That Ye May Be The Children Of Your Father

"But I say unto you, Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you, and persecute you; That ye may be the children of your Father which is in heaven" (Matthew 5:44-45). If we want to truly become the children of our Heavenly Father, then we must attempt to become like Him. Christ tells us to love our enemies. What does God do? "The natural man is an enemy to God" (Mosiah 3:19), but though we may be natural men and women, God loves us anyway. Christ tells us to bless them that curse us. Cursing God is such a widespread and universal practice among His children that the Second Commandment deals specifically with this problem, and though we take His name in vain and use it as a curse word constantly and pervasively, God blesses us anyway. Christ tells us to do good to them that hate us. We have all in our own ways, like an angry child to a parent, screamed at God, "I hate you!", but God does good to us anyway. Christ tells us to pray for those that despitefully use us, and persecute us. So many awful and vile and greedy and cruel and evil things have been done with the justification that they are being done "for God" or in His name. But though we despitefully use God, God prays for us anyway. When Saul was on the road to Damascus to persecute the Christians, the thing that God said to Him was "Why persecutest thou me?" Every time we persecute even the least of God's children we are persecuting Him, but God prays for us anyway. If we want to truly be God's children, then we must follow the example of our Father. Thomas Hobbes explained what happens when we all treat each other as enemies - "where every man is enemy to every man…the life of man [is] solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short." In a world where tragedy comes for all of us sooner or later, where dreams so often wither on the vine unfulfilled, where hearts are broken and spirits are twisted, where we witness children dying of bone cancer, where the wicked walk free while the righteous are locked up, where famines and fires and floods devour communities or even whole countries, where people starve outside of grocery stores full of food, where hate gushes and fear races and cruelty and malice flourish like choking, noxious weeds, where instead of trying to make things even a little better, so many choose to make things worse, and at an ever accelerating pace - in such a world it is easy to look at a God who would create such a place, who would allow so much evil to exist through either criminal negligence or depraved cruelty, and say this Being is our enemy. We curse Him, we hate Him, we will despitefully use and persecute Him in any way we can think of. It is not possible for Him to exist, or if He exists then He does not have the power to put a stop to all of this suffering, or, worse, He does have the power but He is withholding the power out of sadistic spite. We can and many of us have adopted this attitude, but though we make ourselves enemies of God, He loves us anyway. The antidote to living a life that is "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short" is to try to truly become the children of our Father which is in heaven. God is in heaven not because He is hanging out in the clouds behind some pearly gates listening to choirs of angels. God is in heaven because His life is not solitary. His life is filled with those He loves, including the ones who consider themselves His enemies. God is in heaven because His life is not poor, but rich with all of the blessings He showers upon His children, including the ones that curse Him. God is in heaven because His life is not nasty, but sweet with the good that He does in the lives of every single one of His beloved children, including the ones who hate Him. God is in heaven because His life is not brutish and short, but divine and everlasting as He prays one by one for the return of each of His children, including the ones that despitefully use and persecute Him. It makes sense with all of the trauma that we have endured that we would turn inwards, look out only for ourselves, hate the world and everyone and everything in it and especially the One Who created it. It doesn't help. It takes our solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short lives and makes them even nastier and shorter, but it is understandable and logical why we would take that position. When an enemy attacks us, fight back! Or better yet, attack them first. We don't have to wait for the haters if we start the hating first. Only suckers wait around to be persecuted. It's much better to bully than to be bullied, so let's start persecuting first! We all feel that we should only have to love those who love us, and that we have the right and the justification and maybe even the moral imperative to hate those that hate us. But hating our enemies doesn't make them go away. Even if we carry out our hatred to its logical conclusion and kill our enemy, this does not diminish, but rather multiplies our enemies. It's like trying to cut off the head of the Hydra - seven new heads are going to take its place. God said that if anyone tried to kill Cain, they would be avenged sevenfold, and by the time we get to Cain's great great great grandson Lamech, the vengeance had multiplied to seventy sevenfold. We might start off hating one dog, because it bit us. But then we might start to fear and hate all dogs. And then all dog owners. And then all people who don't also hate dogs or dog owners. It doesn't take long before the entire human race becomes our enemy. We can't hate our way out of hate. We can only get out of hate through love. The only way to make fewer enemies is to love them until they transform in our hearts from enemies into friends. And once we start blessing and doing good to them and praying for them, we will melt the ice in their hearts and they will lose their hate for us. When God's great Plan of Happiness works out, then all of His children will be united together in one big family for all of eternity. It is possible, even likely, that if we are redeemed through Christ's Atonement and return to dwell once more with our Father which is in heaven, then we are destined to spend all of eternity with many or all of the people that we now consider our worst and bitterest enemies. If we can't find it in us to love our enemies and do good to those who hate us and bless those who curse us and pray for those that despitefully use and persecute us, then we need to plead with our Father to allow us to see them through His eyes, to see the eternal, glorious, celestial beings into which He intends to remake them, just as He intends the same for us. If we can't love who they are now, then let us try to fall in love with who they may one day become, and remind ourselves that we will be with them in heaven for all eternity. As hard as it is to believe, heaven won't fully be heaven without them, just as it won't fully be heaven for our Father if we ourselves are not there with Him. Having all of us back home makes all of the tragedy and the evil and the cruelty and the hatred and the cursing and the despitefully using and the persecuting and the sacrificing of His Only Begotten Son all worth it in the end. I know if we choose Love over Hate, however impossible it may seem, only then can we truly be the children of our Father in Heaven.