God-Light: Biblical Wisdom in Your Everyday -"Do Not Repay Anyone Evil for Evil"
by Ken Wilson

Love must be sincere. Hate what is evil; cling to what is good. Be
devoted to one another in love. Honor one another above yourselves. Never be lacking in zeal, but keep your spiritual fervor, serving the Lord. Be joyful in hope, patient in affliction, faithful in prayer. Share with the Lord's people who are in need. Practice hospitality. Bless those who persecute you; bless and do not curse. Rejoice with those who rejoice; mourn with those who mourn. Live in harmony with one another. Do not be proud, but be willing to associate with people of low position. Do not think you are superior.  Do not repay anyone evil for evil. Be careful to do what is right in the eyes of everyone. If it is possible, as far as it depends on you, live at peace with everyone. Do not take revenge, my dear friends, but leave room for God's wrath, for it is written: "It is mine to avenge; I will repay," says the Lord. 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." Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good. (Ro. 12: 9-21)

If we take this text as an indicator, what does it indicate about the things that were on the mind of the people his letter was written to?  What were they facing?  They were facing the sometimes exhausting task of getting along.

Simply making their way through the myriad relationships involved in being part of a community, being part of a city, surrounded by people, wasn't a cake walk.

This landscape of relationships is the proving ground of their faith, of their gospel.  Does it make a difference here? 

In the way they walked with others…and not just with a handful of others, but with everyone. Love, sincere love,
is making demands on how they treat, how they respond, how they deal with….everyone all the time.

Most of the time we present our face of love to certain people but not to others.  We don't even consider how to love certain people who aren't on the A-List. 

But God is a jealous God who wants the whole of us--stem to stern. Love orders the whole enchilada. And while God may be pleased with us before we learn this, he isn't satisfied until love is the face we turn to everyone all the time.
Do not repay anyone evil for evil. Be careful to do what is right in the eyes of everyone [including the people who are doing us wrong.] If it is possible, as far as it depends on you, live at peace with everyone. [And not the easy peace people.] Do not take revenge, my dear friends, but leave room for God's wrath, for it is written: "It is mine to avenge; I will repay," says the Lord.

Love is the Alpha-Power in universe because God is Love. Paul's vision of love is something that doesn't wilt, shrink back, take a leave of absence in the face of evil.

Evil is the problem we have with love. In a world without evil, love is the slam-dunk response of choice. A no-brainer when there's no evil to contend with! But there is!  Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot, and the latest clowns…all the way down to your nemesis at work. 

Because it doesn't take a specialist to do evil. We all take a turn dancing with the devil. Where there is no talebearer strife ceases. (Proverbs 26: 20) "Did you hear what so and so said about you?" Someone in a weak moment says something unkind about someone else who isn't present. Instead of saying something on the spot, to clarify what they meant or give them a chance to rethink, you go to the person they spoke about and report the insult, driving a wedge between two people. Not grand larceny evil doing, but wisdom describes it as perverse: A perverse man sows strife, And a whisperer separates the best of friends (Proverb 16:28).

Jesus said, "Let your yes, be yes, and your no be no. Everything else comes from the evil one."  By this standard, we do a lot of dancing with the devil don't we?
This stuff happens all the time and we're on the receiving end of it. When we're on the receiving end, often our vision of love shrinks back, goes AWOL, takes a leave of absence. As though a little evil-doing cause love to lose its potency.  But that's not the time to jump off the love boat.

"Do not repay anyone evil for evil…. Do not take revenge, my dear friends, but leave room for God's wrath, for it is written: "It is mine to avenge; I will repay," says the Lord.

The Bible has a clear-eyed view of evil. We are not seeing evil clearly, unless we also see that evil has to be resisted, and if it refuses to yield, eventually evil has to be crushed. 

But the crushing of evil is God's business, not ours. And his wrath, exercised by him, and him alone, is what he uses to do it.  That's what "It is mine to avenge; I will repay" means: Keep your hands out of my business!

If you see evil clearly--that it will be avenged--you will be the very last person in line to pick up your crushing stone.

Don't trust anyone who says they believe in a God who judges, if they are not also empowered by that vision to keep their hands off the gavel of judgment. 

Romans 1, Paul inveighs against paganism as a system. He says, paganism has forgotten God, and it's led to a mess.  He sites pagan sexual perversion, knowing his audience will be nodding their heads in agreement.  But then, he says, "furthermore…" like "it gets even worse…" and then, along with things like murder, he mentions things like gossip, the sin of the religious. And strife.  Knowing lots of synagogues and churches were full of strife. And then he tosses in for good measure, disobeying parents….

When people use Romans 1 to highlight certain sins (often the very ones the highlighter is immune from) what they often forget to mention is Paul's main point!  Which comes immediately after Romans one, "You, therefore,(speaking to the believers) have no excuse, you who pass judgment on someone else, for at whatever point you judge the other, you are condemning yourself!" Romans 2:1

The high demand of love hits us in our everyday solar plexus Someone does you wrong. And you are incensed and want to get off the love train long enough to just take a little revenge and then get back on. Trade insults for a while.  She's undermining you behind your back? Back atcha! He's lobbing little emotional manipulation bombs? Back atcha!
A while back I was processing some relational strife. Where you wake up in middle of night and rehearse it in your head, and you go back to sleep and you wake and it's there. You're trying to shake it off, but it's like one of those balled up band-aids that you just can't flick off--with every flick it just finds a new place to stick!  Been there? Done that?

Eventually, I gave up trying to take my mind off it.  And I gave up trying to solve it myself in my head.  Instead, I gave myself over to the angst, the anger, the complaint I felt and talked to Jesus about it.  Maybe five minutes "Lord this is how it feels to me.  Lord, why do I have to bear so much of this emotional burden, I'm tired of it."

And as I went deeper and deeper into it, it was like he came closer and closer into it with me.  And I realized that Jesus himself went through so much relational strife in his life.  He grew up in occupied territory, a land crackling with tension every day.  He had family strife. Age of 12 his mother is teed off with him for hanging out in his Fathers house. "Mom, it's not like I'm on drugs or I went to the brothel; I've just been here in the temple talking Torah with my elders."  He had strife with his disciples, who kept getting into arguments tha he had to deal with. He had strife with his critics. Whole dialog sections in gospel of John where you can tell it is getting to him. He's not all serene; he's hot and he's bothered by it. 

All of this assuring me, that he understands, he gets it, and he's with me in it. That alone relieves a burden. Something relaxes, fear and anger let go, fog lifts, and you see your way forward.

(We don't pray because we're holy. We pray because we're hungry.  We pray to get through the day.)

In the psalms you see that the prayer life of the prayer was connected to the strife life of the prayer.

"O Lord how many are my foes!" And how varied! External enemies flat out trying to kill him. Then a circle of underhanded underminers.  And friends going sour on you. 

But for the psalmist, the strife, signified by the anger and the hurt and the fear it stimulates, is a signal to duck in from the battlefield and spend a little time in prayer.

Stop problem-solving with your brain for a while. Unload your burdened heart to God in prayer. Don't start by telling yourself what a good Christian would do.  Start by telling God what a real human being feels when this stuff happens.

The God featured in this book takes the human into account.  He's not trying to lift us above our humanity, he's engaging our humanity.

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." Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good.

This is the genius of wisdom. Paul is invested in this emerging Jesus community making it out of the oven fully baked. He knows what every missionary does: it's not the pagans you have to worry about so much, it's the members of the church devouring each other. Because the church is nothing but a collection of sinners still in the process of being saved by grace. People turn on each other and even friends slip over into the enemy category.    

So Paul turns to the proverbs, which is a very earthy, down in-the-mud-and-the-mire kind of wisdom. Wisdom adapted for human beings made of dirt. Adam from Adamah.

He's quoting from the proverbs, and this is the context: "Like a bad tooth or a lame foot is reliance on the unfaithful in times of trouble. Like one who takes away a garment on a cold day, or like vinegar poured on soda, is one who sings songs to a heavy heart. If your enemy is hungry, give him food to eat; if he is thirsty, give him water to drink. In doing this, you will heap burning coals on his head, and the LORD will reward you. (Proverbs 25: 19-22)
Proverbial wisdom. Down in trenches of everyday life where nothing is ideal, that's time and place for proverbial wisdom.
Wisdom understands the hurt and takes it into account. Not just the facts, but the hurt. You're counting on someone and they let you down.  It's like when you have bad tooth, and you forget it's bad and you bite down--it hurts!

Wisdom days, you gotta take the hurt into account. Don't just try to be Mister Fix-it: take the hurt into account.

And sometimes, in real life, with real anger, you have to begin with the anger.  You gotta take the anger into account and work with it--that's wisdom.  (Just like you gotta work with the bad mood--you can't make a frontal assault on a bad mood by singing someone a happy song.)  

You're mad at what that bozo did? I get it, says God. Let me show you how the big boys play against the kind of stuff your foes are dishin' out. Let me give you something to push back with against that nonsense. Let me bring you in on a secret weapon--what I've found works better than Goo-be-Gone to get the gum out.  

What!? What?!  "If your enemy is hungry, give him food to eat; if he is thirsty, give him water to drink. In doing this, you will heap burning coals on his head, and the LORD will reward you.  Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good."

MLK made a powerful movement out of this wisdom: "When you are in a vulnerable position and someone tries to exercise their power over you to do you harm, and you respond, not by hitting back, or trading insults, or upping the ante on the name calling….when you dig deep, and get in touch with the power at the center of the Universe, that flung out the shining stars and set them on their way, when you get in touch with a love that knows no bounds, can't be contained, can't be retrained, that's when you show 'em, "You don't have power over me. I am my own man. I'm packin' my love heat."

Love throws them off their game. They are expecting something else. They expect you to get blind-sided by anger or cow-tow to fear. They might want your brain to freeze up with anger and fear. But perfect love casts out fear.

And when you love 'em back, the look in your eye will be the look of love, and love is the power that wins.

In trenches of life, we will only practice this if we believe it works. In the heat of our foe-induced anger, believing it's the right thing to do may not be enough.

We may have to believe it's the most powerful thing to do.