Human Response 279: Love the Stranger

Deuteronomy 10:19 Love ye therefore the stranger: for ye were strangers in the land of Egypt.

The Bible says Love one another dozens of times. The second greatest commandment is Love your neighbor. Jesus says Love your enemies. Here Moses says Love the stranger. Indeed, we know that our response to the God who loves me and all people is to genuinely love every person, no matter the nearness or distance of our relationship.

It is easier to love family and intimate friends and brothers and sisters in Christ. Loving the neighbor may be a little harder for these are acquaintances we don’t have a close relationship with. It is hard to love your enemy, who hates you and doesn’t want a relationship with you, but God grants grace to forgive. But surprisingly the hardest is to love the stranger, whom we don’t know at all, an alien, a foreigner, someone of another race or language. The key, of course, is to reach out, make acquaintance, develop a relationship, and at least make them neighbors.

We have three reasons why can respond by loving the stranger: 1) “we love because He first loved us” is the most powerful motivator to love others; 2) the stranger may be Christ (“ye have done it unto me” Matthew 25:40) or an angel (“some have entertained angels unawares” Hebrews 13:2); 3) we were all strangers once ourselves in the land of Egypt (the world) we all were born strangers, foreigners, and aliens to God and His Kingdom, so we know the feeling and we know what it’s like to welcomed into the heavenly kingdom. Therefore, we love the stranger.