I was reading in the book of Deuteronomy today, and came across this verse:
“Your eye shall not pity. It shall be life for life, eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot.” – Deuteronomy 19:21
This can sound like God is instructing Israel to be vengeful, to take what is theirs, and to hate their enemies – but that couldn’t be further from the truth. If you read all of chapter 19, God has beautifully instructed his people to care deeply for justice in the midst of Israel. Out of care for individuals who may have accidentally taken someone else’s life, committing involuntary manslaughter, cities of refuge are set up, where a man can flee and be safeguarded against the family of the person who had been killed. In fact, God is explicit in saying in v. 6 that such a man “does not deserve to die,” which is beautiful to read, given that, because of sin, according to God’s Word, the wages of sin is death. You might think that God would say, ‘well, everyone deserves to die anyway.’ God so cares about us and our lives that he not only made a way for our sin to be dealt with, and for us to find full forgiveness and eternal life despite our sinful nature – he also cares about day-to-day justice and mercy in the wake of civic events.
This instruction about ‘eye for an eye, tooth for tooth,’ is in fact a restriction against vengeance. It’s to keep individuals from seeking their ‘pound of flesh’ when they’ve been treated badly. And this is only given when witnesses have confirmed that atrocity and full justice has been found – then the perpetrator, not the innocent manslayer, but one who hates and murders, for example, when found to be guilty, is killed in an ‘eye for an eye’ kind of justice. There is good reason here, in light of general equity from the law of Israel, to keep the death penalty in our judicial systems. But of course this should only be done, according to the same principles of justice, when there is clear and obvious evidence to convict. Based on the very same passage in Deuteronomy, God would hate that someone could be convicted wrongly and either sit in jail or be killed for a crime they did not commit. Such occurrences are tragedies of the highest degree, and God cares deeply about that.
If you’ve seen the great Leo DiCaprio movie “The Revenant,” you see the deep emptiness of vengeance. Vengeance is only for the Lord to dole out (Romans 12:19), because only he will do so with the purest of hearts and with absolute justice. In the movie, which was made by a devout Catholic filmmaker, the main character achieves vengeance, and it is nothing like he thought it would be. But also knowing that our God will do justice on evildoers gives us confidence that we don’t need to exact revenge in the present – he will do justice, and that is good news. At the cross is where we see justice and mercy meet. He did deal with our sin justly, he put them on his Son – he beared the weight of sin (Is. 53), but also he gave us pardon completely, his mercy. Know that our Lord sees everything that goes on in the world right now, and cares deeply about it. The promises to protect his people eternally will never be taken from you, no matter what bad things happen, so you can have that confidence. But he will also deal with injustice so that we don’t have to take up the sword against every wrong that comes our way. We can live in peace. it’s the way of the Lord, and the way he has always operated.