Sweet Revenge?

Divine Vengeance Against Those Who Hurt You

Christian Revenge and the Wrath of God

Turn the other cheek? Teach him a lesson he will never forget! Love your enemy? Avenge yourself and get even with those who hate you? Divine justice.

“Vengeance is mine; I will repay,” says the Lord (Romans 12:19, NKJV)

God is just: He will pay back trouble to those who trouble you (2 Thessalonians 1:6)

If you imagine God to be the slightest impersonal or disinterested, you have yet to have life’s most thrilling experience – a genuine encounter with the Living God. As we are a higher life form and more personal than plants, so God is higher and more personal than us. With passion, powers of attention, and concern for every detail that makes a nuclear explosion seem like a popgun, the Almighty is so intensely personal that alongside him we are colorless and superficial. And this magnificent God of perfection is in love with you.

As a consequence, Almighty God is furious with those who have hurt you. So extreme is God’s passion to execute justice on your behalf that no human could generate such intense yearning. And yet the God who longs for us to be like him, urges us not to take vengeance into our own hands. The Bible insists that even in this life, justice is important, and yet it speaks of turning the other cheek. We will explore these mysteries, plunging deep into the heart of God and gaining new insight into the breathtaking perfection of God’s ways, and in the process discover the path to inner peace.

Because it is from God, Bible truth on virtually any subject is so vast that to our puny human minds it seems almost contradictory. In a desperate attempt to cope with the mind-boggling complexity, we are constantly tempted to push from our consciousness those parts of divine revelation that don’t fit our simplistic understanding. To do so, however, not only gives us a twisted view of the breathtakingly beautiful, perfect and lovable Lord, but it robs us of comfort and help God longs for us to enjoy. So a goal of this webpage is to embrace as much of the full truth as we can, while keeping it easy to understand.

Before discussing God’s vengeance on those who mistreat you, let’s examine the significant reasons why he pleads with us not to avenge ourselves.

If someone attacks us and we attack him back, we have just become as bad as that person. “But he started it!” we retort like children. Yes, and by that we admit that we have exalted that person to being our leader and moral teacher. We have taken the very person we acknowledge as behaving badly and made him the one who teaches us how to behave. How dumb is that!

If someone hates us so much that we end up hating him, not only have we, by our hate, become like that person, we have highly esteemed his actions. “Imitation is the highest form of flattery.” Yes, he started it, but rather than that justifying us acting like him, our longing for revenge justifies his actions. We have declared him so right that we have made him our role models, inspiring us to acts of unkindness. And, even more terrifying, by letting someone get under our skin, we usually become so blinded with self-righteous anger that we have no idea that we have become like the person we despise. We fool ourselves into thinking we are better than that person, and yet even if he didn’t specifically want us to suffer and it was more a side effect of his actions, we, with premeditated deliberation, want him to suffer.

If someone hurts us, we want to “teach him a lesson,” but if we tried to retaliate, not only would we fail to teach him how to be godly, we would end up letting that person teach us how to be ungodly. If being hit does not teach us not to hit but only inflames our desire to hit back, why do we suppose that us hitting him would do anything other than intensify his desire to hit back? Instead of teaching him not to lash out, we have merely increased his passion for it and taught him that even those who think themselves morally superior end up concluding that unkind behavior is the best way to act.

If our only reason for not hitting back is because we are not strong enough to fight the person or because we fear the consequences, we have still let our heart become as black as that person’s and in addition we have greater fear or weakness than the person we despise. Spiritually, that person has succeeded in making us his clone. Not only has evil not been reduced, it has been multiplied – and multiplied in the worst possible way – by us becoming like the person we despise. If, however, it is with godly motives that we restrain ourselves, wondrous possibilities emerge.

So how do you teach an evil person a lesson? Certainly not by becoming a role model in showing him how to be ungodly. He’s already mastered that art. You teach him a lesson by letting him know first hand how good it is to be on the receiving end of loving kindness. You stop evil in its tracks by refusing to duplicate their behavior or attitude in your own life. Then you use loving kindness to cause evil to retreat in the lives of those who are in its grip.

“Overcome evil with good” (Romans 12:21) is one of the most profound statements ever uttered. Not surprisingly with something so profound, it distills into a few words a fundamental aspect of Jesus’ teaching. Like so much of Jesus’ teaching, something deep within us finds it peculiarly attractive and yet we are constantly tempted to dismiss it as too otherworldly to actually work.

This foundational truth is also taught in more of the rest of Scripture than we sometimes recall. For example, “If your enemy is hungry, give him food to eat,” seems like the honey that repeatedly dripped from Jesus’ lips, and yet it is actually not from Jesus but from Proverbs 25:21. Again we read, “ Do not say, ‘I’ll do to him as he has done to me; I’ll pay that man back for what he did.’” (Proverbs 24:29). Even the Old Testament Law says such things as, “If you come across your enemy’s ox or donkey wandering off, be sure to take it back to him,” (Exodus 23:4) and, “Do not seek revenge or bear a grudge against one of your people, but love your neighbor as yourself” (Leviticus 19:18).

This intimate connection between Jesus’ words, and the Old Testament is to be expected. If Jesus’ teaching had no precedence in the written word of God revealed prior to Christ’s coming, we would have reason to question whether Jesus truly is the Word of God made flesh. And, of course, this eternal truth is reaffirmed by later revelation. For instance, Paul says such things as, “Bless those who persecute you; bless and do not curse. . . . Do not take revenge . .  (Romans 12:14,19) and Peter said, “Do not repay evil with evil or insult with insult, but with blessing, because to this you were called so that you may inherit a blessing” (1 Peter 3:9). Like Jesus, the first Christian martyr prayed God’s forgiveness upon his murderers. He achieved this, not by finally yielding after years of reluctant wrestling with the issue, but while being pounded by the stones that killed him (Acts 7:59-60).

That we should return good for evil is clearly divine revelation, not just because it appears in so many diverse Scriptures, but because it is so contrary to human thinking. “Love your enemies,” sounds off the planet. It is! It’s from another world. It’s from heaven itself – a world so holy and superior that it is the opposite of the way this world thinks and acts. “Overcome evil with good,” sounds impractical but in reality there is simply no alternative. The only way to kill evil is to smother it with love. To fight bitterness with bitterness or in any other way return evil for evil is to fight a wildfire with gasoline. Any way other that love not only fails to overcome evil, it causes evil to spread and therefore to triumph. More frightening still is where it causes the evil to spread – into one’s own heart. The loving Lord passionately longs to save you from the terrifying fact that we end up like the person we hate. We either imitate Christ who died to forgive his haters or we imitate those who touch us with their evil.

You don’t fight corruption by becoming corrupt; you don’t end anger by getting angry. A gentle answer turns away wrath, but a harsh word stirs up anger (Proverbs 15:1). Only light can eliminate darkness. To suppose you can fight darkness with more darkness is stupidity. Spiritual darkness retreats, not by us copying the works of darkness, but only by letting our light so shine that people see our good works. To counteract bitterness you need much sweetness. Lose your sweetness and you lose your usefulness. Become bitter and you become part of the problem. Nothing increases evil like trying to fight evil with evil.

To use unrighteous methods in the hope of stopping unrighteousness is like thinking you can eliminate rape by becoming a rapist. It is hypocrisy at its worst. Just suppose your pipe dream came true and you succeeded in using unchristlike methods to stop someone from spreading evil. How could you claim the slightest victory in fighting evil when by choosing ungodly methods you have let evil win in your very own life?

To get even with an evildoer who mistreats us is to be brought to the level of an evildoer. To forgive is to be raised to the level of the godly.

But how can anyone become so Christlike as to turn the other cheek and do good to those who seek our harm? Only by inviting Christ himself into our very life and – by letting him take over – release him to love others through us with the superhuman love that is God’s alone.

Lift Up Your Head

In a wide range of Scriptures, God pleads with us to fix our minds on Christ.

John 6:40 For my Father’s will is that everyone who looks to the Son . . .

2 Corinthians 3:18 But we all, with open face beholding as in a glass the glory of the Lord, are changed into the same image from glory to glory . . . (KJV)

Colossians 3:2 Set your minds on things above . . .

Philippians 4:8  . . . whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure . . . think about such things.

Philippians 3:13  . . . Forgetting what is behind and straining toward what is ahead (14) I press on toward the goal . . .

Hebrews 12:2 Let us fix our eyes on Jesus, the author and perfecter of our faith . . .

Nothing other than fixing our attention on Christ will elevate us.

Of everything God wants from us, the objects of his love, Jesus said that the most critical is that we love God with all our heart, soul and mind. In practice, “mind” could almost be omitted from the supreme commandment. If we just loved the Lord with all our hearts, it would be reflected in how often our minds drifted to him. It is wisely said that our real God is whatever our minds habitually drift to when we have nothing in particular to think about. And whatever regularly captivates our thoughts determines the person we are destined to become.

We know how critical it is when driving to fix our eyes on where we want to go. If we keep looking at objects on the side, we will find ourselves veering dangerously in whatever direction we gaze. Likewise, if we travel through life with our hearts filled with disgust or resentment toward someone, then, like a moth drawn to deadly flames, our minds will keep drifting toward that person. Our gaze will keep slipping from whatever is true, noble, right, pure and worthy of praise – which in the ultimate is Christ himself – and, instead of Christ, our lives will resolve around the person we despise. If our minds keep drifting to that person, rather than Christ, it shows we have become more passionate about the one who hates us than we are about the One who loves us. That person will fill our minds as much as if we were hopelessly in love with him/her. In effect, our fixation upon the behavior of the person we despise causes that person, not Christ, to become our role model, and even – in a disturbingly real sense- our god.

We will actually become increasingly like the person we hate. This is no idle theory. What moved me begin this webpage is my distress over continually seeing this truth displayed as tragic reality in the lives of many people who e-mail me, sharing their traumatic past and their current problems. And this is confirmed by research around the world into the backgrounds and attitudes of people.

Unless we forgive, we will be so tied to that person that we will end up wherever he/she ends up – or worse.

The Surprise Twist to this Tale

Whenever our finite minds think we have the infinite Lord figured out, we are heading for a shock. Just when we expect Scripture to emphasize love as being the reason for being kind to one’s enemies, it stuns us by speaking of this being the door to vengeance and releasing God’s wrath upon the enemies.

To explore this mystery, see Love your Enemy and Heap Burning Coals on his Head

For a moving webpage about importance of love, see Turn the Other Cheek

Another significant page: Why God’s Anger is Comforting