A time is coming when an enemy will become a dear friend

“You prepare a table before me,
in the presence of my enemies,”
says part of the fifth verse of the most famous 23rd psalm.

There is a beautiful thing that will happen in your lifetime, a thing you most commonly experienced from your high school years when they morphed into adulthood.

You know the experience I’m talking about.

For me it was that group of tough boys from a different, rival town who always ostracised me.  Those who would pick on me.  Those who I got into fights with, where I always came off second-best.  Those times they always had my measure.

Then with the passage of years, a thing changed.  At 20, I became a bodybuilder, and almost overnight achieved the respect of the other males in the community, except the ones who felt most threatened, none of whom at the time had the gumption to challenge me.  It didn’t bother me.  I didn’t want to fight.  I’m pretty much a pacifist.  I wanted to get on with everyone.  It was with this group of ruffians that I became respected.  Indeed, there became a real kinship between these and I.  There was a bond of trust between us.  That was how it was for that season and things have never changed even though we have grown apart.

I don’t say this to blow my own trumpet, because that was how it was.

I say it merely illustrate the point that will come true in all our lives, eventually, and has certainly already come true in your life if you reflect.  There were those children who disliked you, and even hated you, who later came to encounter you, understand you and even like you.  Perhaps you won them over some way.  Or, maybe their disdain for you no longer bothered you.

We don’t know now those with whom we don’t see eye to eye who will in the future become our greatest allies.

God will bring it about without any help from us or them, and we will count it an enormous blessing that those who were against us once upon a time are now the ones who are for us.  And you will find you will not need to do anything about this, for God will bring it about.

All we need to do right now is be faithful as much as we can in all the relationships we can.  Then we allow God to prepare before us a table in the presence of our enemies.

Some of those people who are dissing us now will be missing us at a time to come.

Yes, it’s true.  Not all of them.  But some who have been lukewarm or even positively cold and disdainful toward you, by circumstances beyond the both of you, will come to value you as a friend at a later time — if you’re merciful and allow them back into your life.

If you give them the second chance they’re seeking.  Those who get the second chance and don’t betray it become our biggest advocates as God restores our confidence in humanity.

It is a great hope, of course, to imagine how good it is the God might prepare a table before us in the presence of our enemies, which is simply an image of God being with us, even keeping us safe, when we feel most threatened.

Humanity isn’t the enemy.  It’s the powers and principalities, the rulers in the dark realms. These are the forces the create a spirit of control in human beings who insist on lording it over others.  We might despise their behaviour, but it ought never be lost on us what forces are behind it.

Imagine a time that God may be bringing forth where that enemy will come to repent before you.  It won’t happen in every situation, of course, or even in most, but whilst there is a hope let us strain forward in faithfulness, as God prepares the table before us in the presence of our enemies.

In all this, let us not become too legalistic about the shape of such repentance if it tastes right.  It’s not what is said or done that matters, it’s the heart behind it that counts.

Photo by GEORGE DESIPRIS on Unsplash