The Blessed Hope! THE RESURRECTION

Again, our mission as the church is to be faithful, not just effective. One could argue that Jesus’s ministry wasn’t very effective. Sure, many people were healed, and some ended up following Him. But at the end of His life, His chief leader denied Him, His treasurer betrayed Him, His followers deserted Him, the crowds turned against Him, and His government wrongly convicted Him of treason and nailed Him to a cross. Viewed from our angle, Jesus’s entire ministry of peace was a colossal failure.

But the resurrection changed everything for Him. And the resurrection changed everything for us. We no longer view the world through the dim mist of justice and reward, but through the bright lens of resurrection, where suffering leads to glory and slaughtered lambs rule the earth. Therefore, even if we fail to bring down dictators, our rock-solid hope is that a God will take care of dictators in His own way, and He will carry out perfect vengeance in the end. God can use human agents to carry out His wrath on evil even today (Rom. 23:4), but nowhere in the New Testament does God use the church to be an agent of wrath. We are commanded unequivocally to love our enemies and trust that God will judge the wicked in His own timing.

(Preston Sprinkle, “Fight: A Christian Case for Nonviolence” (David C Cook: Colorado Springs, Colorado), 2013, p. 231).