Proposal: There is no vengeance in God’s agony for the sin of the world.
I’m putting that out there, hoping to start a conversation with many of you.
I grew up believing God was incredibly vengeful. The Old Testament writers convinced me. Their writings were full of God-is-going-to-get-you passages against Israel’s enemies, and even against Israel itself when they fell to worshipping idols or disobeying his commands. They saw every calamity as an intentional act of God, and he was angry a lot. Passages like those used to terrify me as a young boy growing up and I was extra careful to make sure I was one of the good guys, trying to follow God as best I could. But that doesn’t mean I was free of sin, or didn’t go wayward at times, following my own path. I used to be so afraid of what he might do to me because of my failures.
But, as I wrote in last week’s chapter of It’s Time, Jesus talks about his Father quite differently. “For God so loved the world…,” and “He is kind and gracious to the wicked and the ungrateful.” Jesus came to win people into his Father’s love, not scare them half to death. He painted the picture of a tender Father, seeking reconciliation with his wayward children.
How do we account for this drastic difference? What if the Old Testament writers were interpreting God’s anguish for the world through their pre-cross lens of shame and fear? The writers felt God’s agony for the people he loved when they were seduced into sin and deceit. What if he’s not angry at all, just in pain for the suffering of his beloved?
I know we can prooftext our way to vengeance easily. We can also prooftext our way to love and generosity. But I want to know who God really is and so I’m rethinking in this arena with the God I know. That’s always my prayer, I want to know him as he really is, not how I want him to be or how religion has interpreted him to be. It is not lost on me that those most knowledgeable about the Old Testament couldn’t recognize Jesus as God’s son when he was in the same room with them. They completely misunderstood God and couldn’t understand the forgiveness and generosity with Jesus toward “sinners.”
Why am I exploring this? For the last thirty years as I’ve been growing in the wonder of living loved, instead of trying to earn his love, I’ve noticed a shift in my thinking about who he is. And, eighteen months ago I felt God’s invitation to spend some time inside his agony and lament for the world, as he had been with me in the days when Sara was gone. One day, as I was seeking some answers for how we might pray against the delusion and anger that is in the world, he seemed to say that the answers I sought were inside his grief for the suffering of the world. Then, almost as an aside, came this hint: “There is no vengeance in my agony.” I’ll be honest, the thought surprised me. I hadn’t realized before how much I thought his anguish was anger.
So over the past eighteen months I have looked for vengeance inside my Father’s agony. I haven’t found it. What’s more, I find less of it in my own heart. One person shared with me recently that someone was going to pay a severe price for the did wrong they did to me. My visceral response was, “Oh God, please no.” I didn’t want a drop of vengeance for them, only a pathway to freedom .
That got me to contemplate the Scripture, “Vengeance is mine; I will repay.” It is first recorded in Deuteronomy 32 and repeated by Paul in Romans 12, as an encouragement for us not to seek payback when we are wronged. Instead, Paul adds, feed your enemy if he is hungry or give him something to drink, if he is thirsty. Give back good instead of seeking revenge.
The instruction behind both of these passages is to make room for God’s wrath. Seemingly, he will get them in the end, so you don’t have to. I’ve banked a lot of pain into that account. When people have wronged me, especially in the “world,” I have been comforted by the fact that they will get theirs someday. I’m not alone. The Psalmist often found solace there. So the reason I can be kind to those who hurt me is by trusting that God will hurt them worse. I have even prayed some of those prayers in days long past hoping God would vindicate me through retribution. I haven’t felt comfortable doing so for the past couple of decades.
God’s wrath, however, is not his unrequited anger doling out severe punishment to evil-doers, but his zeal to consume the destruction of sin to redeem the world. With that in mind, could this passage mean something different than God will get revenge on my enemies. Jesus doesn’t come vengeful? He doesn’t even punish those who lied about him to have him executed; he forgives them. Maybe, “Vengeance is mine” means that God takes the vengeance of humanity into himself. “I’ll take it; dish out your worst.” Isn’t that what happens on the cross? He takes to himself the sins of the whole world.
No wonder God didn’t answer those prayers from my old days. Not once. I’ve never seen God take vengeance on people who have done me wrong. I’ve thought about Uriah in that context as well. The husband of Bathsheba, whom King David plunders one night while Uriah was off at war on David’s behalf. She gets pregnant, and when Uriah won’t sleep with her when David returns home to cover his transgression, he has Uriah killed. Ask Uriah just how vengeful God is when you see him someday. Yes, the child of his rape dies, but David ends up marrying Bathsheba, who gives birth to the next king of Israel.
And what if “I will repay” does not mean, “I will hurt your enemies to the degree that they hurt you?” What if it means, “I will repay you, for what evil others have done to you.” Now, that prayer is one I’ve seen answered many times. I have seen God pay me back for what others have stolen from me, and I am talking about more meaningful ways than money. And not having to navigate the fleshy desire for vengeance makes it much easier to sense how his Spirit might be asking me to respond in painful situations.
What’s more, can vengeance ever be redemptive? I see the parents of murdered children celebrate “justice”, whenever their child’s murderer is executed or sent to prison for life without the possibility of parole. “We finally got justice,” they say. But did they? Did the punishment of the perpetrator restore their child? Of course not. For justice, we need something far more powerful than revenge, and that is what we entrust to God. So, while I’m grateful when a murderer is convicted and off the street, I don’t think the family got justice. Their loss remains. Only God can restore what others have stolen, certainly not that child, but others to love and a life that is full even with the grief of their loss.
So, I’m wondering if our hope that a vengeful God will give worldly people what they deserve only feeds our own desire for vengeance, even if we don’t get to dispense it. Is that why we still can respond to the animosity of the world with a vitriol of our own? Where then do we find the secret of being “kind and grateful to the wicked and the ungrateful?”
This will obviously be a major shift in how I read Scripture. The miracle of the Old Testament is that they saw through their shame bias to discover a God that was slow to anger (if at all) and abounding in lovingkindness. There’s the miracle. They saw his true nature, even though their internal shame blamed God for every bad thing. I don’t know any other way where both Scripture and my engagement with God can live freely in the same space. When I contemplate this kind of shift, I like to run it past others to hear what they think. I am finding no vengeance in God’s agony and want to put that out for others to explore and comment on. So, what do you think? It would be great to have an open, honest, and generous conversation in the comments below.
Don’t just give your opinion without contemplating some of these thoughts. Then, let’s think through this together and see what we learn.
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I’ve been on this journey of “who God really is” for about 25 years. Having been raised in a hell, fire, and brimstone church.. I was raised with an angry vengeful God. And then about 25 years ago I told God I wanted to know Him and the story flipped. I knew God was love and all that love included.
About two years ago I began to relook at scripture that portray Him as something else. How would I justify what I knew against the backdrop of the OT?
And then I began to understand more recently that I was to reading a story of how individuals saw God or thought about God based on their history and times.
We do the same thing today although Jesus clearly revealed who God was.
I love the take on the vengeance of God. He repays us.. not by stealing and robbing another but from the limitless supply that is already His. All of His actions stem from who He is… LOVE.
Great thoughts. As a helpful resource on this topic I highly recommend Greg Boyd’s books, sermons and writings. In particular the book “Cross Vision”. Also search the issue on Reknew.org. He’s really helped me understand this topic through the lens of the cross.
Hi Wayne! I love your take on who God is today… not the vengeful Creator who smites those who displease Him, with justice yet to be meaded out on those who are not his followers! When I was young, my heart was drawn to God’s constant wooing of Israel back to Himself, but at other times He scared me because it seemed His was frustrated with them and angry at their constant waywardness. That caused me to fear displeasing God, with constant anxiety around where I stood with Him! When I was in Bible College (many moons ago now), I recall saying to God that I feared Him and I asked Him to change my concept of Him if that was not who He was. In my heart, the answer was to look to Jesus; He was the perfect representation of the Father! What that meant took several years for me to really understand, but that changed everything for me! I could see that God was not represented well by human interpretation of events in the Old Testament, or His seeming ungracious and demanding dealings with Israel. His character is love! It is the very essence of who He is! His desire is that none should perish!
While God is also just, that is different than vengeful! Vengefulness is about getting someone back for what has been done to them; that is not who God is! However, His holiness requires that where there is injustice, justice should be realized. That is where Jesus, who is God Himself, comes in. Jesus drew close to the messiness of humankind in the world, took all of the injustice of the world because of human brokenness into Him on the cross; He bore it, He forgave it, and one day will redeem it in heaven and make everything right! That is a God of love, not vengeance! That is the God I now call Abba, Father! I am His child, but He loves no less those who do not call Him the same!
I have struggled most of my life with “God”. In my teens, I was apart of a fire and brimstone church that taught about “For God so loved the world….”, but also taught about a God who is wrathful, angry and ready to strike me down and send me to hell if I do not repent of my sins; or at least that is how I received the message. I’ve been to the alter so many times (even on the same day) to say the sinner’s prayer, crying out to God to save me and fill me with the “Holy Ghost”. I know now that well-meaning people were teaching the “Word of God” as best they knew how, but for an impressionable teenager, I took what they taught to heart, and the message has stayed with me all my life. I struggle in my relationship with God, trying to be “good”, but always feeling guilty, ashamed and condemned. I have been feeling very convinced that God does not love me and is consistently pointing out everything I do wrong and has already decided that He does not want me to be a part of His family or to live with Him in heaven. I am not sure what God thinks of me now. I struggle to believe that He really does love me. I am hoping that someday soon I will get to know the real God of the universe, not what others have said He is, but who He says He is. I pray that my own anger and bitterness toward God does not cause me to miss out on what having a loving relationship with Him is really like. I am open to continuing this conversation because I am a mess and do not know which direction to go from here…….
Thanks for sharing your story, Denise. I’m sorry things seem like such a mess, but I’m glad you’re in this conversation with the rest of us. Keep struggling. He. Really. Does. Love. You. How can he not; it’s his nature. Yes, religion has twisted the Scriptures to exacerbate our fear and unworthiness, but that’s not what Jesus did. God can handle your anger and bitterness. Express them to him with the humility that you might have got him wrong, and see what he will show you. He wants you free from shame and knowing that you are worthy of his love. I pray you find that trailhead and be able to navigate it with joy and peace.
Hi Denise,
seems you are in good company on this page!
Jesus came and said to his hearers: no one knows the Father. In other words; despite your thousands of years of Bible study you do not know Him. In hebrews 1 it says that in the last days God speaks to us through his son and that Jesus is the exact representation of his being. Jesus is what the Father has to say about himself. Because he is fully God and fully man.
The greatest sin ever committed by us humans is that we murdered Jesus, our maker and a 100% innocent being. Can you imagine imagine a greater sin? And yet he says, Father forgive them because they don’t know what they are doing. If God forgives us the moment we kill him then he can never be our problem. If we are at our worst, He gives his best to us to show us something…. He loves us and loves you! He is not your problem:)
hope it helps.
I was very impacted but what you said and I wondered whether ‘forgiving God’ may help.
Now when I first read that idea of ‘forgiving God’, I confess that I was uncomfortable with it. Forgive God? But if we are holding something in our heart against God; then, in order to move forward, we are going to need to forgive God for whatever these things are.
“But God doesn’t sin; He doesn’t need our forgiveness!” we protest. I am not saying that he does. I am saying that we need to forgive God—we need it.
Let me be clear: To forgive a person is to pardon a wrong done to us; “Forgiving” God means to release the hurt and resentment we hold against him. We don’t understand why these things happened to us but in our heart, we believe that God let it happen.
I think that it is helpful here to remember that we are in the midst of a spiritual battle. God is for us but “The thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy”. He is also called the “Accuser of our brothers and sisters”. He accuses us but also, he accuses God and here is the nub. Looking back at the Garden of Eden story; the snake’s first words were “Did God really say?”. He was sowing doubt into the minds of Eve as to the honesty and openness of God. Later He suggests that God has misled them. So, from early on we are being encouraged to doubt God’s love and motive.
That is why it is important to recognise the lies of the opposition who wants to separate us from God. We need to “forgive” God in order that we can draw near to him again, and receive his love. Perhaps part of the fruit of that restoration will be that God will then be able to explain to us why things happened the way they did. But whether we receive this or not, we know we need God far more than we need understanding. And so, we forgive—meaning, we release the offense we feel towards him.
I hope this is helpful but if not please ignore.
Wayne I so loved what you wrote. What a beautiful revelation and an alternate way to see a scripture that we have read as being something so different to what it really is. ‘Vengeance is mine says God’. He took the vengeance on Himself not on those who have wronged Him or all of us. I love it. Thank you so much for sharing such an insight.
Bless you and Sara abundatly.
I love how you expressed your “rethinking” in this area based on the God you have come to know. The entire concept of rethinking God or His nature or doctrine you were raised with is totally reprehensible to many Christians. It’s like they feel that if they rethink what they have believed for a long time, it is somehow a breach of faith and they are in danger of going backwards in their Christian life.
Thank you for this! Perhaps it will embolden others to rethink the love of God and how that was demonstrated through Jesus, who is the exact representation of the Father! The entire Old Testament has to be “rethought”, based on Jesus’ life. Otherwise we operate with a horrible mix of law and grace which keeps us in a prison of our own making. The good news is that Jesus came to set us free, even from our own self-made incarcerations!
I am not an English native speaker, so I will use Google translator.
I’ve been on this path for quite some time. Thanks to a shock conversion at a late age (29), rather as a skeptic who went to the Catholic Church some 10 years, I have not been very religiously indoctrinated by either side.
I will describe what I believe God has led me to in this matter.
Three times in the NT it is written that;
Jesus spoke according to how they could hear. (Mark 4:33)
Paul could not speak to the Corinthians as to the spiritual ((1Cor 3:1)
i
The author of the Letter to the Hebrews says that they
they need milk, for solid food is for adults. (Heb 4:11-140.
I believe this principle applies to the Old Testament as well, or perhaps especially. Paul writes, when WE WERE CHILDREN, we were …
So God spoke to Israel from the beginning according to how they could listen.
It is important to remember that “God who is love” also gave the Law out of love for His people.
The 10 Commandments were an expression of God’s love. The rest of the Law was also given not so much to protect them from God’s wrath as from the consequences of sin. Those consequences God takes upon himself (as He took on Himself the sin on the cross), because that was the understanding of the time – everything is done by some deity. Of course, everyone experientially knew to some extent the law of “action and reaction,” but “that which is spiritual must be spiritually discerned,” this spiritual discernment they did not have, not having the Holy Spirit.
Paul writing: “But before the faith came, we were shut up together and kept under the guard of the law, until the faith was revealed.”
“shut in together” – I read somewhere that the Greek uses a word that means protection from the outside, something like a fortress.
Yes, the law protected them from the consequences of sin. It wasn’t the curse cast by god that caused the misfortunes, but the consequences of the evil done. God took it upon himself to actually DREAD him, because that was the philosophy of all nations at the time, although many true worshippers of God were coming to some knowledge of goodness, mercy, grace (especially David, on whom the Holy Spirit descended AND HAPPENED, had New Testament thinking).
He couldn’t talk to them about love either, because love wasn’t something important, there was no talk of love at all. You know, e.g.:, first they got married, and then possibly fell in love. Parental love, etc., but it was not a topic of conversation, deliberation of discussion.
When the fulness of time came!!!!
and when the fulness of time did come,
One aspect of this ‘fulness of time’ is that 400, 500 years earlier Greek philosophers began to think and write about love thoroughly!!! The greatest was Plato! So, during those 4 centuries, ‘love’ became part of Greek culture and, of course, also influenced the thinking of Abraham’s descendants. They yielded significantly to this culture after all.
NOW it was possible to talk about love, to show love both to one’s own and to strangers, NOW the message of love could only be understood!!!
Was God lying before? Or did he speak as they could listen? Are we lying by telling children all sorts of things inconsistent with reality that they can’t understand?
This is how I understand it now, and today I was freed from that line “I will repay” THANK YOU WAYNE!!!!
Translated with DeepL.com (free version)
Thanks for sharing Piotr. In my struggle with all of this, I want the revelation of God in my heart to come in alignment with the revelation of God in Scripture. I think all who wrote were inspired by God to write the words they did. I don’t think they were just human observations; they were inspired by the Spirit.
But that doesn’t mean all the words in the book hold equal weight. This is not a rule book to follow but the flow of God’s revelation over thousands of years, to help us see how God led his people out of guilt, shame, and blaming him for the fallen creation, into an awareness of his love and justice. So, some things that were written were wrong and later voices corrected the misunderstandings about God. Woe to those who read the Bible as a legal document, because they can prooftext their way into darkness while they think they have light.
The proof is in knowing him and when he told us to love our enemies, we had to know that he did as well. He couldn’t ask us to be better at this than he is. He loved me when I was his enemy and that love opened the doors of redemption.
I’m glad this has led you to greater freedom.
Amen to all you have written. It matches the loving Father I am getting to know after a lifetime of religion. Could it be that God’s anger is only directed to sin itself? And his love and compassion only towards the victims of sin, be they perpetrators or those sinned against? It is a great mystery and I don’t believe human beings have the capacity to understand HOW sin entered a perfect world let alone how Satan himself with God before the world was created could have conceived to rebel and take millions of angels, themselves perfect beings with him. Perhaps God’s anger is only directed towards Satan and the fallen angels, and it only falls on mankind when they choose to side with them. There is so much we cannot know this side of final redemption, and there is so much in our individual understanding that changes as we allow God through his Spirit to correct us.
This conversation is spot on. My soul has been seeking it for a long time. Thank you, Wayne!
Wayne:
Thanks for sharing your thought provoking ideas. There are important keys to understanding God’s nature in the Old Testament that I find helpful.
We find the first self revelation of God in Exodus 34:6:
“Then the LORD passed by in front of him and proclaimed, “The LORD, the LORD God,
compassionate and merciful, slow to anger, and abounding in faithfulness and truth”.
The prophet Joel knew that same revelation of God which he quotes in Joel 2:13:
“”And tear your heart and not merely your garments.” Now return to the LORD your God,
For He is gracious and compassionate, Slow to anger, abounding in mercy and relenting of catastrophe.”
Jonah shows he also knew the revelation of God’s nature by how he ends Jonah 4:2:
“I knew that You are a gracious and compassionate God, slow to anger and abundant in mercy,
and One who relents of disaster.”
Thanks to all who have written so far. I appreciate the time you took to comment and share part of your story. How we see God is critical to our journey in him, and how we see him in the Scriptures is an important part of that. But we’ve got to take care that we don’t read the Bible as rule book, or we’ll certainly get confused. Read it as a story of the unfolding of God’s revelation through time. Yes, many of the Old Testament writers misunderstood him, but they are sharing what they saw at the time. What a marvelous story of God leading all of his children to know him as he truly is and to let his light set us free from the darkness of the world that entangles us.
Thank you for inviting us into this conversation. I retired 2 years ago after 3 dozen years as an ordained minister in a “mainline” Baptist denomination. A conversation like this wasn’t possible in that context without risking my career. This year I have been reading the Bible “chronologically”, and able to do that between God and me without fears of being labeled a heretic for asking the difficult questions. I’m currently reading about the reign of King Hezekiah and finding myself unfamiliar with the God that is described in the texts prior to that. I found myself cringing when reading 2 Chronicles 30:18 when it said that uncleansed people were participating in a Passover feast. After reading so much prior to that about people being killed for not doing exactly what God prescribed, I just assumed that these people were going to be toast. The good news for me was that they weren’t. Hezekiah prayed a confessional prayer for them and we are told that God listened to his prayer and healed the people. I thought at that moment, “this is the God I’m becoming more familiar with as I grow and mature in His love”. It makes me wonder how we as folllowers of Jesus Christ need to view the vast amount of Scripture that portrays an intolerant God who massacres anyone who doesn’t do exactly what he says they should do. Thank you for helping us help each other to sort this out by looking to our Savior, Jesus Christ and by being led by His Holy Spirit.
I took your advice and spent some time considering what you said in this post before commenting. I will try to sort my thoughts out in an orderly way. I only read the post once and will give my initial thoughts. I did this intentionally hoping for honesty and sincerity. I certainly don’t intend to offend.
I don’t question the authority of scripture. My interpretation may be off or the translation I am reading may be off, but I find myself on a slippery slope when I think about the prophets of the OT missing God. There are just too many of them with the same message to buy into the idea that they all missed God.
The OT is full of expressions of the love of God. I think it’s misrepresented to only link it to vengence. What comes across as vengence or vitriol could just be truth being spoken in love. Jesus did it in the Temple when he overturnd the tables. I bet the guy with his money and inventory laying all over the ground didn’t feel loved but I think an argument can be made that the behavior of Jesus came from a place of love. Sometimes we don’t feel loved even though we are. I think it’s fair to say he forced his agenda. I think it’s possible that he imposed morality where it was lacking.
I’ve been reading Isaiah. 26:10 stood out to me a couple of days before I read the article. It talks about righteousness and the majesty of the Lord being overlooked when there is corruption and it isn’t dealt with. Maybe vengence and discipline aren’t exactly the same, but I think they at least overlap a bit. I think we need to be careful not to misinterpret discipline, and maybe vengence, as a lack of love. Maybe it’s not a way to make us behave as much as it is a way to show us how to avoid the natural consequences of a fallen world or to show us a path to give us our best life here on earth.
I’ve told others how much more I understand Gods’ love for me after having my own child. It seems vengence is stirred up in me the most when my child is wronged. My lean is toward a vengence from God taking us in the right direction.
Hi Virgil. I don’t question the authority of Scripture either; I do question how it is interpreted. I don’t think the prophets missed God; I think they misunderstood him. Without the cross they could only view God through their shame and when they touched his agony they interpreted it as vengeance, albeit almost always with an invite to redemption, forgiveness, and God taking them back. It is the love of God that comes through in the OT that is the miracle. They could see it, but it was beyond their comprehension, which is why they could only long to see the things we now experience.
Thanks for the response. I see a difference in missing God versus misunderstanding him. I realize now that is an important distinction. However, the prophets potential to misinterpret is what I struggle with. If we consider the potential for them to misinterpret than we open the door to consider all of scripture to be misinterpreted by its author.
It also seems to me that the prophets were able to experience God as a loving God, even without the cross.
Do you thing vengeance and discipline are two totally different and separate ideas as they are used in the OT?
I think I see it a bit differently, Virgil. It’s not that all the authors could misinterpret, but that those before the cross would have had shame/fear blinders on and those after would not. Thus, Scripture interprets Scripture and I give more weight to what’s in the New than the Old. Even Jesus said, “The ancients said this, but I tell you this…” ALL of Scripture is a progressive revelation of who God is. In the process each misunderstands a bit of it until the Son comes, the Word of God in human flesh. Now we could see God as he is, and for me that’s the final Word on the nature of God.
Yes, the did see to God’s love and lovingkindness even through their shame, which is the great miracle behind the OT writers.
Yes, I think vengeance and discipline are totally different things. Vengeance has in mind retribution and punishment. Discipline as to do with training and transformation, as I see it. Those who think they are the same thing try to use vengeance as discipline—the fear of something worse to get someone to respond. That doesn’t train anyone; it keeps them bound in fear.
That’s the way I see it at this point, anyway.
Hi Wayne,
Thanks for opening up this conversation, I really appreciate the thoughts and timing as well. For the few weeks before you put up this blog, I’ve been grappling with a similar question: whether God ever wants or desires to put people to shame, or see us burdened by shame. It’s such a jump going from “maybe 1% of the time” to never, and I’m beginning to entertain the thought for the first time that it really might be never.
A lot of this came from a conversation a few weeks ago with my brother. He asked “Do you remember a time when someone was angry with you, and you felt no shame, even when you knew they were right?” this flowed into many other questions like “was it their intention to bring shame?”, “do you remember a time being angry, but at the same time not wanting to see any shame whatsoever come to the other person?”, “does God ever desire to see us in shame? Does anger have a place in God apart from vengeance and adding to our shame?”
There’s a lot there, and all this really hit me. My first thought was that my belief in “righteous anger” as a Christian has not served me well. It just made it too easy to see my own anger as a godly thing. I would look to whether I was justified or right, but missing that at least part of my intent was to bring the other person to shame. How could I lay such a terrible burden on others and feel righteous while I was doing it?
The other thing that struck me was thinking the number of times when I read shame into the Bible, and situations when sometimes anger could simply be an expression of being deeply distressed, disturbed, troubled in spirit like in Mark 3 when Jesus heals on the Sabbath.
In saying all this, the struggle is very real at the moment. Strangely it’s not Old Testament that bothers me for reasons similar to what you described, but I struggle more with the new Testament, many of Jesus’s parables, and even reading Romans 1 and 2 last night. I have the feeling I’m often fighting the scriptures when I read them, and hate that feeling. I don’t want to think this “no vengeance in God” because it makes me feel comfortable, but because I really believe that it’s true. I can’t get away from this sense in my heart that the desire to bring shame really is something foreign to compassion (on the contrary to lift it off). However, I’m feeling such a dissonance, especially reading the Bible. I hope that makes some sense. I still feel like I’m missing something here!
Caleb, thanks for your comment. I love the process you’re going through. It may seem like a struggle, but it’s a good one. To sort out God’s approach to shame, to recognize your own righteous anger, and to no longer feel at odds with the Scriptures is a great pursuit. When I fell at odds with the Scriptures, my first thought is, I’m really at odds with the religious interpretation of this passage. What else could it mean? The way I see it, I want my experience of God and my interpretation of Scripture to lead me to the same space. That’s when I know I’m finding what may be truest. But it has been a thirty-year process for me and it is still on going. To hold those two realities in tension is a critical part of my discipleship experience.
Thanks Wayne, I appreciate the encouragement. I really like the invitation that it’s okay to be in the tension, holding it together with God rather than needing to have all the answers.
I really appreciate your insight, Wayne. Balance is such an important place for me to be, especially spiritually. I move closer to that when I hear your take. Iron sharpens Iron. Thank you.
Hi Wayne,
Thanks for sharing this post. I have not ever really shared in God’s agony but I do know that God does agonize over sin. It seems clear to me He gets his vengeance at the cross. What an amazing act of love for mankind. He not only takes on the agony , shame and humiliation of sin. He gives us a way out. Opening up a new relationship with Him where He is willing to share a part of himself to live inside of us! What great love God has for us can that be His Vengeance?
I find it quite easy to write this and see it but to live is a different story. I wish and pray that I can love as God loves. Maybe that can be a discussion for another day?
It certainly can. Thanks for your comment, but I’m not sure what you mean by he gets his vengeance at the cross. If you think he got even with humanity by the horrible death of his Son, then we see that differently. I don’t see that as vengeance but redemption. He wasn’t punishing Christ on our behalf; he was destroying sin in his own Son, as I think Paul saw it.
Hi Wayne
I meant by his great love that he showed mankind at the cross was His vengeance.
The furthest thing from my mind was he was getting back at mankind, but opening of a relationship through Jesus’s sacrifice. I look at it like this is His redemption His Vengeance? Buying doing the best over all good is that His vengeance?
Not to get back at anyone but to love them.
Hopefully I am explaining this correctly.
Thank you so much Wayne for this brilliant post.
I completely agree with your novel interpretation of Romans 12. Recognizing that God absorbed all vengeance on the cross and viewing His repayment as compensation for our losses is a brilliant insight. This sheds new light on a scripture that has, for ages, been used by fundamentalists to justify taking vengeance on God’s behalf against those who disagree with them.
Your passion for seeking the truth, even if it means admitting you’re wrong, is both refreshing and rare. This requires a new approach to interpreting the Scriptures. Like you, I am not questioning the truth of Scripture itself, but rather the accuracy of our interpretations, which I believe depend greatly on our perspective. As you have said, the number of Christian denominations reflects the diversity of perspectives.
Maybe we should go back to the original people for whom and by whom the Old Testament was written and learn from their approach in stead of using the text in a mainly Greek way as a scientific handbook or a legal document?
In this regard, “Midrash” is an interesting way to work with the Scriptures. “Midrash interprets not only the text before the reader, but also the text behind and beyond the text and the text between the lines of the text. In rabbinic thinking, each letter and the spaces between the letters are available for interpretive work.”
Rachel Held Evans, had this revelation: “Midrash, which initially struck me as something of a cross between biblical commentary and fan fiction, introduced me to a whole new posture toward Scripture, a sort of delighted reverence for the text unencumbered by the expectation that it must behave itself to be true. For Jewish readers, the tensions and questions produced by Scripture aren’t obstacles to be avoided, but rather opportunities for engagement, invitations to join in the Great Conversation between God and God’s people that has been going on for centuries and to which everyone is invited.”
Hi Wayne. Thank you for this. I am absolutely with you on it. It made me think that in Luke 4 when Jesus quoted freom Isaiah 61 he ended with “…..to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favour” and sat down. But He did not then finish the quote which contains the words “and the day of vengeance of our God”. I think that is significant.
What a great observation. Interesting….
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