Vengeance Is Mine

Some sermons are harder to make than others. Some texts you read and think, “Well, that’s a sordid tale. Not much to uplift the soul here. Let’s move on.” There are others where you encounter a story like this, and those brave souls who attempt to spend some time in there can see multiple ways of looking at the story.

Unfortunately, this is a story that isn’t unfamiliar to our culture. Versions of this happen every day. Something like this may have even happened to you in this room. Because this topic is so familiar, it can blind us on how best to see it, because our various cultures and upbringings crowd around us as we read.

A mistake that we can make in looking at this text (and really many others) is to try to find the main villain. We try to make it simple and reduce the story to pure good guys versus pure bad guys. And that’s just not what we see here. As one commentator put it, there is “ostensibly nothing…commendable” in this chapter (Matthews). He’s right. Yes, there are some actions in this chapter that are worse than others, but there is something that everyone in this room can identify with.

This is a hard story, but there are two points for us to draw from it that Tim Keller, I believe, famously said: You are worse than you think but You are loved more than you know.