Hated By Versus Peace With All Men

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Hi R____,

Thank you for your question. You ask if we can be hated of all men and still live in peace with all men.

We are told:

Rom 12:18  If it be possible, as much as lieth in you, live peaceably with all men.
Heb 12:14  Follow peace with all men, and holiness, without which no man shall see the Lord:

The answer in the spiritual sense is that we cannot be at peace with all men, because of the simple fact that what you and I believe is hated of all men. But in the physical realm we can indeed “live at peace with all men” even as we are spiritually “lying dead in the streets of [ their] great city where also our Lord was crucified”. It is just as possible to be hated of all men spiritually, even as we are living at peace physically, as it is to simply live physically while being crucified spiritually, as in these verses of God’s Word.

Rom 6:4  Therefore we are buried with him by baptism into death: that like as Christ was raised up from the dead by the glory of the Father, even so we also should walk in newness of life.

Another way of saying this same thing is this:

Gal 2:20  I am crucified with Christ: nevertheless I live; yet not I, but Christ liveth in me: and the life which I now live in the flesh I live by the faith of the Son of God, who loved me, and gave himself for me.

I hope that helps you to see how we are “the smell of death” to those who hate the Words of God which you and I so love, but we are very much alive to Christ and our heavenly Father.

2Co 2:16  To the one we are the savour of death unto death; and to the other the savour of life unto life. And who is sufficient for these things?

We are both life and death at the same time, depending upon our perspective. From the perspective of our old man, we are as good as dead, but from the perspective of our new man, we are “resurrected from among the dead… in Christ”.

Your brother in Christ,
Mike

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