Christ. Dead. For Now.

He is in the tomb. He is dead. From the creed, “He was crucified, died, and was buried. He descended into hell.”

The world today feels like Hell to a lot of Christians.

A few days before He died, Christ said, “Turn the other cheek,” and Christians want to argue with Him. He wasn’t saying not to use the legal system or defend one’s self. He was saying Christians should let him seek vengeance, not take their own retaliation.

This isn’t about war or the defense of a nation or the church. Christians want to overcomplicate turning the other cheek to justify it being so complicated that Christ could not have possibly meant it.

Christians do to “turn the other cheek” what many post-Christians do to passages about same-sex sexual relations in scripture — the Christians expend 5000 words to say “I want to punch the SOB back” and the pagan ones write multivolume series on hermeneutics and eisegesis instead of just saying, well, perhaps I should just say they want sex contrary to the way God intended.

Christ’s call to turn the other cheek is not a call for pacificism or to give up defending one’s self as some misunderstand it. It is not a call to sit back and not seek justice. But it is a call to abstain from retaliation — a human act and right we all understand. Christ, instead, says basically, “Let me be your vengeance.”

We’re just impatience and want to be the means of his vengeance. When someone attacks us, we want to attack back, not just defend ourselves, but go on offense against that person. We want an eye for an eye.

That whole idea is polluting our politics and pulling well-intentioned believers out of churches and into the streets with clenched fists and raised voices.

But why does Christ not want us to retaliate?

Here is what you miss, and let me bring in current events.

Instead of championing women, Nike and Anheuser-Busch have decided to champion yet another white guy engaged in performance art pretending to be a woman. The secular left is championing transgenderism and all the other progressive social ills of the day.

The world seems to be speeding up. Not only is it speeding up, but you have a whole lot of prominent Christians telling people in the pews to calm down. They’re doing that because they know God’s got this. But the Christian Twitterati are attacking the pastors telling congregants to calm down.

Put bluntly — while it is no call to surrender or to pacificism, you need to know that cultural insanity is going to advance and be dominant. The progressives, the liberal theologians, and the anti-Christian Hollywood set are going to look like they are winning.

It is an absolute act of mercy on God’s part, and you should internalize it, remember it, and listen to the pastors who tell you to calm down.

Barring some miraculous conversion, these people who you want to punch, retaliate against, or otherwise put righteously in their place will literally never have it better than they have it right now. God is being merciful. He will give them a few decades of a great life, and for all eternity they’ll have the memory of their good life now to compare to the life yet to come. Asaph captures this in Psalm 73.

3 For I was envious of the arrogant

when I saw the prosperity of the wicked.

4 For they have no pangs until death;

their bodies are fat and sleek.

5 They are not in trouble as others are;

they are not stricken like the rest of mankind.

6 Therefore pride is their necklace;

violence covers them as a garment.

The Holy Bible: English Standard Version (Ps 73:3–6). (2016). Crossway Bibles.

18 Truly you set them in slippery places;

you make them fall to ruin.

19 How they are destroyed in a moment,

swept away utterly by terrors!

20 Like a dream when one awakes,

O Lord, when you rouse yourself, you despise them as phantoms.

The Holy Bible: English Standard Version (Ps 73:18–20). (2016). Crossway Bibles.

27 For behold, those who are far from you shall perish;

you put an end to everyone who is unfaithful to you.

28 But for me it is good to be near God;

I have made the Lord God my refuge,

that I may tell of all your works.

The Holy Bible: English Standard Version (Ps 73:27–28). (2016). Crossway Bibles.

You and your rage and your unwillingness to love your neighbor and your desire to throw punch now and repent later — you’ve got 70, 80, maybe 90 years of putting up with this mess and a billion, trillion, years and more of a new Earth made pure, righteous, and just.

Jesus is telling you to let him seek retaliation for you because the retaliation he will provide is a retaliation you can’t even begin to wrap your head around. As I keep writing, God’s got this.

Today, Holy Saturday, we remember Christ revealing Himself unto the land of all the dead and showing all the generations back to Cain and Abel that yes, there is a Heaven, a Hell, a master plan, judgment, and eternity. We remember the world thinking they beat God, but Sunday’s coming.

Put even more bluntly — the world will one day burn, and I don’t mean global warming. Jesus did not stay dead. No one on this planet will. But some will be separated from a good eternity, and God is being merciful to those people right now. Don’t join those who will one day be exiled from God for eternity. Pity them.