Forgiveness & Vengeance

Forgiveness and Vengeance

When Charlie Kirk was murdered, the mask came off for a lot of people. It was rare that so many seemingly normal people would celebrate an assassination as though a great siege had been lifted. Kirk, though controversial, was predominantly a social media figure hosting open Q&A’s about current political issues. He wasn’t a CEO of a health insurance company with questionable ethics, nor was he a loud and bombastic Republican president. He was a guy coming to college campuses to have good-faith conversations to unite a bitterly divided country. In less than a day after he was murdered, thousands in sadistic glee called for more assassinations of other right-leaning figures. A debate quickly ensued over how Christians were supposed to respond. Many, myself included, favored a swift and harsh retribution; death penalty for the convicted assassin and consequences for those who celebrated his death. Others, especially those skeptical of all politics, opted for grace and advocated strictly prayer and forgiveness instead. They would embrace “third-wayism,” scorning any public association with one political party or another for the sake of the gospel.

It appears to me, thanks to an over-focus on the New Testament in Bible studies and seeker-friendly churches, that a significant portion of Christians today hold to the latter proposition. Even worse, I fear more have fallen for the trap of thinking that Christ merely calls us to be nice or to be kind. As CS Lewis, a famous Christian thinker, put it, “‘kindness’ is a quality fatally easy to attribute to ourselves on quite inadequate grounds…Thus a man easily comes to console himself for all his other vices by a conviction that ‘his heart’s in the right place,’ … we think we are kind when we are only happy.” ¹ Often the claim to be nice or kind is stolen moral valor to hide cowardice and a lack of biblical conviction.

Proponents for the grace-only approach, to forgive and pray, might cite New Testament (NT) teachings like “Do not resist the one who is evil. But if anyone slaps you on the right cheek, turn to him the other also.” ² They argue that by rejecting any retaliation, they follow Christ’s teachings and offer a chance at redemption. To prove the effectiveness of this approach, they might point out that early Christianity spread in spite of the sword of persecution, arguably making a greater evangelization impact through their deaths than in their lives. Thus, we should only forgive those who wrong us, to “love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you” for the sake of the Gospel. ³

Yet the Bible does not limit its conception of God, or the definition of righteousness, to only grace. Throughout the Old Testament (OT), God executes just vengeance upon sin commands His people to resist corruption and purge evil from among them. When Israel fell into idolatry, He did not spare them from the same fate as the Canaanites before them. ⁴ It was the early Christian’s revulsion, not passive sorrow, of evil that drove them to oppose infanticide in the Roman Empire and fight back five centuries of Islamic expansionism to preserve Christendom.

Too often, Christians are ignorant of OT stories outside of the sanitized interpretations they learn in Sunday school. In misunderstanding NT grace as being inoffensive, we have forgotten the holy judgement of God and cheapened grace. Thus, we must rediscover the space for vengeance inside our vision of love.

Old Vengeance

The OT is clear: God’s just punishment for evil is destruction. Sunday school Noah’s Ark is generally a story about God’s covenant to never wipe out humanity again. But the real story is a dark account of the consequences of sin. During Noah’s time, angels who disobeyed God took wives from the humans, and in symbolic perversion begat the Nephilim. Humanity became depraved so fast that God regretted making man, and sought to reset all life on dry land. He only spared Noah and his immediate family because Noah was the only righteous person left. In the face of great evil, the solution God used was death: to give to humanity what they deserved for their sin. God afterward made a promise to never blot man off the face of the earth again, but His just vengeance remained.

Following soon after, God pronounced judgment upon Sodom and Gomorrah, saying, “the outcry against [them] is great and their sin is very grave.” ⁵ Abraham interceded, pleading with God to not destroy the righteous with the wicked, and God promised to spare the city if he found even ten righteous people. And the only people who were spared were Lot, Abraham’s nephew, and his two daughters. Everyone else perished. Early in the OT, God’s punishment was death and destruction.

God switches to an indirect approach for judgement in Deuteronomy 9. Before Israel' s conquest of Canaan, Moses reminds the Israelites that “the Lord your God is not giving you this good land to possess because of your righteousness…but because of the wickedness of these nations.” On account of the Canaanites ritual prostitution and child sacrifice, God used the Israelites to herem (to utterly destroy) the Canaanites and their perverted worship. Contrary to popular level criticism, this was not a command to kill every Canaanite, but a command to subdue and ultimately destroy their pagan culture reveling in sex and bloodshed.

God did not spare Israel from His judgement either. In the golden calf incident, the Levites were commended for their zeal in purging idolatry from their brethren. “Today you have been ordained for the service of the Lord, each one at the cost of his son and of his brother.”⁶ When Israel fell into the same sins as the Canaanites before them, God wiped them out and scattered them away through exile. He declares, “Because you have defiled my sanctuary with all your detestable things…My eye will not spare, and I will have no pity. A third of you shall die of pestilence…a third shall fall by the sword…and a third I will scatter to the winds and pursue with drawn sword.” ⁷

Reading the other prophets yields the same idea that God will bring judgement for all sin, and is not partial even towards His chosen people. I bring these stories up to illustrate that God does not make peace with evil: He destroys it with a holy vengeance.

New Forgiveness

The NT, on a surface level, presents an entirely different approach generally focused on forgiveness and mercy aimed at drawing out repentance through grace. People focused on compassion point out that Jesus sat and ate with tax collectors, prostitutes, and “the marginalized.” The argument is that because Jesus did these things, we should be welcoming and accommodating to all people, “for it is not the healthy that need a doctor, but the sick” ⁸. Support for a compassion-based approach is readily found throughout the NT, especially in Jesus’s Sermon on the mount. Common refrains include “turn the other cheek,”⁹ “judge not lest you be judged”¹⁰, and “ love your enemy as yourself.”¹¹ When alone with the adulterous woman after the Pharisees trying to set him up left, he says to her, “Neither do I condemn you.”¹² These ideas to love your enemy and to love God are present all throughout the rest of the NT, with the exception of Revelation.

Perhaps the largest reason why the NT advocates compassion and grace as a response to evil, is because that response is the centerpoint of the Christian faith: the reconciliation provided by Jesus Christ on the cross and through his resurrection. Suffering on the cross, Jesus prayed to God, saying “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.”¹³. Instead of calling down a legion of angels to smite the Roman soldiers, the crowd chanting his death, and the religious leaders largely responsible for executing him, Jesus sought their reconciliation and interceded for them. Paul sums up the NT approach to evil pretty well: “Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good.”¹⁴

Justice in the Bible

Still, to frame the NT as solely restorative is too reductive. There are plenty of instances where God metes out judgement, first upon Ananias and Sapphira for lying about their contribution to the church ¹⁵, and upon many Christians for partaking unworthily of the Lord’s Supper ¹⁶. Yet, given the overall attitude shift between the OT and the NT, how do we reconcile the vindictive judgement of God in the OT with the redemptive mercy in the NT? If we see the OT as setting the stage, describing the problem, then the NT is the answer to the OT, offering the solution.

Let’s step through some points I made in the previous section with this idea:

• It is not the healthy that need a doctor, but the sick
• Judge not lest you be judged/turn the other cheek
• God’s grace through Jesus’s sacrifice is how we ought to overcome evil with good

First, let us imagine a patient who is morbidly obese. If the patient sees no issue for their condition, why should they seek treatment for it? The patient will only seek remediation if they know or suspect that they have a sickness of some sort. Every “sinner” Jesus associated with understood their own sin, or at the very least had the slightest conception of guilt and shame at their own condition. Zaccheus, the tax collector who climbed a tree to catch a glimpse of Jesus, vowed to “give half of my possessions to the poor, and if I have cheated anybody out of anything, I will pay back four times the amount.”¹⁷ In contrast, the Pharisees believed themselves already to be clean, so they were blind to the significance of Jesus’s teaching and the grace he offered. Thus, compassion shines the greatest when the one receiving it understands that they deserve punishment. In such a sense, the church should embrace such sinners with the love of the father of the prodigal son.

Second, the sermon on the mount is easily one of the most misused sections of the Bible. “Judge not, lest ye be judged,” rather than a warning against hypocrisy, is used to shield sin from judgement and criticism. “Love your enemy as yourself,” rather than a callback to “Give him bread to eat…give him water to drink, for you will heap burning coals on his head,”¹⁸ is used to shroud cowardice with “humble kindness.” “Turn the other cheek,” rather than a call to “live at peace with everyone, If possible, so far as it depends on you”¹⁹, is used to bash anyone over the head for any form of justified retaliation in response to various evils.

Finally, there is a point to be made that Jesus’s sacrifice on the cross is meaningful because of God’s righteous vengeance. How is this possible? If our hamartia, our twisting of good, did not demand a real and terrible judgement, we wouldn’t need Jesus’s sacrifice! The essence of grace lies in the fact that it is undeserved. That God would offer Himself as remediation for our sin makes the cross much more brilliant. This is why “he who is forgiven little, loves little.”²⁰

A Space for Vengeance

So, what is the right response to evil, especially in light of Charlie Kirk’s murder? We can debate about how far the retribution should go, but there should be no doubt that the public celebration of his murder cannot be tolerated by Christians. Too often prayer is used as an excuse to avoid any meaningful action. Prayer alone is insufficient. People who outwardly and gleefully celebrated his murder online should at minimum lose their jobs. Anyone aiding the killer, such as George Zinn, should be charged and thrown in jail. Just as Christians vehemently opposed child sacrifice, so we too should oppose political violence and advocate for swift justice. That means refuting the lies told about Charlie Kirk when people we know celebrate it. That means looking friends in the eye, asking if they’d celebrate us getting shot for our beliefs. Our moral cowardice has cost the Church not just credibility, but the respect of an agitated younger generation.

In our understanding of love, we have been seduced by a counterfeit sense of humility upheld by sentimentality, and have forgotten the love of God, which mandates a hatred of evil. This has diluted the Gospel message into a vain “feel-goodism,” of which the grace we extend to others yields minimal repentance or fruits of the Spirit. No wonder why Protestant churches are stagnating or floundering. We have forgotten that it is against the backdrop of eternal damnation that the Gospel appears as good news.

Until we recover the hatred of evil in love, our compassion will remain a hollow gesture.