The Good News: God Is Not Your Enemy

In 1944, a young Japanese soldier named Hiroo Onoda was sent to a small island in the Philippines with orders to hold out and never surrender. The war ended in 1945. Onoda did not stop. For nearly thirty years he lived in the jungle, treating leaflets announcing peace as enemy tricks, still fighting a war that had been over for decades. He only laid down his rifle in 1974, when his former commanding officer flew out to tell him, in person, that it was finished.

It is a true story, and it is a picture of how many people live with God. The war is over. The reconciliation is done. And yet they are still out in the jungle, still hiding, still braced against an enemy who is not even there. So let me tell you plainly what someone needed to fly out and tell Onoda: it is over. God is not your enemy.

All this is from God, who reconciled us to himself through Christ … that God was reconciling the world to himself in Christ, not counting people's sins against them … We implore you on Christ's behalf: Be reconciled to God.

2 Corinthians 5:18-20 (NIV)

To understand that verse, we have to go all the way back to the beginning, to where the war started in the human mind.

A garden given, not earned

Out of love, God made man and set him at the center of everything, so that through man God could reveal His love and glory to all creation. He planted a garden, a paradise where everything man could want was already provided. Man did not do a single thing to earn it. He opened his eyes and he was in paradise.

This is what we have come to call the grace of God: what God does for us with no contribution from us, what He gives that we never have to earn. Grace is not against effort. Man was told to work the garden. Grace is against earning, against the idea that your effort is what made it happen. You work in it, but you never work for it.

And God gave man one boundary, one place to walk away if he wanted to. He said, in effect, I will not force you to stay in relationship with Me, because one of the most important things you can know about Me is that I do not force people. Love only works when the other person is free to walk away.

You are free to eat from any tree in the garden; but you must not eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, for when you eat from it you will certainly die.

Genesis 2:16-17 (NIV)

Read that carefully. Even here, God is not threatening to kill anyone. He is warning. He is saying, this way of living has no life in it, and I know, because I am the way, the truth, and the life. Your action itself will cost you your life.

The first lie: God is against you

Then the serpent showed up. And I want you to watch how he tempted them, because he uses the same move on you.

“Did God really say, ‘You must not eat from any tree in the garden’?” … “You will not certainly die,” the serpent said to the woman. “For God knows that when you eat from it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.”

Genesis 3:1, 4-5 (NIV)

What is the real temptation here? It is not fruit. The temptation is to disbelieve God, and specifically to disbelieve Him in one area: to believe that God does not love you. That God is holding out on you. That if something is beautiful and good, God does not want you to have it. In short, that God is your enemy.

Is that not what it always comes down to? God does not want you to enjoy your life. God does not want you happy. So you had better take matters into your own hands and find your own way. That is the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. It is not an apple or an orange. It is simply the decision to run your own life your own way, doing what seems good to you and avoiding what seems bad to you, instead of living in a daily relationship where God leads you into what is good and out of what will harm you. Every single day you wake up you face both trees.

But you will never surrender your life to God through the tree of life as long as you believe God is your enemy. How could you? How can you hand your whole existence to Someone you think hates you?

The second lie: now He is furious

So they ate. And then the devil hit them with a second lie. Now that you have disobeyed, your enemy is also enraged. He will destroy you. Look, you are naked, exposed. You had better start covering yourself, doing this and doing that, and even when you have done it all you still will not be good enough, so run and hide, because if God shows up He will wipe you out in the heat of His anger.

And do we not still hear this, even in churches? If you do not pray, God will send an accident. If you do not tithe, money will dry up. If you do not come under the right man of God, you will not make it. Why? Because supposedly you are a sinner in the hands of an angry God who is your enemy, so you had better shape up or be dealt with.

Here is where we have to be careful. Do not confuse sin destroying you with God punishing you. The devil wants you to read every painful consequence of your own self-living as God's punishment. But God does not punish you like that. Sin itself carries the destruction, and God actually works to give you a way out of it.

Make no mistake, rejecting God wrecked man. The consequences that fell were not nice at all. But it was not God striking man down. God did not even curse the man. It was man who wounded himself by his own choice. And yet, forever after, our minds were deceived into believing that God is our enemy, and now that enemy is furious.

Who is really reconciling whom

Now go back to what Paul wrote and read it slowly. “God … reconciled us to himself.” Notice the direction. God is not reconciling Himself to us, as if He were the offended party we have to calm down. It is man who plays the enemy, man who is hostile in his mind. God is the one reaching out to say, I am not your enemy.

This is where Christianity turns everything upside down. Every other religion, all of them, is built on human beings trying to pacify God or the gods. Christianity walks in and says the opposite: God is the one pursuing man, God is the one working to show man, I am not against you. And He proved it by not counting our sins against us.

You can see it even in the garden. God did not count the man's sin against him. He came looking for the man, He clothed him, He moved him so he would not live forever in a fallen state. God does not count your sins against you. But sin will. Your sin will count against you. Your sin will hurt your relationships and ruin your life. Not God. Sin.

But if you will come to God, He will take your sin onto Himself, and everywhere sin has tried to ruin you, He will step into your place, dying the death you deserved and carrying the pain you should have carried. That is exactly what the cross is.

What the cross actually shows

Look at what put Jesus on that cross. It was selfishness, in Barabbas letting an innocent man die in his place. Betrayal, in Judas selling his friend for silver. Jealousy, in leaders who wanted their crowds back. Lies, from false witnesses. Cruelty, from soldiers who hated Jews. Religion, from people who destroyed God in the name of serving Him. Cowardice, in friends who swore they never knew Him. Every sin you can name conspired to nail God Himself to that cross.

And here is the wonder. Knowing all of it had been done against Him, He absorbed it all in His goodness. He did not call down fire. He did not count it against us. He cried, “Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing.” We all sinned against God, and God refused to hold the sin against us.

Why? So you would never again be afraid to come to Him. So you would stop running and hiding like Adam among the trees. So you could run straight to Him and be saved. This is the message He wants carried to the whole world: come back to God, be reconciled to God, stop running, because God is not your enemy. God is your friend.

Even when you sin, He does not count it against you. Instead He comes to rescue you and make a way of escape. Are you sick, suffering, in pain because of sin? He took the very thing you deserved so He could heal you. He let Himself be taken captive so you could go free. So you can stop fighting a war that ended at the cross. Lay the rifle down. Come out of the jungle. All you have to do is believe it, and it is yours.