Deflecting Offenses

Like Pilgrim, in the classic story of Pilgrim’s Progress, our own journey toward the celestial city often involves trouble, danger, traps, distractions, enemies, and woundedness to body and soul. It is not difficult to accumulate in our mind during our earthly journey, a list of wrongs actually committed, or perceived to be committed against us by others. Those ‘others’ make up a long list. Examples may be a spouse, neighbor, co-worker, parent, teenaged or adult child, teacher, political opponent, and even God. People will speak, write, text, etc. to us or about us to others words that are offensive, painful, and perceived as unfair and maybe not even true. Sometimes the offense is what we perceive others failed to do for us [e.g. God]. Over time these offenses, whether real or perceived, get put into the ‘offense compacter’ of our mind, where they sit, ferment and wait for some triggering event by which they can then be [sometimes violently] released/expelled from us via a raging verbal retaliatory rant, sometimes via destructive physical action, and sometimes in more subtle ways of giving others the ‘cold shoulder’. ‘Payback time’ is not a ‘right’ to be claimed by a Christ follower. Some tribal or culture groups consider it a duty to exercise revenge/retaliation against enemies or someone who has harmed them. But retaliation is not to be on the ‘to do’ list of a bondservant of Christ: “Never pay back evil for evil to anyone…Never take your own revenge, beloved but leave room for the wrath of God, for it is written, ‘Vengeance is mine, I will repay, says the Lord.” [Rom 12: 17,19].

However, for us to agree that we are not to retaliate against those who wrong or offend us does not automatically mean that we don’t continue to accumulate grievances in our mind, where they are then able to continue their acidic decomposing of our soul. The older we get, the greater the risk to us of our ‘compactor’ getting completely full, souring and embittering our character.

In I Corinthians 13:4-8 the Apostle Paul lists several components of mature biblical love, one of them being this: [love] does not take into account a wrong suffered‘. Other translations will render this phrase as: ‘it keeps no record of wrongs‘ [NIV]; ‘it takes no account of the evil done to it-it pays no attention to a suffered wrong’ [Amp. Bible]; ‘it is not irritable and it keeps no record of being wronged‘ [NLT]. To ‘not take into account’ would appear to mean that we don’t record on a mental ledger the offense, i.e. we don’t ‘keep track’, and thus don’t accumulate those offenses against us by that person, and by implication, any person. This would mean that we simply deflect the offense, not allowing the offense to be ‘recorded’ on our mental ‘offenses ledger’, and thus not permitting them to accumulate. In the same verse, Paul says that ‘love is not provoked’ followed by the phrase, ‘does not take into account a wrong suffered”. These phrases seemed to have a connected meaning i.e. if I pre-determine to not ‘mentally record’ offenses of others, I am far less likely to be provoked in the first place.

The scriptural principle of ‘overlooking’ an offense seems to express the same idea [‘love covers a multitude of sins’ I Pet 4:8]. Deflecting, i.e. turning away, causing to bounce off, causing to glance off, or ricochet by means of our shield of faith, those hostile, unkind communications aimed at us [Ephesians 6:16] is based upon our confidence in God’s watch care-His awareness of all that is happening to us, and our awareness of His awareness. It is also based upon our reminding ourselves of all that we have been forgiven by God, and His call upon our lives to ‘be kind to one another, tender-hearted, forgiving each other, just as God in Christ also has forgiven you’ [Eph 4:32]. Reminding ourselves of truths like these will help strengthen our resistance to the temptation to either immediately retaliate, or ‘record’ and accumulate those offenses in our mind. As Peter reminds us: “…since Christ also suffered for you, leaving you an example for you to follow in His steps….and while being reviled, He did not revile in return; while suffering, He uttered no threats, but kept entrusting Himself to Him who judges righteously” [I Pet 2: 21,23]. I am not naively suggesting we fail to take note of the verbal threats or offenses of others [see Acts 4:29] or that we are so stoic that we fail to feel and recognize the emotional pain caused by the offenses, but instead, that we seek to avoid ‘recording‘ and accumulating offences in our mind which we may later use as ammunition to retaliate one way or another- a common form of behavioral conflict in marriages.

It would seem then that a maturing Christ follower would not only seek to grow to increasingly abandon the urge to retaliate when wronged, but would actually ‘take every thought captive’ [II Cor 10:5] and thereby seek to avoid allowing the wrong to be stored [recorded] in the ledger of our mind, which would otherwise become a source of a poisoning of our soul and character. Instead, we learn to more and more deflect offenses, bounce them off via our shield of faith and our confidence in God’s care and forgiveness of us, thereby slowly morphing into the kind of remarkable person our Lord has intended for us to become.

Do you sometimes practice verbal, written, or some form of ‘cold shoulder’ retaliation? Or are you ‘just’ silently recording, storing, and accumulating offenses? Are the offenses of others getting easily past your shield of faith? Is your grievance accumulator getting really full? Does your attempt to suppress your retaliatory spirit fail and you break out in angry outbursts or verbally counterpunch, or overstate your case in defense of yourself? Do you retaliate against others in subtle ways e.g. sarcastic replies, withholding friendliness or affection esp. to a spouse, failing to offer help to someone in need who has previously offended you? Have you become a careful ‘bookkeeper’ of offenses done against you? Isn’t it time to run that ledger through the shredder?

CJS