The true law of benevolence having been laid down in all its length and breadth and in contrast with the narrow Pharisaic rule and practice, is now shown to be reasonable from analogy. The appeal is a twofold example, that of God and man. The demonstrative power of the first rests not merely on the general principle of God's perfection and authority as the standard and exemplar of all excellence, but also on the filial relation borne to him by all believers, and here obviously assumed by Christ as necessarily belonging to his true disciples. As if he had said, 'In coming to me, you come to the Father, not mine merely but your own; for if you believe in me, you are his children, and the child must imitate the father in all imitable qualities and acts. But he does not confine his rain and sunshine to the good or righteous, i.e. those who are conformed to his will, but gives them also to the wicked and unrighteous.' The implied conclusion is that we are not to regulate our love by the merit of the object but extend it to all. From this it follows that the love here meant is not the love of complacency, involving moral approbation, but the love of benevolence, involving only a desire of the object's welfare. Maketh to rise, an unavoidable periphrasis of one Greek verb (ανατέλλει), which is used both in a transitive and intransitive sense (see above, on 4, 16, and below, on 13, 6), the former of which is applied in the classics to the growth of plants, the rise of water, and the shedding forth of light. Sendeth rain (Tyndale, his rain), on the other hand, might be more simply and exactly rendered rains (or raineth). Evil and good, just and unjust, are not [to] be carefully distinguished, but regarded as synonymous descriptions of one great universal contrast which exists in human character.
Joseph Addison Alexander, The Gospel According to Matthew (New York: Charles Scribner, 1864), 159.
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