Enmity – noun – the state or feeling of being actively opposed or hostile to someone or something.
The english word enmity is based on the latin word “inimicus,” plainly translated as enemy.
I don’t know if you’ve studied Roman society at all, but being an enemy wasn’t just an annoyance between two people– something that carried on for a long time like a college football rivalry. Interpersonally, having an enemy often resulted in one party eliminating the other. To be an enemy of the state… Rome? That meant you could expect to be hunted down and put to death.
But to be the one who creates an enemy? Fostering enemies? Well, that person has a vendetta. Death might be too easy a punishment for that person. You might want to torture that person… or enslave them.
From a Christian perspective, enmity entered the world as a result of the Fall of Man. God cursed the serpent for tempting Adam & Eve to fail…
“And I will put enmity
between you and the woman,
and between your offspring and hers;
he will crush your head,
and you will strike his heel.”
Around the house I can create enmity by favoring one child over the other.
Or by feeding the cat before I feed the dog. [Guilty as charged, your honor.]
At church, you can create enmity by telling the senior pastor what a fantastic job the youth pastor did filling the pulpit.
Enmity is something we manage as part of our humanity. Thinking systematically, enmity has negative connotations as it can lead to and breed jealousy, anger, and all sorts of other emotions and actions which are sinful. But the presence of enmity in us? Ultimately created by God as recorded in Genesis 3:15, came from a God who is, by definition, Good.
It’s something we manage. It’s something we wrestle against. It’s innate.
My point is that it’s what you do with it that is the difference between sinful enmity and innate enmity. (see Numbers 35:22-24)
I’m hardly free from enmity.
When I hear a sports star talk about how they manage enmity they usually say things like, “I just want to get better every day at my sport” or in golf, “It’s not me versus them, it’s me versus the course.”
On my best days that’s my attitude.
But, as a person who has had to claw and fight for some things in life, I battle a tendency to not just try to do my best– to test myself against the course– but to seek an advantage by fostering enmity.
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