Am I correct in assuming that this is what you are referring to in a later post.
I hope that I can correctly answer this. There is the Church, believers in Christ. They will be for us, then there is the rest. They will be against us. Persecution is a sign that the Church is real. Meaning individual people, not an organization or a building.
Like I said in an earlier response, The first half of your post is Scripture, the second part I don’t remember as being Scripture.
Not sure as to your meaning of “poles”, just had to decipher on my own here. I thought the question was about Matthew 11:28-30.
You said, Mt 11:28-30 opened your eyes to the Truth of God; this Word spoke to you in particular, and I asked, what did/does it mean for you?
Now, you answered on what I meant with the opposite pole: the hardness of persecution.
I see the latter, the persecution, rather as a word in the time, not an eternal rule, and I see that just in the pleonasm of the two sayings, "Who is not against us, is in favour of us", earlier in Jesus' ministry, and the later "Who is not in favour of us is against us". I dispute Muslim scholars who just say, the latest statement of Muhammad is the definite statement. If you have two contradictory statements, it's a clear sign that neither is independent from the situation. So I don't think that animosity towards Christians needs to be perpetual, or even more, that this is a sign of a living community.
I read a novel called «Il Visconte Dimezzato», where the story goes like that:
A duke has been divided into two halfs by a sword, but the two halfs kept on living. One half was entirely good, and the other half was entirely bad. Of course, the people hated and feared the bad part. But more and more, also the entirely good part got a lot of enemies, because it didn't only do good but also accused all evil, and as all people did not always do good, they got upset against the good part as well. In the end, the two parts of the duke are reassembled, and the author closes with the sentence, "You think now that everything was fine? No, it was just the world we are used to".
Sometimes it seems to me that you feel as if the "real church" you mean should be as the good half of this duke; maybe that is your feeling that tells you that having enemies is a good sign.
We may ideally see in Jesus the all-good. But he was different; his teachings, His Word (you find most in Mt 5-7, but also elsewhere) answered differently to the problem of good and evil:
His "rulings" for the Kingdom of God are ideally good. They are the goal, our excercise for preparation of the soul for Jannah (Heavenly Paradise). But at the same time, he prays not to judge, and to forgive. One reason may be not to trap in the trap of the good half of the duke.
However, the major reason is that we are ourselves not perfect. "Forgive us, as we forgive" is the liberation from the need to be perfect, but equally the liberation from hatred and vengence. We are in this world, and we are not perfect. When Jesus said to his disciples, "you are not of this world", he did not mean that they were already in the state of Jannah, but rather, that they had decided to give absolute priority to the Word of God over the temptations of the world we are living in. This is the epiphany I had when I began to read the Gospels (long time ago), and still what I consider the essence of the Good Message.
It also leads us back to a part of your original question:
We shall act in love to each other. This entails everything: To try to do good where you are, to anyone in your reach; to insist in goodness without hardness, and not to let hatred capture us, but feel the freedom to forgive, to try to keep the high commandment in deed, not giving up upon our own fails.
God does not need to be loved. It is us who need to love God and follow His Word.
