Revenge or Recovery

As I look at Romans 13 today I am seeing more and more connections to the context from chapter 12. I think these instructions on how to relate to authority are an expansion of what it looks like to overcome evil with good. They are also unpacking what it means to never take your own revenge or pay back evil for evil, for it is often likely that most causes inducing a desire for revenge will come from those in authority.

And now that I think of it the same has been quite true in my own life. Most, if not all, of my rebellious attitude came from abuse of authority when I was growing up. My inability to defend myself created an intense sense of injustice inside my heart and a desire to settle accounts or get even with those bigger and stronger than me. I can remember incidents where brute force was used to suppress me and attempt to subdue my anger but it tended to only increase my anger. But because I was powerless to act out my increasing desire for revenge I learned to internalize and hide it to avoid further abuse and pain.

As a consequence my heart was trained to hide my emotions, for emotions displayed almost always got me into trouble with authorities such as parents and teachers. I early learned to become an image manager although I never mastered the technique of projecting effectively a different emotion than what I was feeling inside. I only learned to mask them enough to keep them from becoming very obvious to most people. I also learned that rationalization and creating misleading manipulations of facts were effective tools to keep people from knowing what I was really feeling inside. But all of this was primarily because my heart did not know how to deal with the pain inflicted on it by those in authority over me.

What I am starting to see more clearly now is that most of my life could easily be described as being afraid of authorities. Along with that has been cultivated deep-rooted desires for revenge and because revenge conflicted with being a “good Christian” it transformed into roots of bitterness. The suggestions that I should treat my enemies with kindness, respect and unselfish love in this context has always sounded very repulsive to me, at least at the emotional level especially since these notions often came from the same authorities that were using abusive methods to try to control my life and suppress my emotions.

It is now easier for me to understand why I have had such an aversion to Romans 13. Besides it being used to justify unquestioned abuse by authorities I always reacted strongly to the idea that I had to submit to that abuse willingly. I suppose that was because to do so would be to give up the desires for revenge that naturally ensued from many of the actions of those authorities.

Revenge is the secret hope that many people carry inside somehow believing that revenge would alleviate the pain in their heart caused by abuse. We believe the lie that if we could just make others suffer at least to the same degree that they have caused us to suffer that justice would be “served” and we could then be free to return to what we felt like before the abuse or maybe even better. But that is another illusion of Satan's philosophy designed to destroy the image of God in our soul. A desire for revenge does not represent justice like we think it does but is actually a surrender to the spirit of hatred and bitterness that motivates those who have abused us. Abusers generate the same spirit in their victims as they have in their own heart which in turn was received from a previous abuser themselves.

So what I am beginning to see here is a sharp contrast between the natural reaction that the human heart will have toward abusive authority by desiring revenge and wishing evil on my abusers, and the way to freedom outlined by God which looks very different than my natural way of reacting to these things. For everything that I read here conflicts sharply with what my natural flesh wants to do to protect my heart. And to complicate things some of the abusers themselves have used these passages to try to control and manipulate me into compliance with their selfish desires. So I have to disconnect these passages from the spirit of my abusers that use this to justify themselves and try to see them in the light of the Spirit of heaven.

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