In Romans 12.20, Paul writes,
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.
Whereas human vengeance is often motivated by hatred, God's vengeance is an act of love. Human vengeance is destructive, God's vengeance is creative. God's vengeance, while liberating the oppressed and healing the wounded, also brings restoration to the oppressors and liberates them from their acts of oppression. God's vengeance results in the new creation of all things. Thus Moltmann can write,
The 'Last Judgment' is not a terror… It is a source of endlessly consoling joy to know, not just that the murderers will not triumph over their victims, but that they cannot in eternity even remain the murderers of their victims.
That is why we are not to take vengeance into our own hands – we have profoundly misunderstood it and when we have taken it into our own hands cycles of violence, destruction and sin have only been perpetuated. This is why Paul goes on to say in Romans 12.21f,
“But if your enemy is hungry, feed him, and if he is thirsty, give him a drink; for in doing so you will heap burning coals on his head.” Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good.
Evil is not overcome through human instruments of punishment and subjugation. Evil is overcome through the doing of the good, through a willingness to continue to suffer, through a refusal to hate and through the embrace of love. By living in such a way we become a witness to the final restoration and reconciliation of all things in Jesus. After all, Jesus is the Judge. Yet, as Hans Urs Von Balthazar says, Jesus crucified is the revelation of the Judge who puts himself on the side of the those who would damn themselves.
Let us leave vengeance to God. For in the consummation of the kingdom we just might discover that vengeance looks very little like the ways we have imagined it. Leaving vengeance to God is not waiting for those who have caused us suffering to finally be subjected to suffering. Rather leaving vengeance to God is waiting in hope for all to be liberated from brokenness, pain, and sorrow.

For Francis [of Assisi] religion was not a thing like a theory but a thing like a love affair.
– G.K. Chesterton
And that's just what is lacking. Over and over I see Christians who relate to God like they relate to an idea. I see Christians who know God like they know math, physics, philosophy or any other area of knowledge. I see Christians who pray with rhetorical devices and formulas. What I rarely see are Christians who know God like they know a person. Christians who talk with God not just to or at God.
Increasingly I have begun to think that this is the problem that lies at the very root of the plethora of problems that exist within North American Christianity today. Ultimately, at the bottom of it all, North American Christians miss the mark because they've never truly known God. Despite all their talk about “personal relationship with Jesus” I wonder how many of them have actually met him.
But Francis was right – true religion is a love affair. It's passionate, it's intimate, it's genuinely knowing and being known. Without that intimacy, without that very real personal relationship, Christianity is bound to become twisted into perversion or wither into nothingness.
It is this relationship that lies at the heart of Christian mysticism. That's why C. Ringma can say that Christians in the West in the 21st-century will become mystics or cease being Christians. This is what Kierkegaard never grasped. “Mystics,” he said, “have not the patience to wait for the revelation of God.” Contra-Kierkegaard mystics are not those who give up on understanding. Rather they are those who are rooted in love relationship and are so grounded in trusting the one they love that they do not need a complete answer to everything. They possess the understanding that only intimacy grants. Kierkegaard would reduce God to a proposition. Of course, this only makes sense as relationships – interactions between the self and the other – are increasingly impossible within Kierkegaard's existentialist framework.
This is why I am also increasingly thinking that Christians need to stop trying so hard. Christians are involved in a mass of activities seeking to transform the world, bring the kingdom of God, build the church, etc., etc., etc. But, outside of genuine relationship, these activities will be futile, like matches struck in a midnight thunderstorm. A flash of light, the smell of smoke, then darkness and rain, darkness and rain, darkness and rain.
The first thing Christians should do is cry out to God. Cry out for a genuine encounter, cry out for God's in-breaking into their lives and into the world. Until God comes everything is useless. Yet Christianity is marked by the guarantee of God's coming. God will come. God is not just the God of the past or the God of the future. God is the God of all of history, and that includes the present.
And when God does come, when God breaks in and transforms our present we will realise then that God is, after all, our Lover.

The authors of the Left Behind series turn eschatology into scatology. That is to say: instead of talking about the consummation of the kingdom and the new creation of all things they just end up talking a lot of shit.

I've often said that I feel like Jesus' disciples around the time of Peter's confession. Yes, I get that Jesus is the Messiah but I'm still unpacking what that means. It's like the miracle that immediately precedes that account. Jesus heals the blind man the first time and he only sees people “like trees walking around”. So Jesus heals him a second time so that the blind man can see properly. Well, I've often said I feel like I'm at the stage of seeing walking trees.
However, I stumbled on another way of looking at things.
I was reading the story where Jesus is speaking in a house and a paralysed man is lowered down (through the roof… poor home-owner!) in front of him. Jesus looks at the man and says, “Take heart, your sins are forgiven.” Of course everybody is astounded that he would presume to forgive sins and so he asks, “What is easier to say, 'Your sins are forgiven' or 'rise up and walk'?” Yet Jesus does demonstrate his authority to forgive sins by healing the paralysed man.
I've been thinking of myself as that paralytic. I feel that I've heard the first affirmation, yes, my sins are forgiven. Not simply in some other-worldly sense of a ticket out of hell, but in the sense that I have been restored into right relationship with God. Yet I'm still awaiting the second part, “take up your mat and walk”. I'm still figuring out how this right relationship with God translates into right relationship with others in the contemporary context.
Yet this is a more encouraging model than the first one. To begin with there is a sense of joy attached – a relationship has been restored. There is also a sense of assurance. The second statement will follow the first. In a sense this way of looking at things provides more freedom along the way. It is liberating because ultimately it is awaiting God's action, the in-breaking of God's creative Word. It allows me to recognise where I am paralysed, and to be okay with my impotence to overcome that paralysis. After all, it's only a temporary thing. I will continue to cry to God and rest in the assurance that one day I will discover myself walking. Not only walking but dancing.

“The definition of religion that I think is the most accurate is that religion is ritual designed to promote relationship.”
– CM
I think this definition is beneficial for a couple reasons. On one hand it counteracts those who seek to establish a (false) dichotomy between religion and relationship. It's as if religion has become a bad word these days. “No, I'm not into religion, I'm into relationship.” Christians have often been too hasty to throw away their language for the sake of maintaining the status quo. This definition begins to redeem the word religion and bring it back to a biblical definition, as James says, “Pure and undefiled religion in the sight of our God and Father is this: to visit orphans and widows in their distress”.
On the other hand this definition is useful because it does not discard ritual in the pursuit of relationship. In engaging in the Christian religion there are particular Christian rituals passed down by Scripture and tradition (baptism and the Eucharist being the most prominent). This definition does not simply allow the person in pursuit of relationship to discard all rituals or traditions but rather it affirms ritual because such rituals reveal the particular relationship that the God of Christianity desires to have with believers. These are the ways in which God seeks relationship with his people, and in these ways unique things are revealed about character of the Christian God.
In essence this definition seeks to reveal the mutual indwelling of ritual and relationship. It reveals why ritual and relationship must go hand-in-hand if one is to fall within the Christian tradition.