*** w52 10/1 596-604 A Strong Refuge Today ***
A Strong Refuge Today2 In these last days loud-mouthed bullies and braggarts threaten Jehovah’s people with bodily injury, and we know that in ourselves we cannot withstand their attacks.
6 Opposition to us is national and international, for this world hates Jehovah and his people.
HATING JEHOVAH’S ENEMIES
10 The Lord Jesus said, “Continue to love your enemies.” (Matt. 5:44, NW) And he also said, “Every kind of sin and blasphemy will be forgiven men, but the blasphemy against the spirit will not be forgiven.Men may condemn us and still may be forgiven. We do not love them for their hurtful works to us, but there must not be hatred toward them on this account. Rather the commandment is to pray for such persons. But the situation is entirely different when opposers get to a state of antagonism against God and the spirit, so that even regardless of the facts in evidence of Jehovah’s workmanship and power, they distort them and accuse God of wickedness. Such extreme debasement is only identifying them with Satan the great opposer whose end is destruction. Satan is our enemy and he is also God’s enemy.
11 Haters of God and his people are to be hated, but this does not mean that we will take any opportunity of bringing physical hurt to them in a spirit of malice or spite, for both malice and spite belong to the Devil, whereas pure hatred does not. We must hate in the truest sense, which is to regard with extreme and active aversion, to consider as loathsome, odious, filthy, to detest. Surely any haters of God are not fit to live on his beautiful earth.
16 There is no doubt that those wicked creatures who reproach and dishonor Jehovah, who blaspheme pure and true religion, who endeavor to destroy the faithful worshipers, who break into God’s holy city, Zion, and try to terrify and brutally ill-treat and kill the Lord’s children, who are in every way the real enemies of Jehovah, are fit only to be taken and destroyed. But that execution work is Jehovah’s, for he will determine who are the incorrigible.
19 The modern-day Moabites have opposed Jehovah’s witnesses with a hatred not born of righteousness, but from the Devil and against all righteousness.
20 The modern-day Moabites will be brought low, for Jehovah has completely finished with them. Hear just a part of the punishment: “For in this mountain will the hand of Jehovah rest; and Moab shall be trodden down in his place, even as straw is trodden down in the water of the dunghill. And he shall spread forth his hands in the midst thereof, as he that swimmeth spreadeth forth his hands to swim; but Jehovah will lay low his pride together with the craft of his hands.”
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