Bradley Pierce: Vengeance Belongs to God, And He Has Appointed Ministers to Carry It Out

This article was first published on Bradley Pierce’s Substack.

One of the most commonly misunderstood passages in the New Testament is Jesus’s teaching in the Sermon on the Mount regarding “an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.”

The popular reading goes something like this: the Old Testament was harsh and retributive, but Jesus came along and replaced all of that with grace, love, and turning the other cheek. On this view, Jesus effectively overruled the Old Testament’s standard of justice and introduced an entirely new ethic.

But that reading is wrong. Jesus was not overriding the Old Testament. He was correcting a misapplication of it.

What Lex Talionis Actually Was

The principle of lex talionis — the law of retribution, “an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth” — appears in three places in the Mosaic Law: Exodus 21:24, Leviticus 24:20, and Deuteronomy 19:21. In every instance, the context is judicial.

These were instructions for judges and civil magistrates. The principle established proportional justice — the punishment must fit the crime, no more and no less.

For example, a judge could not impose a sentence of death for the crime of pickpocketing. Nor could he let a murderer walk free with a slap on the wrist. The punishment was to be commensurate with the offense.

This was never a command authorizing private citizens to exact personal revenge on their neighbors. It was a rule of law for the courts. It governed the civil administration of justice.

What Jesus Was Actually Correcting

By the time of Jesus’s ministry, the Pharisees had taken this judicial principle and twisted it into a justification for personal retaliation. If someone wronged you, they reasoned, the law of “eye for eye” gave you the right to pay them back in kind. They had taken a command meant for magistrates and turned it into a license for personal vengeance.

Jesus corrected this view in the Sermon on the Mount:

“You have heard that it was said, ‘An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.’ But I tell you not to resist an evil person. But whoever slaps you on your right cheek, turn the other to him also.” (Matthew 5:38–39, NKJV)

Notice what Jesus is doing. He is not saying that the principle of lex talionis was wrong. He is not abolishing the law He Himself gave through Moses. He is saying that you — the individual — are not the one authorized to enforce it.

When someone wrongs you personally, your calling is not to seek your own payback. Your calling is to absorb the blow, to bless those who curse you, and to overcome evil with good. The enforcement of proportional justice is not your job. It is the job of the civil authority.

Jesus is drawing a line between the personal response of the individual believer and the public justice that God has delegated to the civil magistrate. He is not softening the standard of justice. He is clarifying who administers it.

It is important to note, however, that none of this means Jesus is telling people they cannot exercise self-defense. The right to defend oneself and others against imminent danger — even with lethal force — is not the same thing as seeking personal vengeance. Vengeance is retribution after the fact, a settling of scores. Self-defense is the protection of life in the moment of threat.

Scripture nowhere forbids a man from protecting himself, his family, or his neighbor from an aggressor. To the contrary, Scripture expects good men to do exactly that. What Jesus forbids is the private pursuit of payback — the vigilante impulse to make someone pay for a wrong already suffered.

Paul Makes It Explicit: Romans 12 and 13

If there were any doubt about this reading of Jesus’s words, the apostle Paul eliminates it at the end of Romans 12 and the beginning of Romans 13. These chapters form a seamless argument, and they must be read together.

At the close of Romans 12, Paul writes:

“Beloved, do not avenge yourselves, but rather give place to wrath; for it is written, ‘Vengeance is Mine, I will repay,’ says the Lord.” (Romans 12:19, NKJV)

Paul is quoting Deuteronomy 32:35, from the Song of Moses. God declares that vengeance belongs to Him alone. He will repay. The individual believer must not take justice into his own hands.

But then Paul immediately continues, without a break in his argument, into Romans 13:

“Let every soul be subject to the governing authorities. For there is no authority except from God, and the authorities that exist are appointed by God... For he is God’s minister to you for good. But if you do evil, be afraid; for he does not bear the sword in vain; for he is God’s minister, an avenger to execute wrath on him who practices evil.” (Romans 13:1, 4, NKJV)

Paul’s logic is unmistakable. In chapter 12, he tells individuals not to not avenge ourselves, because vengeance belongs to God. In chapter 13, he tells us how God carries out that vengeance for civil offenses: through the civil magistrate.

The governing authority is God’s minister — and specifically a minister of vengeance, “an avenger to execute wrath.” The magistrate “bears the sword” not as a symbolic gesture, but as God’s ordained instrument of retributive justice against evildoers.

God’s Vengeance Through Human Instruments

This is the teaching that so many miss when they pit the Old Testament against the New, or when they imagine that Jesus replaced justice with mere niceness.

God has not abandoned justice. He has not rescinded the principle that wrongdoing deserves proportional punishment. What He has done is clarify the proper jurisdiction. The administration of retributive justice does not fall within the jurisdiction of the individual. It falls within the jurisdiction of the civil magistrate, who holds that authority as a delegation from God Himself.

The individual Christian is called to a personal ethic of mercy, patience, forgiveness, and love — even toward enemies. When someone wrongs you, you do not take matters into your own hands. You do not play vigilante. You seek justice, but you entrust the enforcement of it to the One who judges rightly.

And God does not leave justice unadministered in this world. He has appointed human agents — civil governments — to act as His ministers of wrath.

The authority the civil magistrate exercises is not his own; it is delegated to him by God. The sword he bears is not his own. It is God’s. The justice he administers is not arbitrary and capricious human justice. It is God’s justice, entrusted to civil officials for the maintenance of order and the punishment of evil.

There is, therefore, a proper role for men to carry out vengeance — but it is the civil government carrying it out on God’s behalf, as His duly appointed ministers, and not individuals carrying it out in a vigilante fashion to settle personal scores.

A Unified Biblical Ethic

Far from contradicting the Old Testament, Jesus and Paul affirm and deepen its teaching. The law of lex talionis stands.

Proportional justice remains God’s standard. What the New Testament restates and reinforces is what was already clear in the Old Testament but had been muddied and distorted by men: that standard is for the civil courts to enforce civil justice, not for private citizens to take it upon themselves.

The Christian who turns the other cheek is not denying justice. He is entrusting it to the right hands — first to God, and then, derivatively, to the civil magistrates God has ordained for exactly that purpose. And the civil magistrate who punishes the wrongdoer is not acting contrary to the spirit of Christ. He is fulfilling his God-given vocation as a minister of divine justice in a fallen world.

The Bible speaks with one voice on this matter, from Exodus to Deuteronomy to the Sermon on the Mount to Romans: vengeance belongs to God, and He will repay.

Eternal judgment He will carry out directly — every man will stand before God and give an account. Even temporally, God may act directly. But when it comes to the normative administration of criminal and civil justice in this present age, God carries out His vengeance through the civil government — the magistrates He has appointed and authorized for precisely that end.

They are His ministers, wielding His sword, executing His wrath on behalf of the victims of wrongdoing and as a restraint against the would-be evildoer. The individual Christian, meanwhile, is freed from the burden of seeking his own payback and called instead to pursue justice through God’s ordained channels — the civil magistrate — rather than taking retribution into his own hands.

He can trust that justice will be done: by God Himself in eternity, and hopefully also by His appointed ministers in the here and now.