page-0237-1 – We Love God!

The rule is a positive command that we should treat others as we would wish them to treat us. The negative form is well known in Jewish literature and in pagan literature… Jesus is, therefore, not saying something new here, but it is significant that He stresses the positive form of the rule. The negative form is merely a rule of prudence: do not hurt other people lest they retaliate. The positive form is not prudential but absolute: this is how you are to treat others (positively), regardless of how they treat you. Jesus thus goes beyond the negative form, citing the rarer and more demanding form (I. Howard Marshall).

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We give our hand to every man that loves the Lord Jesus Christ, be he what he may or who he may. The doctrine of election, like the great act of election itself, is intended to divide, not between Israel and Israel, but between Israel and the Egyptians, not between saint and saint, but between saints and children of the world. A man may be evidently of God’s chosen family, and yet though elected, may not believe in the doctrine of election. I hold that there are many savingly called, who do not believe in effectual calling, and that there are a great many who persevere to the end, who do not believe the doctrine of final perseverance. We do hope the hearts of many are a great deal better than their heads. We do not set their fallacies down to any willful opposition to the truth as it is in Jesus but simply to an error in their judgments, which we pray God to correct. We hope that if they think us mistaken too, they will reciprocate the same Christian courtesy; and when we meet around the cross, we hope that we shall ever feel that we are one in Christ Jesus.

C.H. Spurgeon