Is it possible to love somebody you do not like? Yes! And this is what many are not considering when they question why a loving God would allow bad things to happen to mankind since all mankind belongs to God. The Bible says that God is love and He is. Does God care about all of mankind? Yes! Not only does God care about all of mankind, He takes care of all people, regardless of whether they acknowledge Him or not.
Here is a passage from the Bible: ““The God who made the world and everything in it is the Lord of heaven and earth and does not live in temples built by human hands.25 And he is not served by human hands, as if he needed anything. Rather, he himself gives everyone life and breath and everything else.26 From one man he made all the nations, that they should inhabit the whole earth; and he marked out their appointed times in history and the boundaries of their lands.27 God did this so that they would seek him and perhaps reach out for him and find him, though he is not far from any one of us.” (Acts 17:24-27).
“‘For in him we live and move and have our being.’ As some of your own poets have said, ‘We are his offspring.’” (Acts 17:28).
In God, every single human being lives, moves and have his or her being. What makes us human is the spirit which God puts into each and every single one of us, to give us life and to give us intellect. And the spirit that God puts into each and every man that exists, walks around and operates intelligently is “God in us”. God is in every human being. God operates through and around every human being; and God has complete control over every human being—believers and unbelievers alike.
No human being spends any second of life outside of God; whether you believe it or not. God is life and anything outside of God is lifeless. So if you breathe in the air, move around and operate in some intelligent capacity, all of what you do and accomplish, you do and accomplish in God. Once God gets out of you, life is sucked out of you and you become lifeless. And when life lives your body, it simply decays and gets reabsorbed into the ground.
And since the entire human society does everything it does within life, the human society operates completely within God who is life. The Spirit of God gives us life and the Spirit of God is God—God the Holy Spirit. God hides His face from the people who offends Him and uses His name in vain but He does not remove Himself from them because removing Himself from anyone is removing life from the person. And anyone whose life is removed from within him, dies.
There is love and there is likeness. God commands we must love one another, including loving our enemies.
God does not command anyone to like anyone else, because likeness is a personal preference; a choice that is left to us to decide. Likeness is aroused by attractiveness to someone else or something.
You like what you are attracted to because it causes excitability in you. You like something because it excites your mind. And things that excite your mind causes you to be happy. And nobody understands this better than the devil. This is his chief ploy in getting humanity to do the things it is prohibited from doing.
Whatever we like, we tend to do because it makes us feel good. Making us do anything we do not like turns that thing into a chore or work; and we labor through that because it offers us no enjoyment. We get excited every time we get a chance to do the things we truly like. And this feeling is not limited to the things we do that entertain us. It also includes people.
People that do the kind of things we like to do are a great attraction to us. We want to spend as much time as possible with them because they enjoy the same kind of things we enjoy. We talk about such people with fondness because in our minds, they represent happiness and something beautiful. Their company gets us animated and feeling good and laughing and losing ourselves.
We become friends with the people we like because they get us totally. They know what we like and what we don’t. They say to us the things we like to hear, not necessarily the things we must hear for fear of getting us angry, thereby causing them to lose our friendship. How many times have your friends lied on your behalf! And each time they lie to protect you; you appreciate their friendship the more and trust them even more.
They do it for you and you reciprocate, even though it goes against your conscience to tell lies. But because you like them and they like you and fun is endless any time you get together with them, you believe your relationship with them is worth protecting even at the cost of selling your conscience. That is likeness! Likeness is about creating a fun atmosphere and unrestrained happiness. The only rule that applies is the rule of confidentiality.
Love on the hand is the ingredient that makes life work. Love is a calculated effort geared towards making someone else’s life better. Love is selfless! Love is not about doing fun and happiness. Love is about life and the mitigation of suffering on part of other people. Love is not just about now, it is more about the long haul.
Love does not wait for the things that excite your mind. Love reacts to the things that depress your heart. Love is not about what you receive; love is about what you offer. Your focus of love is not you. Your focus of love is others, and that is why love puts joy in your heart: The good you do to help others out of difficult situations, returns immeasurable joy to your heart.
Love does not wait for the other person; love springs into action out of the feeling in your heart. Love hungers the heart for friendship so that the work of faith will be perfected in your heart. If you are in it for likeness, as soon as the fun is gone, so are you. But if you are in it for love, only the resolution of the problem signals the time to move on.
It is often said that friends do not abandon friends. That is because friendship is the true measure of love, not likeness. In love people find things to love and share to create lasting friendship. But in likeness the fun conditions must be preexisting and have to remain for the friendship, or what appears to be it, to continue. Once the spark is gone, the friendship is gone. But in love friendship endues all adversities.
To like someone, that someone has to exhibit things you have already decided in your mind and gets attracted to. You are instantly drawn to those who instantly exhibit them and gradually warm up to those who eventually show they have them. You are neutral to those who do not poses them and antagonistic to those who shun them or simply indifferent to them.
Is likeness trivial? Not at all, because everybody operates with it, and it has a very important usefulness! You do not like people who do the things you disapprove or simply behaviors you know to work against society. You do not like anyone who does bad things to you and say untruthful and demeaning things about you or other people. You do not like people who deliberately destroy things that belong to other people.
You do not like people who always cause arguments and prevent a group to reach a consensus. You do not like anybody who brings trouble into your life or stirs up trouble in your family. You do not like anyone who misleads your kid or any member of your family, causing them to follow the wrong path in life, thereby failing in what is expected of them within the family.
You do not like people who shoot you down and are bent on evil for you. Your heart never warms up to anyone who rejects you and views you as a failure, but you are instantly attracted to people who encourage you no matter how badly and how many times you have messed up. You have good thoughts about those who are honest with you and who constructively point out the things you are not doing correctly that might be derailing your progress in life.
You know that people like these encourage and support you not because they like mediocre or tolerate bad behaviors, but because they understand what you are going through and are doing what they can to make it easier for you to continue to straighten things up. They encourage you because they do not want you to get discouraged and lose hope.
They want you to continue trying until you find the right footing and get moving again. So you appreciate their patience with you, and their walking side by side with you when other people have counted you out and abandoned you. In essence, you like them for loving you—their love, your likeness. Love definitely leads to likeness.
And because you appreciate their sacrifices towards you, not only would you love them and what to give back to them in whatever way you can, you come to like them as well. They like you back because of your courage and your responsiveness to their help the progress you have made, thereby bringing love and likeness to operate inseparably. This is the maturity every family strives for, but only love brings it about.
A family starts out with love and as people grow up and follow their dreams, they get into various things, some of which divide and some of which unite. In most situations, there is always somebody who does not take the rules as seriously as everybody else in the family, whose behavior would always bring arguments and rancor. The family may love him or her and come to their rescue countless time, but none like him or her because of their indifference to orderly existence.
No one likes anyone who is doing things that work against their interest. Not a single person! And it does not matter that the person working against you is a family member. In fact, it is only your love for such a family member that prevents you from hating that family member. If you do not love them, or if you stop loving them as is sometimes the case, you will hate them and distance yourself from them. But love is always bringing you back to them because love covers over all wrongs.
That is why God commanded us to love all people. It is love that promotes unity and peace. Likeness actually creates factions—we versus they. But when likeness is born out of love, it creates unbreakable friendship—friendship that knows no bounds. True love always leads to likeness but likeness does not always lead to love. Some have actually found love in likeness because they did not compromise their values to be liked.