar prayers. "Make my enemies look fat." "Make
them lose all their money." "Lord, if it's not too much bother,
would You please just up and kill them all? You can do it, Lord! If You'll
just smite all my enemies dead, I won't ask You for another thing the
rest of this month."
Our title for this series is: WHAT TO DO ABOUT LOVING HATRED. Because
really, it is SO enjoyable to fondle our favorite feelings of resentment
against that certain skinny someone. But it's interesting that the Bible
writers went through this same kind of spiritual schizophrenia. Just a
few pages over from where the Psalmist cries to heaven for revenge, the
son of the Psalmist, Solomon, writes this in chapter 24 of Proverbs:
"Do NOT gloat when your enemy falls; when
he stumbles, do NOT let your heart rejoice, or the Lord will see and disapprove
and turn His wrath away from him."
That's an odd suggestion, isn't it? If we act too happy
about our enemy getting whacked, God might stop whacking him just to teach
us a lesson. Should we pretend we're not partying over our antagonist's
demise, or only celebrate in the closet where God can't see us?
Well, friend, I'm not making light of this problem, because it happens
to be one of THE most REAL spiritual battles we face. I remember a couple
of years ago we did a radio series with this title: I CAN'T STOP HATING
YOU. Putting a twist on the lyrics of that old country hit by Hank Williams.
And we were stunned at the response. We offered this same free book entitled
How to Deal With Anger, and we must have had twice as many phone calls
as usual. In their frame of mind, I just hope callers didn't experience
too many busy signals either!
I mentioned in our last segment a young mother who battled for ten years
a vicious, internal rage against a boy who had senselessly slaughtered
her four kids. He was just 14 years old, so there was no death penalty
option she could look forward to. She knew that this boy, this grinning,
smirking, headline-loving smark-aleck juvenile killer was going to be
coming up for parole every two years for the rest of her adult life. Haunting
her dreams. Intruding into her every thought, her every emotion. And somehow,
for her own sanity, for the sake of her new family, the three new children
God had given her, she needed healing. She needed to learn the miracle
of forgiveness. But even ten years later, she was just beginning to glimpse
the possibility of that. Could God really empower her to forgive? What's
more, could she give up the enjoyment, the pleasure, of fondling and mentally
caressing her grievance?
In his book What's So Amazing About Grace?, Philip Yancey retells the
devastating story out of Simon Wiesenthal's book, The Sunflower. Back
in 1944, World War II, Wiesenthal saw the worst of Nazism. He was a P.O.W.
in Poland, and saw Hitler's brigades kill his grandmother. They kidnaped
his own mom, stuffed her into a cattle-car train headed for the camps.
All told, he lost something like 89 of his relatives to the Holocaust.
He himself tried unsuccessfully to commit suicide when first taken prisoner.
And there's one story, one anecdote, where he's at a German hospital,
forced to help clean up. And he's summoned to the bedside of a dying Nazi,
a man wrapped from head to toe with bandages. He wants to confess to a
Jew, any Jew, his sins. And in a raspy voice this Karl admits how he and
his fellow Nazis, in the town of Dnyepropetrovsk, rounded up 300-plus
Jews and herded them into a three-story building. Dousing it with gas,
they then lit this human bonfire, shooting anybody who tried to get out
of the burning building. It was a horrible, evil scene, and now this Nazi
soldier was trying to confess.
"In the last hours of my life you are with
me," he croaked. "I do not know who you are, I know only that
you are a Jew and that is enough."
And he wanted Simon Wiesenthal to give him absolution,
to forgive him. Just those four words, "Yes, I forgive you,"
would have sent Karl to a peaceful death. And Wiesenthal, standing there
in his prison garb, with the yellow Star of David on his shabby uniform,
couldn't say the words. He WOULDN'T say them. Without uttering a syllable,
he turned around and walked out of the room. This man's crimes, the evil
of the Third Reich, the burning of those 300 Jews, the slaughter of his
own grandmother — it was all too much to forgive. There was just no way.
More than 20 years later, Simon Wiesenthal wrote to many theologians and
priests and rabbis, asking them about this agonizing memory of his. "What
should I have done?" he asked. "Should I have forgiven this
German criminal for his sins?" He got 32 answers from these religious
people. Only six suggested that maybe he SHOULD have offered forgiveness.
Others pointed out that morally, Wiesenthal could only forgive sins done
to HIM. One quoted the ancient poet, Dryden: "Forgiveness, to the
INJURED doth belong."
And then Yancey sums up with this:
"A few of the Jewish respondents said that
the enormity of Nazi crimes had exceeded ALL POSSIBILITY of forgiveness.
Herbert Gold, an American author and professor, declared, ‘The guilt for
this horror lies so heavily on the Germans of that time that no personal
reaction to it is unjustifiable.' Said another, ‘The millions of innocent
people who were tortured and slaughtered would have to come back to life
before I could forgive.' Novelist Cynthia Ozick was fierce: ‘Let the SS
man die unshriven [meaning without absolution]. Let him go to hell.' A
Christian writer confessed, ‘I think I would strangle him in his bed.'"
Well, this story may seem far beyond the boundary of
what the human race can ever cope with. Except that these people DID cope
with it. This IS what happened to them. And we relate it today for two
reasons. First of all, perhaps it brings into perspective our trivial
hurts, the smallness of our ongoing feud with that certain someone. Is
our anger really justified? Are we perhaps playing with our petty resentment
TOO much?
But here's the more important issue. Is it possible that some things absolutely
CANNOT be forgiven? Is the Holocaust so big, so horrendous, so beyond
the pale, that it simply drains away all of heaven's storehouses of grace
. . . and still is found wanting? We asked once in a Christmas program
if perhaps Oklahoma bomber Timothy McVeigh simply could not be redeemed,
even by heaven. Maybe Calvary itself, that monumental sacrifice for the
human race, isn't enough to wash away the wrongful deaths of 168 innocent
victims.
Well, in our humanity, perhaps it's understandable that we might think
so. And I confess here, friend, that I don't know your hurt. I don't know
who has wounded you, and to what extent. All I do know is what the Bible
says. And we quoted this verse recently, from John chapter one, where
John the Baptist looks up and sees Jesus coming toward him.
"Look," he says, "the Lamb of
God, who takes away the sin of the WORLD!"
I admit that I don't know how to stack up the Friday
afternoon of Calvary against the universal blot of sin we call the Holocaust.
The burning of those 300 Jews. The slaughter of Oklahoma City's 168 men
and women and teenagers and children and babies. You saw that picture
too, where the fireman brings out that dead baby. Isn't that so big, so
monstrous, that even God Himself will not or perhaps even CANNOT forgive
it?
I would think that, and you would think that. But the plain Word of God
tells us that Jesus Christ is able to take away ALL sin, wash away ALL
evil. All sins can be forgiven unless the sinner resolutely turns away
and rejects the Holy Spirit's attempts.
What that means is this. Every time I cling to a hatred, or hold on to
my anger, I am in essence saying this: Calvary is not enough for this
one. Heaven is not big enough. God is not good enough, powerful enough.
The blood of my Savior is not POTENT enough to cover this wrong . . .
and that's why I have to continually and eternally keep stoking this fire
myself. If vengeance is needed, I can't trust that God will handle it;
I need to stay on THIS job myself.
Now, maybe you don't think it out as articulately as that. Most likely,
if you're like the rest of us, you just hang onto anger because it's enjoyable
to do so. Hence our title: WHAT TO DO ABOUT LOVING HATRED. We don't easily
give up the things we love. But it's the long testimony of the human experience
that this hatred we love . . . turns around and destroys us in the end.
In this same book, Yancey shares a final comment:
"Not to forgive imprisons ME in the past
and locks out all potential for change. I thus yield control to another,
my enemy, and doom myself to suffer the consequences of the wrong. I once
heard an immigrant rabbi make an astonishing statement. ‘Before coming
to America, I had to forgive Adolf Hitler,' he said. ‘I did not want to
bring Hitler inside me to my new country.'"
Friend, do YOU have an Adolf Hitler to leave behind before you enter a
new country? Believe me, God IS big enough.
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