Several Scriptures telling us not to retaliate, emphasize that this is not to let the offender get off scot-free, but to release the Almighty to execute judgment.

Romans 12:19 Do not take revenge, my friends, but leave room for God’s wrath, for it is written: “It is mine to avenge; I will repay,” says the Lord. (20) On the contrary: “If your enemy is hungry, feed him; if he is thirsty, give him something to drink. In doing this, you will heap burning coals on his head.”

Proverbs 24: 17 Do not gloat when your enemy falls; when he stumbles, do not let your heart rejoice, (18) or the LORD will see and disapprove and turn his wrath away from him.

This shocks us, even though it blends in with other Scriptures that seem to speak of vengeance with peculiar relish:

2 Thessalonians 1:4 . . . we boast about your perseverance and faith in all the persecutions and trials you are enduring. (5) All this is evidence that God’s judgment is right, and as a result you will be counted worthy of the kingdom of God, for which you are suffering. (6) God is just: He will pay back trouble to those who trouble you (7) and give relief to you who are troubled, and to us as well. This will happen when the Lord Jesus is revealed from heaven in blazing fire with his powerful angels. (8) He will punish those who do not know God and do not obey the gospel of our Lord Jesus. (9) They will be punished with everlasting destruction and shut out from the presence of the Lord and from the majesty of his power

Revelation 6:9 . . . I saw under the altar the souls of those who had been slain because of the word of God and the testimony they had maintained. (10) They called out in a loud voice, “How long, Sovereign Lord, holy and true, until you judge the inhabitants of the earth and avenge our blood?” (11) Then each of them was given a white robe, and they were told to wait a little longer, until the number of their fellow servants and brothers who were to be killed as they had been was completed.

Deuteronomy 32:43 Rejoice, O nations, with his people, for he will avenge the blood of his servants; he will take vengeance on his enemies and make atonement for his land and people.

We discovered in the previous page, significant reasons for God urging us not to take vengeance into our own hands. For even more insight into this perplexing issue and an examination of how loving our enemies fits into divine vengeance, let’s explore a powerful passage of Scripture, commenting as we go.

Romans 2:1 You, therefore, have no excuse, you who pass judgment on someone else, for at whatever point you judge the other, you are condemning yourself,

Absorb those words: “at whatever point you judge the other, you are condemning yourself.”

Over and over, Scripture emphasizes that no matter what happens in the short term, eternity will reveal that only people who humble themselves end up exalted. In contrast to humble people, whoever judges someone considers himself morally superior to the person he judges. By judging, he proves himself to be so far from the spirit of humility as to be in grave spiritual danger. Jesus emphasized this when he said, “Two men went up to the temple to pray, one a Pharisee and the other a tax collector. The Pharisee stood up and prayed about himself: ‘God, I thank you that I am not like other men – robbers, evildoers, adulterers – or even like this tax collector. I fast twice a week and give a tenth of all I get.’ But the tax collector stood at a distance. He would not even look up to heaven, but beat his breast and said, ‘God, have mercy on me, a sinner. I tell you that this man, rather than the other, went home justified before God’ ” (Luke 18:10-14). The man overwhelmed by the immensity of his own sin was forgiven, whereas the man who looked down on certain people remained tragically unaware that he was condemned.

Most of us delight in finding people whose sins we can despise. We rarely analyze why we do this, but it is actually our pathetic way of getting our minds off our own sins and drowning out the screams of our consciences.

There are “those who are pure in their own eyes and yet are not cleansed of their filth” ( Proverbs 30:12). The only way to be pure is to admit to ourselves and to God our desperate need of cleansing. Living in denial of the gravity of our own sins is eternally more dangerous than a person with a deadly cancer living in denial of the need to seek medical help. Better than being cured of cancer, facing head-on the truth about one’s filth, and coming to Christ to be pronounced spotlessly pure, is the most liberating experience in the universe.

Salvation from eternal judgment depends on you believing that Jesus was nailed to the cross to pardon your sin. How can anyone possibly imagine a more horrific sin than one that required the Innocent One – the only Son of Almighty God – being tortured to death? How, then, could anyone accepting salvation through Christ’s sacrifice possibly believe there could be a worse sin than his own? And yet isn’t this exactly the deluded, self-righteous belief of anyone who judges another? Doesn’t judging involve thinking someone’s sin is worse than one’s own sin? Anyone claiming to be a Christian who judges someone, thinks to himself, “Because that person’s behavior offends me, he is a more serious offender than little ol’ me. I’m almost perfect. After all, my sin merely tortured to death God’s only Son.” Who in their right mind could claim to be a Christian and think like that? To judge anyone – considering yourself morally superior to someone – is to so minimize your own sin as to virtually live in denial of the fact that it was because of your sin that the Savior died. Such a denial would involve either rejecting your one hope of salvation – the fact that Christ died for your sin – or at least edging precariously close to that point. Is it any wonder that someone judging another stands in danger of eternal condemnation?

We saw from Romans 2:1 that merely thinking ourselves morally superior to anyone exposes us to divine condemnation. What, then, will be the consequences of having such an inflated view of our self-righteousness that we suppose ourselves justified not only in condemning someone but in wanting to take the law of God into our hands and see our self-centered, hypocritical wrath executed on that person?Dare we have the audacity to think we know better than the Judge of all humanity and accuse the holy Lord – the one who at any instant would be fully justified in sending us to eternal torment – of being too soft? If thinking ourselves better than other people exposes us to judgment, what does thinking ourselves better than God do?

Other Scriptures are even more emphatic that our very salvation hangs in the balance when we daydream of “getting even.” Jesus repeatedly said such things as, “ . . . if you do not forgive men their sins, your Father will not forgive your sins. (Matthew 6:14).

Now to continue with Romans 2:

because you who pass judgment do the same things

“No I don’t!” we protest in chorus. Our response shows just how deeply a judgmental spirit blinds us to our own sins. We all have our particular version of hypocrisy in which we manage to see our own sins through the wrong end of the binoculars but see more clearly the sins of those who have hurt us. In God’s eyes, our hypocritically biased view is as pathetic as the following exchange.

“How dare he steal yellow jellybeans! I want a law passed that anyone stealing yellow jellybeans be jailed for life!”

“But you’ve stolen jellybeans. You’ll be sentencing yourself to jail.”

“Of course not! I only steal red jellybeans!”

The Lord graciously – it certainly was not my doing – blessed me with wonderful Christian parents and through Christ he spiritually joined me to himself at a young age and I’ve never drifted from him. Consequently, I could produce a long list of common sins I have never indulged in. I would sooner publicly display my bodily filth than present any of that as a suggestion that I’m the slightest less worthy of hell than the most sadistic mass murderer on the planet. If anything, my spiritually privileged background fills me with shame. It means I’ve never overcome the huge obstacles to faith that so many have had to overcome to believe in Jesus. Of course, salvation is always undeserved but someone who becomes a Christian despite being born to non-Christians is rather like someone who becomes a millionaire by starting a business with nothing, whereas I’m more like a millionaire who simply inherited his money from his parents. My sheltered background also means there are many powerful addictions – even smoking – that I have never broken in my own life, since I have never had the slightest exposure to them. For all these reasons, my supposedly less sinful life is simply an illusion – and a dangerously seductive illusion that I must not fall for, lest the resulting hypocrisy expose me to the wrath of God. “From everyone who has been given much, much will be demanded,” warned Jesus (Luke 12:48).

I dare not point the finger at anyone. Had I lived my highly sheltered life until I was born again as a child and then lived sinlessly for the rest of my life, no one that ever existed would be more worthy of hell than me. Even if, like Adam, I had merely had a piece of fruit that I shouldn’t, I’d be worthy of hell, let alone all the horrific sins I’ve committed. In a flash of anger I once wished my little sister were dead. That makes me a murderer in the view of the One whose piercing eye bores through one’s hypocrisy into one’s heart. Like a rapist, I have lusted. Like a con artist, I have deceived. To try to throw up as an excuse the fact that almost everyone else has acted similarly, would not only fail to reduce the magnitude of my sin, it would expose myself to eternal judgment because, “He who conceals his sins does not prosper, but whoever confesses and renounces them finds mercy” (Proverbs 28:13). For years I considered my sins minor. Not even now has my calloused conscience fully softened to the gravity of the offenses each of us try to excuse.

How dare I have the audacity to want God to be merciful to me if I – being guilty of the atrocious sins I mentioned – cannot be gracious towards the sins of others! If there is one thing that riled Jesus, it is hypocrisy.

Anyone not wholeheartedly agreeing that you and I are equal to the vilest of sinners, has no conception of the holiness of God. Tragically, most people have spent so long looking down on others that they cannot even imagine what it would be like to look up and behold the Holy One. They have so closed their eyes to spiritual reality that they live in a world of make believe – a world that, to their eternal horror, will one day shatter.

No matter how horrifically someone has treated you, his offense against you is not as grave as what you have done to God. Your sins were so atrocious that nothing short of Jesus’ death could atone for them. In effect, your sins tortured and murdered the Holy Son of God, the Lord of the universe. In the terrifying words of Peter, “You killed the author of life” (Acts 3:15). Oops! That has to be biggest conceivable blunders. Imagine ignorantly destroying the very One who upholds the fabric of the entire universe; the One keeping our very atoms from disintegrating, along with every atom in all creation. That is the magnitude of our sin.

We are so self-centered that we are acutely aware of our pain when others hurt us, but barely conscious of God’s pain when we hurt him. In our hypocrisy we are usually full of excuses for our own sins, grossly downplaying their gravity, but rarely are we as generous in excusing anyone else’s sin.

We seem hell-bent on pointing to the speck of dust in someone’s eye, utterly oblivious to the sandpit in our own eye. We suppose it is the other person who is annoying us, but it is primarily the yet-to-be-discovered sand in our own eye that is the real source of our irritation. When we start accusing others as if we are better than them, the problem isn’t their sin, but our blindness to our own sins.

Let’s proceed to the next verse in Romans:

(2) Now we know that God’s judgment against those who do such things is based on truth.

God’s judgment is based on truth, not only because he alone sees everything and knows every heart, but in stark contrast to even the most unbiased of us, he alone does not view people through a hypocritical, self-centered haze.

(3) So when you, a mere man, pass judgment on them and yet do the same things, do you think you will escape God’s judgment?

Suddenly, the issue is no longer, Why hasn’t God’s judgment fallen on that person? but, How speedily will divine judgment fall on me for my self-righteous hypocrisy?

Note the words, “you, a mere man.” Did we create ourselves? Did we design the molecules of the person we want punished? What makes that person answerable to us? Do we have a perfect, unbiased grasp of the intricacies of morality? Do we know everyone’s secret thoughts, pressures and motives? Just who do we think we are in usurping God’s right to be Judge?

(4) Or do you show contempt for the riches of his kindness, tolerance and patience, not realizing that God’s kindness leads you toward repentance?

The driving force behind God’s kindness towards his enemies is the hope that they would repent. His longing is that those who continually hurt him – and we ourselves once fell into that terrifying category – will have a genuine and complete change of heart so that they can become his treasured friends, totally new people and fully trustworthy. This, too, is a major reason why he wants us to show this same kindness to those who don’t deserve it. If they respond to our kindness by repenting, we have truly succeeded in “teaching them a lesson.” Instead of simply doing what it takes to avoid unpleasantness, someone changed by kindness, not force, genuinely wants to do right. The person’s sincerity invites God into his life. He becomes a new person.

(5) But because of your stubbornness and your unrepentant heart, you are storing up wrath against yourself for the day of God’s wrath, when his righteous judgment will be revealed.

We might think those we despise are beyond change, but if the Almighty can change you and me, he can change anyone. Nevertheless, any who refuse to repent are “storing up wrath.” God’s restraint in kindly giving people more time to come to their senses is a window of opportunity that if not seized by the guilty, will end in a full outpouring of divine wrath.

The Lord told Ezekiel, “When I say to the wicked, ‘O wicked man, you will surely die,’ and you do not speak out to dissuade him from his ways, that wicked man will die for his sin, and I will hold you accountable for his blood. But if you do warn the wicked man to turn from his ways and he does not do so, he will die for his sin, but you will have saved yourself (Ezekiel 33:8-9). The same principle applies to us being kind to those who mistreat us. If we don’t show kindness to offenders, we will be held responsible. If we do the right thing and they refuse to repent, however, they will be held accountable, but we will be innocent.

“You are storing up wrath” is in the present tense, implying an on-going process. It is my conviction that Paul, under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, is not merely saying that wrath has been delayed, but that wrath is constantly being added to the store during the time of kindness, thus continuously increasing the final outpouring of wrath if there is no repentance. For confirmation from Bible scholars, see “Storing up Wrath.”

Likewise, our kindness to our enemies makes us godlike and increases the stakes for them. It gives our enemies a greater opportunity to come to their senses by seeing first hand that there is a better alternative to their own lifestyle. Love is perhaps the most powerful way of proving to people the spiritual reality of Christianity. “By this all men will know that you are my disciples, if you love one another” (John 13:35). Again, Scripture reveals to wives that loving gentleness is the best way to bring unbelieving husbands to salvation (1 Peter 3:1-4) Likewise, there is nothing more powerful in transforming this planet for the glory of God than you displaying the character of God with supernatural patience, kindness, gentleness, self-control, faithfulness, goodness, love, joy and peace. And the best opportunity you will ever have – in this life or the next – to portray the beauty of the Lord is when people mistreat you. Under normal conditions, to try to demonstrate the reality of God is like trying to show a movie in a Drive-In during daylight. When the deeds of darkness touch us is like when darkness falls at a Drive-In. It is then that people can appreciate what is being displayed.

Jesus referred to his enemies tormenting him to death as his “hour” – the pinnacle of his ministry, his glory (John 12:23,27; 13:30-31). Likewise, the time when we are cruelly treated is our moment of glory. It is our finest hour; our stupendous opportunity to show forth the reality of the Lord who indwells and empowers us.

A greater demonstration of the reality of Christ and a greater opportunity to repent, however, increases the accountability of those receiving our kindness, so that if they don’t repent they will face even greater severity on Judgment Day.

Paul urges us to consider both the kindness and severity of God (Romans 11:22) – kindness to those who respond to his love by a genuine change of heart, and severity to those who abuse his grace.

Of course there is heaven and hell, but if there is just one eternal reward given equally to all Christians, and just one uniform punishment, talk of increased accountability and accumulating wrath would be almost meaningless.

Throughout the world there is an enormous range of accountability, from babies to intelligent adults who have not heard of Jesus through to those who have witnessed mind-boggling miracles and proofs of God’s power and yet have stubbornly refused Jesus’ salvation. There are also vast differences in degrees of faithfulness and in the varying abilities and opportunities assigned to different Christians. If the Judge of all humanity could access just one reward and one punishment to assign to each of such diverse people, it would seem hard for him to adequately respond to all this variability.

The options available to the Judge, however, are up to the task. Scripture refers to a whole range of rewards and punishments.

Punishment varying according to accountability is hinted at in many Scriptures. For example:

Luke 12:47 That servant who knows his master’s will and does not get ready or does not do what his master wants will be beaten with many blows. (48) But the one who does not know and does things deserving punishment will be beaten with few blows. From everyone who has been given much, much will be demanded; and from the one who has been entrusted with much, much more will be asked.

For more Scriptures and explanations, see Degrees of Punishment.

There are also varying rewards. Consider Jesus’ parable in which servants were each given an equal sum of money known as a mina. Because of their varying faithfulness, one servant ended up with eleven minas and control of ten cities, another had five minas and control of five cities, another had nothing but his life, and the enemies of the returning king lost even their lives (Luke 19:12-27). For explanations and other Scriptures, see Heavenly Rewards.

Parables

A man is in court, convicted of driving a car while intoxicated. The law says he should lose his driver’s license. The man pleads with the judge that his job depends on him having a driver’s license. The judge is in a dilemma; he wants to be merciful but if this man re-offends someone could be killed. Finally, the judge agrees to let him keep his license but pronounces that if this man again appears in court convinced of this offense he will not just lose his license, and hence his job, but he will be jailed. God’s kindness is like that. It raises the stakes because it unavoidably raises our accountability.

A woman wearing her finest clothes is attacked by a man who grabs her by her dress. As much as she loves that dress she has no option but to tug at it with all her might. The dress will either tear and be ruined or she will retrieve it undamaged. Either way, however, that evil man will not win. Likewise, when the Evil One attacks God by holding on to someone important to God – and that’s every human – the Lord pours out his mercy on that person, engaging the Evil One in a supernatural tug-of-war for the person’s soul. That person will either respond to God’s kindness and be saved or refuse and be ruined. Either way, when the battle is over, the Evil one will end up with nothing. So it is when you show kindness to the undeserving. Your action invites God to apply supernatural force to that person. By the time God has finished, the person will end up either restored or ruined, but you, like that woman, will be free. Whatever the outcome for that person, you will triumph, be vindicated and eternally exalted.

You acting in a loving, non-judgmental way causes everything to slot together with divine precision. It releases God to execute perfect justice, while allowing the Judge to be merciful to you and also stopping evil in its tracks by preventing the offender from contaminating your own heart.

When you and I were God’s enemies he loved us so much that he went to the extreme of the cross to make us his friends. And beyond that, he had to tolerate much evil until we finally accepted his forgiveness, and even then we try his patience. If God didn’t treat kindly those who hurt him, we’d all be in hell right now. How dare anyone forgiven so very much not forgive others!

From the moment all is revealed, the redeemed with spend the whole of eternity marveling at God’s judgments.

Revelation 16:7 And I heard the altar respond: “Yes, Lord God Almighty, true and just are your judgments.”

Psalms 145:17 The LORD is righteous in all his ways and loving toward all he has made.

Psalms 96:11 Let the heavens rejoice, let the earth be glad; let the sea resound, and all that is in it; (12) let the fields be jubilant, and everything in them. Then all the trees of the forest will sing for joy; (13) they will sing before the LORD, for he comes, he comes to judge the earth. He will judge the world in righteousness and the peoples in his truth.

Burning Coals?

Let’s see if we now have deeper insight into that mysterious Scripture with which we commenced this webpage.

Romans 12:19 Do not take revenge, my friends, but leave room for God’s wrath, for it is written: “It is mine to avenge; I will repay,” says the Lord. (20) On the contrary: “If your enemy is hungry, feed him; if he is thirsty, give him something to drink. In doing this, you will heap burning coals on his head.”

In biblical thought, burning coals are most commonly associated with divine wrath. For example, we read in Scripture, referring to God:

Psalms 120:4 He will punish you with a warrior’s sharp arrows, with burning coals . . .

Psalms 11:6 On the wicked he will rain fiery coals and burning sulfur . . .

2 Samuel 22:8 “The earth trembled . . . because he was angry. (9) Smoke rose from his nostrils; consuming fire came from his mouth, burning coals blazed out of it.

Psalms 140:10 Let burning coals fall upon them; may they be thrown into the fire, into miry pits, never to rise.

In fact, the connection between burning coals and divine wrath is so strong that Bible readers can hardly get it out of their mind. Nevertheless, despite the reference to divine vengeance just a few words earlier, it seems so out of place to bring wrath or vengeance into an exhortation to love that Bible scholars struggle with this interpretation. They typically opt for the reference to burning coals to mean that our kindness will fill our enemy with “burning shame.” Renowned theologian, Charles Hodge wrote, “To heap fires of coal on anyone is a punishment which no one can bear; he must yield to it. Kindness is no less effectual; the most malignant enemy cannot always withstand it.” (Source). This is true. It would seem almost impossible not to eventually win an enemy over by continued kindness.

Here’s a fascinating reference to burning coals:

Isaiah 6:5 “Woe to me!” I cried. “I am ruined! For I am a man of unclean lips, and I live among a people of unclean lips, and my eyes have seen the King, the LORD Almighty.” (6) Then one of the seraphs flew to me with a live coal in his hand, which he had taken with tongs from the altar. (7) With it he touched my mouth and said, “See, this has touched your lips; your guilt is taken away and your sin atoned for.”

A burning coal to the lips would normally have tortured a person. Instead, Isaiah being cut to the core over his sinfulness allowed that coal to sanctify and transform him.

Likewise, if your enemies repent, the coals your kindness heaps on their head will burn off their defilement, transforming them into godly people filled with “burning shame” over what they did to you. Nevertheless, as a last resort, divine vengeance hovers over the head of the offender so that one way or the other – heartfelt remorse or eternal judgment – your enemy will indeed be overwhelmed with regret over his past misdeeds.

Regret – One Way or Another

Even God’s judgmental, wrath-filled pronouncements of doom are usually our loving Lord’s last-ditch effort to avert judgment. An obvious example is Jonah’s prophecy that in forty days’ time Nineveh would be destroyed. There seemed not a glimmer of hope in his entire message. It had the effect God longed for and that Jonah dreaded. The evil city repented and God relented. As I have shown elsewhere (see the link at the end of this series of webpages) forgiveness and restoration is more often the goal of harsh prophecies than most of us realize.

We don’t know a lot about the next life. We know that divine forgiveness means we will go to heaven, but Scripture shows us that forgiveness does not mean an end to our remorse over past sin. For example, God forgave David over his sin with Bathsheba but David kept suffering the consequences for decades to come.

2 Samuel 12:11 “This is what the LORD says: ‘Out of your own household I am going to bring calamity upon you. Before your very eyes I will take your wives and give them to one who is close to you, and he will lie with your wives in broad daylight. (12) You did it in secret, but I will do this thing in broad daylight before all Israel.’” (13) Then David said to Nathan, “I have sinned against the LORD.” Nathan replied, “The LORD has taken away your sin. You are not going to die. (14) But because by doing this you have made the enemies of the LORD show utter contempt, the son born to you will die.”

Suppose David had eluded punishment and repented only on his deathbed. If suffering regret and loss after forgiveness is an insight into divine judgment, I can’t see David’s last-minute repentance saving him from suffering regret and loss over his sin. Forgiveness means that a genuine deathbed repentance would allow David to go to heaven, but he would still suffer loss because of his sin. I also believe that in heaven he would receive a divine revelation of the sinfulness of sin and of God’s holiness beyond anything we are likely to experience this side of eternity. I can only assume that this would flood him with heart-wrenching regret over how he had wronged Bathsheba’s husband.

Whoever has sinned against you will either end up with his eyes opened to the gravity of his offence and reeling with remorse over what he did to you, or he will be eternally punished for his sins. Either way, it is certain that the person who has wronged you will forever regret his actions. There is no question about that. The only question mark dangles over our neck is whether we will be filled with shame over crashing to the level of the someone who has wronged us by trying to “get even,” or will we be eternally pleased with the victorious, Christlike way we responded to the challenge?

Understanding Divine Wrath

There is nothing more fundamental to God than love and justice. Before we can claim even a superficial understanding of the heart and mind of God, we must come to terms with the fact that “An eye for an eye” is instruction from the same unchanging Lord who said “Turn the other cheek.” Ultimately, it is not a choice between love or justice. This world is hurtling towards both. Both are God’s passion and must be our passion. That’s why you must read An Eye For An Eye: Christian Justice or Love Your Enemy?

Not to be sold. © Copyright, Grantley Morris, 2004. For much more by the same author, see www.net-burst.net These writings may be freely copied provided this entire paragraph is included and it is not placed in a webpage or in anything that is sold. For use outside these limits, written permission is required. Freely you have received, freely give.