It was Monday, December 1, 1997. About a dozen students were huddled to pray—as they did every morning—in the hallway outside the administration office at Heath High School in Paducah, Kentucky. Classes would start in a few minutes, so someone closed in prayer.

The final “amen” still hung in the air. Students had not yet begun to move away to their classes. Suddenly the sound of gunshots shattered the peace of the moment. A fourteen-year-old freshman had walked up to the group with a .22 caliber automatic pistol and was firing into the prayer circle, calmly shooting students one at a time.

When it was over, three students were dead and five others seriously wounded. The story made headlines for weeks. What was so astonishing was that by all accounts, the students in the prayer circle had done nothing to provoke the boy who did the shooting. In fact, several of them had previously befriended him. The secular media were at a loss to explain how anyone so young could commit such a heinous act of pure evil.

Another aspect of the story also caught the media’s eye—the amazing forgiveness immediately extended by the survivors and their loved ones. Many relatives of the victims were interviewed by the press in the days and weeks following the shooting. Despite the utter senselessness of the crime, no one spoke with bitterness or a desire for vengeance. Churches in Paducah, while ministering to the victims and their loved ones, also reached out to the shooter and his family. One of the injured girls was fifteen-year-old Melissa Jenkins. As she lay in the hospital less than a week after the shootings, fully aware that the damage to her spinal cord was so severe she would be a paraplegic for the rest of her life, she sent a message through a friend to the boy who had deliberately shot her: “Tell him I forgive him.”

How can someone who has been so grievously wounded forgive so freely and so quickly? Apart from Christ, it is well nigh impossible. “But we have the mind of Christ” (1 Corinthians 2:16). The Holy Spirit indwells and empowers us. Therefore, Christians are capable of supernatural acts of forgiveness.

One of the earliest examples of this sort of forgiveness is Stephen, the first martyr. While he was being stoned, with large rocks battering his body, breaking his bones, causing him to bleed and ultimately die—in the midst of all that trauma he found strength to pray for his killers. “Then falling on his knees, he cried out with a loud voice, ‘Lord, do not hold this sin against them!’ Having said this, he fell asleep” (Acts 7:60). Despite the violence of the moment, his death was so peaceful that Scripture portrays him as simply drifting into a tranquil slumber.

The natural tendency in such situations is to pray for vengeance. In fact, the death of the Old Testament prophet Zechariah makes an interesting contrast with that of Stephen. Like Stephen, Zechariah was stoned, but notice the marked difference in his dying prayer:

So they conspired against him and at the command of the king they stoned him to death in the court of the house of the Lord. Thus Joash the king did not remember the kindness which his father Jehoiada had shown him, but he murdered his son. And as he died he said, “May the Lord see and avenge!” (2 Chronicles 24:21–22).

We cannot fault Zechariah for praying for vengeance. He recognized, of course, that vengeance belonged to God, and he properly left the matter with God. His praying this way should not be regarded as a sin.

In fact, there’s a legitimate sense in which all martyrs are entitled to plead for vengeance against their persecutors. Revelation 6:10 gives us a look behind the curtains of the cosmic drama. There we learn that the perpetual cry of the martyrs of all ages is, “How long, O Lord, holy and true, will You refrain from judging and avenging our blood on those who dwell on the earth?”

There is certainly no sin in crying for justice like that. God will avenge His people, and when His vengeance is finally administered, no one will be able to complain that it is unjust. In fact, we will simply marvel at the long-suffering of God that restrained vengeance for so long.

But for now, in the bright light of the New Covenant, while the fullness of divine vengeance is restrained and the gospel is being proclaimed to the world, there is a higher cause than vengeance to plead for—forgiveness and reconciliation with those who persecute us. Jesus said, “love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you, pray for those who mistreat you” (Luke 6:27–28). Christ Himself gave us the example to follow when, as He died at the hands of evil men, He prayed for their forgiveness. Stephen obviously got the message.

It is natural, and even right, to want to see justice fulfilled and divine vengeance administered. But for the Christian there is another priority. Justice will come, but in the meantime our thoughts and actions toward others are to be driven by mercy. As Christians, we should be obsessed with forgiveness, not vengeance.

That said, justice does have a place in God’s plan, and that’s what we’ll see next time.

(Adapted from The Freedom and Power of Forgiveness)