As a digital missionary, I spend what might be an unhealthy amount of time in comment threads, asking Christians if their hateful diatribes from an account with “God First” in the bio is an effective evangelistic tool for growing God’s Kingdom in either the number of souls freed or helping to establish God’s kingdom in deeds. To their immense credit, most of the people I talk with rethink how they engage in the digital world as followers of the Jesus way. Occasionally, people will push back, such as one North Dakotan woman who, a few months ago, challenged my claim that if killers repented, they could go to heaven.
A frequent refrain of my theology is that Christianity is an offensive religion, although not for the reasons most people think. Many religions (although certainly not all) are merit based. If you’re a good person, good things will happen to you. Christianity makes the bold claim that if you’re a bad person, Christ’s blood was still shed for you.
Tonight, I made the latest post in my #SlowToShare campaign addressing claims from many Christians that the demonic nature of transgenderism (their words) led to the inevitable second shooting in which a gender diverse person went into a Christian school and committed an unthinkable act. The crux of their argument (helpfully shared in a concise meme of “trans killers” some of whom are misidentified) is that trans people keep shooting people. In the nonpartisan spirit of correcting misinformation in order to preserve our witness, the plot got lost. Predictably, given the climate of hostility towards transgender and gender diverse people in the United States at the moment, DMs and reactions came in from people upset at my “defense” of trans people in a moment of national mourning. I’ll be the first to admit that my reaction to instances of gun violence is atypical and calloused. I don’t know how it can be anything else given my history with gun violence. Regardless, there’s a reaction from many in times of tragedy, which is also perfectly understandable, of anger towards the killer and their family.
As I was submitting to silence in opposition to the anger and hurt at a Body of Christ who too often turns to anger and hate rose in my body, the Will Reagan/United Pursuit song “Take a Moment” came into my mind. This song is always a beautiful reminder to me that the pain and troubles of this world are nothing compared to the lightness and peace that come from surrendering to Jesus, and that Jesus’ ultimate authority supersedes the horrible and fleshy violence and tyranny of our current day. As I listened to the song a third time, lying in bed, controlling my breathing, I felt a line from a 2023 post of mine pop into my head: “In Luke’s account of the Gospel, Jesus is hoisted up on a cross, bleeding and beaten, when he may* have uttered the words, ‘Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing.’” I felt so burdened again with the knowledge that as Jesus hung bloodied and dying, he chose mercy instead of hatred. Why do we then, struggle in our humanness to do the same, even when the pain, though profound, is inflicted on a distant other? I thought of the woman I met in the mission field noted above again. Did I still think that killers, even killers of young, innocent, praying children, could have access to God’s eternal mercy and forgiveness if they accepted God into their heart?
Gut wrenchingly, I did.
That bowel-turning feeling is what I’m referring to when I say the Gospel of Jesus Christ is offensive. Where we see and feel a deep suffering, God calls us ever more to peace and mercy. How is this fair? For as long as I don’t think about myself and my prior sins, I’m comfortable asking this question. Then reality sets in and I realize, maybe I don’t want fairness.
Christianity is an offensive religion.
Worse yet, my spiritual revelations were hardly done for the evening, despite my tiredness (both physical and emotional). Because, after I rallied myself up about the unending, unstoppable love of God for God’s children (even the really, really, really bad ones), I remembered another passage in the Bible: Psalm 58: A Prayer for Vengeance. Whereas Jesus is hanging bloodied and merciful, David cries out for vengeance – including a plea for God to “break the teeth in their mouths (v. 6).”
This is one of those moments (of which there are unfortunately many) in the Christian life in which you have to lean in and study God’s words on more than just a surface level. How was I, and by extension we as the Church, supposed to accept Jesus’ mercy in one hand and David’s wrath in the other? How can God’s mercy and judgement coexist? And how might the Spirit be working in these revelations to provide guidance on navigating our habitual and yet freshly agonizing gun violence grief?
The Enduring Word Commentary specifies that in Psalm 58, David is addressing rulers and judges. This helps clarify the contrast between Jesus and David. Jesus is interceding on behalf of soldiers who are doing the violent bidding whereas David is attacking the rulers directly. Jesus certainly doesn’t shy away from rebuking authorities in his day so the two passages come into better alignment in context. But there’s still this question of if killers are redeemable and how evil functions in our broken world.
David doesn’t shy away from naming this evil as occurring “from the womb” (v. 3). This reiterates the classically and widely understood doctrine of original sin in which all people are born with the capacity and perhaps propensity for evil. David is also in the unique position of having wrestled very publicly with his sexual sin against Bathsheba and his subsequent attempt at hiding his sin by killing Bathsheba’s husband Uriah. This is summarized beautifully in The Enduring Word’s quoting of Kidner: “The description in verses 3ff. is close enough to what is quoted in Romans 3:10ff. to warn the reader that he faces a mirror, not only a portrait.”
In other words, when we face another’s sin, no matter how deprave, we can’t face it accurately and fully without realizing and acknowledging our own role in perpetuating sin on the earth through our heritage in Adam. Although our spirits are willing to do God’s goodness, our flesh gives in to the darkness of evil. Perhaps not that darkness or not quite that dark of darkness. But then again, all darkness, even dull darkness, cannot exist where there is light.
When we get to the (in my view) climax of the Psalm, David asking for teeth to be ripped out, The Enduring Word has another helpful insight. This stanza is less about physical harm coming to these corrupt rulers and more about the rulers being stripped of their power. In other words, their access to commit harms on a large, systemic level is what David asks to be taken away, not harm to come to them per say. Justice doesn’t always have to look bodily.
Finally, in this cry for justice, David ultimately submits the authority of and responsibility for justice to God, not to himself. The righteous rejoice because God carries out the punishment. The righteous do not rejoice in anticipation of punishment. God alone is responsible for weighing a person’s soul. God alone defines what is forgivable and not.
So then, let’s return to the present moment. We feel, deep in our bodies, grief and anger and weariness at the brokenness of the world. From those depths, do we cry for God to have God’s way? From those depths, do we cry for a stripping of power? Or, from those depths of our grief, do we demonize, condemn, and villainize? Do we tap into our collective ties to original sin and perpetuate more hatred, more violence, more destruction on the earth? And then, do we dare to think that our violent response to violence is somehow counted as righteousness simply because we’ve convinced ourselves that we are knowledgeable to know the width and depth and heights of God’s mercy?
I can already tell I’m being misunderstood. I’m not saying that all killers go to heaven. I’m not even saying that any do. All I’m saying is that even killers have access to the mercy and grace of God if God so chooses to dole it out. How we testify in our moments of anger and fear to a broken world matter more than we testify in our moments of joy. Do you testify to the Gospel of Jesus Christ or is your testimony to Jesus still a work in progress?
The eternal fate of killers is not in our hands. We are not the ones to decide. We cannot allow our grief be hijacked by the Devil but instead, in all things, we need to surrender to the God above it all, who goes before us and stands above us.
Keep our hearts soft, Lord Jesus, even and especially in the face of all that is hard and heavy. Keep us as your Light on a Hill in an increasingly darkening world anxious for your Good, hard News.
Bryce Van Vleet is the #1 selling author of Tired Pages and Before We All Die Let’s Have One Last Chat by the Fireside. He also hosts the podcast Death in Dakota, sells poetry art here, and masquerades as the spoken word artist Liihey. You can support him by clicking through blog posts or donating (scroll to the bottom of the page).
Living Beyond 
Leave a comment