Vengeance belongs to the Lord, not to us!

Matthew 5:38-42

Jesus said: "Here's another old saying that deserves a second look: 'Eye for eye, tooth for tooth.'39 Is that going to get us anywhere? Here's what I propose: 'Don't hit back at all. 'If someone strikes you, stand there and take it. 40 If someone drags you into court and sues for the shirt off your back, gift-wrap your best coat and make a present of it. 41 And if someone takes unfair advantage of you, use the occasion to practice the servant life. 42 No more tit- for- tat stuff. Live generously.

Food for thought!

RESIST not evil and it will decrease. Fight it and it will increase!

Here is a statement of one of the great laws of our being. When we resist we make a mental image of the thing we are fighting, and that tends to have it created for us. When we fight our enemies we make them into heroes. When we learn to look only at what we want and never at what we do not want, we will no longer resist anything.

This is a statement of eternal truth. It means that whatever man sets in motion in mind will be returned to him, even as he has conceived within himself and brought forth into manifestation. If we wish to transcend old thoughts and feelings we must rise above them and think higher things. When we desire only the good, the evil slips from us and returns no more.

Jesus forbade the tit for tat law because retaliation has no place in the Christian life. He gives examples.

He says that if anyone smites us on the right cheek we must turn to him the other cheek also. There is far more here than meets the eye, far more than a mere matter of blows on the face. Suppose a right-handed man is standing in front of another man, and suppose he wants to slap the other man on the right cheek, how must he do it? Unless he goes through the most complicated contortions, and unless he empties the blow of all force, he can hit the other man's cheek only in one way--with the back of his hand. Now according to Jews (Jesus' people) to hit a man with the back of the hand was very insulting. So, then, what Jesus is saying is this: "Even if a man should direct at you the most deadly and calculated insult, like slapping you with the back of the hand, you must on no account retaliate, and you must on no account resent it."

It will not happen very often, if at all, that anyone will slap us on the face, but time and time again life brings to us insults either great or small; and Jesus is here saying that the true Christian has learned to resent no insult and not to seek retaliation at all. Jesus himself was called a gluttonous man and a wine-bibber. He was called the friend of tax-gatherers and harlots, with the implication that he was like the company he kept.

The true Christian has forgotten what it is to be insulted; he has learned from his Master to accept any insult and never to resent it, and never to seek to retaliate.

Now you may ask: are our enemies going to go away with it? No. Remember what the Lord says in Deuteronomy 32:35, "Vengeance is mine. I will repay."

So let us not take vengeance into our hands; it is God's right and duty. Those who wrong us will pay for it in due time from the Lord.