The illustration for "love thy neighbor as thyself" is the man seen robbed and bleeding on the side of the road and the one other man that stopped to take care of him (the Good Samaritan). If you were that bleeding man, you would want help too. The good Samaritan wasn't buddies with the robbers.
If one has a personal enemy with a vendetta, a Christian is commanded to show kindness to him to "heap burning coals on his head" and not repay evil for evil. These are behaviors toward an individual, not movements, not ideologies, and not evil acts. A Christian's chief concern in society is his own conduct so that if anyone slanders him it will be a baseless accusation.
I personally believe most of the vilest workers of evil will not ever be redeemed (pedophiles, baby killers, those with millions of deaths on their hands, etc.), not because God is powerless to change them, but because he is using their evil for his purposes.
One of those purposes is to show us that we would all be like these scumbags if God did not restrain us by our own consciences. Another is to show us what happens when a nation denies and hides the truth and rejects God. Yet another purpose is that through our hate for their evil, we can get a glimpse of God's hate for all evil. God is far more patient than we are, and he uses times of trouble to chasten his children.
Christians cannot expect non-Christians to have the self-denying self-sacrificing love for their enemies that God has for Christians who were once his enemies.
The illustration for "love thy neighbor as thyself" is the man seen robbed and bleeding on the side of the road and the one other man that stopped to take care of him (the Good Samaritan). If you were that bleeding man, you would want help too. The good Samaritan wasn't buddies with the robbers.
If one has a personal enemy with a vendetta, a Christian is commanded to show kindness to him to "heap burning coals on his head" and not repay evil for evil. These are behaviors toward an individual, not movements, not ideologies, and not evil acts. A Christian's chief concern in society is his own conduct so that if anyone slanders him it will be a baseless accusation.
I personally believe most of the vilest workers of evil will not ever be redeemed (pedophiles, baby killers, those with millions of deaths on their hands, etc.), not because God is powerless to change them, but because he is using their evil for his purposes.
One of those purposes is to show us that we would all be like these scumbags if God did not restrain us by our own consciences. Another is to show us what happens when a nation denies and hides the truth and rejects God. Yet another purpose is that through our hate for their evil, we can get a glimpse of God's hate for all evil. God is far more patient than we are, and he uses times of trouble to chasten his children.
Christians cannot expect non-Christians to have the self-denying self-sacrificing love for their enemies that God has for Christians who were once his enemies.