Thursday, March 18
Amidst all the good news, why does the Messiah, as depicted in Isaiah 61, proclaim God’s vengeance? When is this prophecy fulfilled?
When in Nazareth, Jesus, the Messiah, read Isaiah 61 as far as “To proclaim the acceptable year of the Lord,” (Isaiah 61:2; Luke 4:19). Then He stopped and said, “This day is this scripture fulfilled in your ears” (Luke 4:21). So, He deliberately and specifically avoided reading the next words in the same verse: “the day of vengeance of our God” (Isaiah 61:2). While His ministry of good news, liberty, and comfort was beginning to set captives free from Satan’s tyranny, the day of vengeance was not yet to come. In Matthew 24 (compare Mark 13, Luke 21), He predicted to His disciples that divine judgments would come in the future.
Indeed, in Isaiah 61 the day of God’s vengeance is the “great and the terrible day of the Lord” (Joel 2:31; Malachi 4:5), to be fulfilled when Christ will come again to liberate Planet Earth from injustice by defeating His enemies and setting the oppressed remnant of His people free (Revelation 19; compare Daniel 2:44, 45). So, although Christ announced the beginning of “the year of the LORD’s favor,” its culmination is at His second coming.
How do you reconcile the notion of a loving God with a God who also promises vengeance? Are the ideas incompatible? Or do you understand vengeance as a manifestation of that love? If so, how so? Explain your answer.
Though Jesus has told us to turn the other cheek (Matthew 5:39), elsewhere He was very clear that justice and punishment will be meted out (Matthew 8:12). Though Paul tells us not to “render evil for evil” (1 Thessalonians 5:15), he also said that when the Lord is revealed from heaven, with flaming fire He will take “vengeance on them that know not God” (2 Thessalonians 1:8).
The difference, of course, is that the Lord in His infinite wisdom and mercy can alone bring both justice and vengeance in a completely fair manner. Human justice, human vengeance, comes with all the faults, frailties, and inconsistencies of humanity. God’s justice, of course, will come with none of those limitations.
Which of the following incidents would make you more likely to want to see vengeance returned upon someone who does evil? (1) A person who hurts someone you do not love or (2) a person who hurts someone you do love? How does this help us better understand the link between God’s love for us and the warnings of vengeance?
