The Boy Who Watched His Mother Die
Eren Yeager was a child when the wall came down. He watched a Titan lift his mother out of the rubble of their house and eat her while he was carried away screaming. Everything that follows in his life proceeds from that afternoon. He does not become a soldier out of ambition or duty. He becomes a soldier because he has seen something that should not exist doing something that should not be permitted, and he wants it erased from the earth. “I’ll kill them all,” he says. “Every last one.”
(not me having violent or murderous intent towards anybody I’m talking about the anger factor, vengeance belongs to God not me.)
Such is the same when I think of my mother on her last days she will be devoured by death taken from me just like eren and there’s nothing I can do which comes for us all namely due to sin and Lucifer our fall in
The garden death entered the world and such is the object of my rage and tears at the devil in that day not at God it was never meant to be this way. Whenever I recall these things, my family passing away or possible friends there is no comfort and I’m beside myself or if any of them end up in hell and die in their sins
And here is the thing that makes the story worth telling: at that moment, he is right. His hatred is not a character flaw. It is the correct response of a moral creature to genuine atrocity. A boy who watched that and felt nothing would be the monster. The rage is evidence that something in him is working properly. The story does not begin with a villain; it begins with a witness.
I know that hatred. I want to be precise about what I mean, because the word gets used carelessly and I do not use it carelessly.
There is exactly one category of human being I hate: the false minister. The wolf in sheep’s clothing. The man who stands in the pulpit with the name of Christ in his mouth and uses the trust that name buys him to prey on children, to manipulate the vulnerable, to feed himself on the flock. The pedophile with a Bible. The hypocrite who knew better, who had the key in his hand, and who used it to lock the door instead of open it.
I do not hate the world. I do not hate unbelievers. I have more hope for the man who never entered a church door nor played with religion they are cold like Jesus said rather than for these lukewarm hypocrites What I hate is the specific evil of a man who takes the only medicine a wounded soul has and poisons it — who makes the very word father unusable for someone, who ensures that a person who needed God most will now flinch every time they hear His name. That is not one sin among others. That is arson in a hospital.
And my hatred toward them has two hands, and I want to name both honestly.
The first hand is a light. My way of “wiping them out” — my Rumbling, if you want to call it that — is to be a light. To show people the actual Christ, the real one, the one behind the counterfeit these men sold them. To go to the people they traumatized and love them, sit with them, and tell them the truth: that what was done to you was not God. That the God who was used as the weapon is not the God who is. Every person who was driven from the faith by one of these men and who finds their way back is a work of theirs undone. That is how you defeat a false shepherd. Not with a sword. With a true one.
The second hand is a prayer, and it is not gentle. I pray, on the authority God Himself has given the psalmists, that He will destroy these men. That He will repay them in full and without mercy in hell for every soul they wounded, every child they touched, every conscience they crushed under a law they never kept themselves. I pray what the Pharisees earned: their blood be on their heads. I do not soften it and I will not pretend to. The Bible does not soften it either. Their eternal consequences torments in the rotting demonic flames of hell I won’t pity them worth a penny that’s going out out value being discontinued, like God said in Ezekiel they will cry out to me and I won’t hear them. Now you want mercy when you were abusing children and manipulating people with the scriptures turning people away and painting a picture or God falsely all while you “preached”. Yes your miserable soul will suffer and be consumed day and night not “eternally destroyed” but the vessel being destroyed rebuilt and destroyed for all eternity and you will have no rest and your company will be demons and other lost humanity, wailing and screaming but you won’t be heard. The blood of your abusers cries out and now it has come and demands Justice, since you have not turned from your evil ways, nobody will pity you but yourself and in the new heaven and earth nobody will even remember you existed.
In a different life somewhere in my heart, I want God to enact justice now to wipe out all of these false ministers from the Earth he knows the hearts of men that will repent the fake from the real the wheat from the Chaff I don’t hate them as human bearers of God nor out of person of vengeance, which is not mine to repay but Gods. But if God could just do a generational, reset and nuke these types of men and false ministers. Raising up a new generation.
GOD IF YOU WILL SAVE MY LOSY FRIENDS AND FAMILY EVEN IF IT COSTS ME MY LIFE FATHER THEY KNOW NOT WHAT THEY DO.
And I want to say this plainly, without ambiguity, because words like these get misread: I have no violent intent toward any person. Not one. Judgment belongs to God and to no one else, and that is exactly the point of praying it — I am handing the fire to the only hands clean enough to hold it. My task is the gospel. His task is the reckoning. He has kept the harder half for Himself.
That distinction is the whole subject of this piece, because it is also the exact place where Eren Yeager was destroyed — and where I do not intend to follow him.
Psalm 139: The Imprecation Bracketed by Omniscience and Self-Examination
Psalm 139 is the great psalm of God’s omniscience (vv. 1–6: “thou hast searched me, and known me”), omnipresence (vv. 7–12: “whither shall I flee from thy presence?”), and creative sovereignty (vv. 13–18: “I am fearfully and wonderfully made”). Then, without transition, verse 19: “Surely thou wilt slay the wicked, O God: depart from me therefore, ye bloody men.” The turn is abrupt but not random. Alexander Maclaren observed that the sudden shift to prayer is “natural” precisely because the preceding meditation on the unfathomable God drives the psalmist to align himself, out loud, with that God’s cause.
Verse 22 reads śin’ētîm taklît śin’āh — “I hate them [with] the completeness/consummation of hatred.” The root is śānēʾ (to hate). The key word is taklît, a feminine noun from kālāh, meaning “completion, perfection, extremity, consummation.” The KJV’s “perfect hatred” is thus not “hatred without moral flaw” but “hatred brought to its full extent” — hatred that is entire, undivided, without any secret sympathy for the evil in view. Barnes glosses it: “With no approval whatever of their conduct; with no sympathy for the evil they do; with no words of apology for their sinful acts; with entire disapprobation.” Crucially, Hebrew śānēʾ in covenant contexts denotes loyalty-orientation — to “hate” God’s enemies is to refuse alliance with what God opposes, not necessarily to feel personal malice. In this same context the psalmist frames it entirely God-ward: “Do not I hate them, O LORD, that hate thee?” (v. 21). The offense is against God’s honor, not David’s amour-propre.
Calvin insists the hatred is legitimate only as zeal for God’s glory and not as private grievance. On vv. 19–24 he writes that David’s example teaches us “to rise with a lofty and bold spirit above all regard to the enmity of the wicked, when the question concerns the honor of God,” and he laments that “the only thing which incites us to contention, strife, and war, is a desire to avenge our private wrongs; none is affected when the majesty of God is outraged.” Calvin then reads verses 23–24 as David’s proof of integrity: “In declaring his hatred of those who despised God, he virtually asserts thereby his own integrity, not as being free from all sin, but as being devoted to godliness.” Note Calvin’s caution elsewhere (on Psalm 69): before anyone applies David’s imprecations to himself, he must reckon that David held a divinely appointed royal-prophetic office, and “whether the same zeal which was in him reigns also in us,” rather than “an impulse of the flesh.”
The decisive point: the self-examination is not a pious add-on but the governing frame. Having declared his hatred, David does not rest in it; he exposes it to the searching God of verses 1–6 — the God from whom no thought is hidden. “Search me, O God, and know my heart: try me, and know my thoughts: and see if there be any wicked way in me” (vv. 23–24). The Hebrew imperatives ḥoqrēnî (“search me thoroughly”) and bĕḥānēnî (“test/assay me,” a metallurgical term for refining metal) are the same verbs used of God’s action in verse 1. David is asking God to run the same omniscient scan over his hatred that verse 1 said God runs over his whole life. The imprecation is therefore quarantined: it is offered, and then instantly submitted for inspection, so that any strand of it that is a wicked way may be found and purged. The man who prays verse 22 rightly is the man who cannot pray it without also praying verse 23.
The Imprecatory Psalms: Four Approaches and the Reformed Verdict
Scholars count anywhere from 14 to 35 psalms with imprecatory content depending on the definition. The classic exemplars are Psalms 5, 10, 35, 58, 69, 83, 109, and 137. There are four major interpretive approaches.
The “sub-Christian/superseded” view. These prayers reflect an inferior Old Covenant ethic incompatible with “love your enemies.” C. S. Lewis (Reflections on the Psalms, 1958) is the famous representative. Lewis calls the cursings “terrible” and “contemptible,” “devilish,” and warns we must not “for one moment… yield to the idea that, because it comes in the Bible, all this vindictive hatred must somehow be good and pious.” Yet Lewis is more subtle than a flat dismissal: he says “if the Jews cursed more bitterly than the Pagans this was, I think, at least in part because they took right and wrong more seriously,” and “the ferocious parts of the Psalms serve as a reminder that there is in the world such a thing as wickedness and that it (if not its perpetrators) is hateful to God.” He treats them as an object lesson in what injustice does to victims: “Take from a man his freedom or his goods and you may have taken his innocence, almost his humanity, as well.” The Reformed critics answer that Lewis is wrong to bar the imprecatory sentiment from Christian prayer, since every time he prayed “Thy kingdom come” he was praying for the very in-breaking of divine justice these psalms request.
The prophetic/messianic view. The curses are not personal wishes but prophetic announcements of divine judgment, and many are quoted messianically in the New Testament (Ps 69:25 and 109:8 applied to Judas in Acts 1:20; Ps 69:22–23 in Rom 11:9–10). Augustine is the fountainhead: in Reply to Faustus he states, “The curses of prophecy are not hostile imprecations, but announcements of coming judgment. Hostile imprecations are forbidden, for it is said, ‘Bless, and curse not.'” Because David is called “a prophet” (Acts 2:30; 4:25), the imprecations carry prophetic authority rather than private vindictiveness. Calvin and Spurgeon also lean this direction.
The covenantal-legal view. The psalmist invokes God’s own covenant sanctions — the curses of Deuteronomy 27–30 — asking God to be true to His word. The pray-er is not inventing punishments but appealing to what God has already sworn against the covenant-breaker. Erich Zenger notes these are poetic prayers, which “distinguishes them from insistent complaint and propagandistic rhetoric.”
The “hand vengeance to God” view. This is the pastorally decisive reading, worked out most fully by Dietrich Bonhoeffer (Prayerbook of the Bible, 1940) and contemporary Reformed scholars John N. Day and Alex Luc. Its logic: the enemies in view are “enemies of the cause of God, who lay hands on us for the sake of God. It is therefore nowhere a matter of personal conflict.” The one who prays “must dismiss from his own mind all thought of personal revenge… otherwise, the vengeance would not be seriously commanded from God.” Only the innocent can leave vengeance to God. And then Bonhoeffer’s Christological climax: “God’s vengeance did not strike the sinners but the one sinless man who stood in the sinners’ place, namely God’s own Son. Jesus Christ bore the wrath of God, for the execution of which the psalm prays.” He stilled that wrath and prayed “Father, forgive them.” Therefore “the imprecatory psalm leads to the cross of Jesus and to the love of God which forgives enemies. I cannot forgive the enemies of God out of my own resources. Only the crucified Christ can, and I through him.”
Zenger adds the essential corrective that these psalms are not gratuitous violence but the “passionate lament, petition, and desires” of victims who refuse to lie about the reality of evil — and who, by voicing their rage to God rather than acting it out, confront us with our own capacity for violence. This is exactly the psychological function moral-injury clinicians describe.
The synthesis: the imprecatory psalm is the divinely authorized container for exactly the emotion I have described above. It is the God-given alternative to both repression (pretending you are not angry, which is a lie and a lid over grief) and vengeance (taking the sword, which is Eren’s road). You pray the fire out of your own hands and into God’s.
The Woes, the False Shepherds, and Greater Judgment for Greater Light
Matthew 23 contains seven woes against “scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites.” The Greek hypokritēs means literally “actor,” one playing a part. The catalog: “blind guides” (vv. 16, 24), “whited sepulchres… full of dead men’s bones” (v. 27), “serpents, generation of vipers, how can ye escape the damnation of hell?” (v. 33). The gravest woe is verse 13: “ye shut up the kingdom of heaven against men: for ye neither go in yourselves, neither suffer ye them that are entering to go in.” The image, rooted in the rabbinic “key of knowledge,” is of religious leaders who were given the key to open the door and instead lock it against the very people seeking to enter — the precise sin of the abusive minister who stands between the wounded and Christ. It is bad enough not to enter heaven yourself; it is far worse to bar others.
Matthew 18:6 — the millstone. “But whoso shall offend [Greek skandalizō, cause to stumble] one of these little ones which believe in me, it were better for him that a millstone were hanged about his neck, and that he were drowned in the depth of the sea.” The millstone in view is the large mylos onikos turned by a donkey, not a hand-mill — a deliberate image of inescapable, crushing judgment. Drowning was a punishment rarely used in Israel, marking it as especially horrific. The verse establishes that causing a believer to stumble incurs a judgment so severe that violent death would be preferable.
Ezekiel 34 and Jeremiah 23 — the false shepherds. Ezekiel 34 is the most famous denunciation of bad shepherds in the Bible. “Woe be to the shepherds of Israel that do feed themselves! should not the shepherds feed the flocks? Ye eat the fat, and ye clothe you with the wool… but ye feed not the flock. The diseased have ye not strengthened, neither have ye healed that which was sick… but with force and with cruelty have ye ruled them” (vv. 2–4). God’s response is twofold, and it is the theological heart of the entire vocation. First: “Behold, I am against the shepherds; and I will require my flock at their hand” (v. 10) — God Himself will hold the abusers accountable. Second: “I, even I, will both search my sheep, and seek them out” (v. 11), and “I will set up one shepherd over them… even my servant David” (v. 23). The remedy for false shepherds is not that the sheep become vigilantes but that the True Shepherd comes and feeds them. Jeremiah 23:1 sounds the same note: “Woe be unto the pastors that destroy and scatter the sheep of my pasture!” Jude and 2 Peter 2 extend this to false teachers “for whom the mist of darkness is reserved for ever.”
Luke 12:47–48 and the doctrine of greater responsibility. “And that servant, which knew his lord’s will, and prepared not himself, neither did according to his will, shall be beaten with many stripes. But he that knew not… shall be beaten with few stripes. For unto whomsoever much is given, of him shall be much required.” This is the clearest statement that culpability scales with knowledge, echoing Ezekiel’s watchman commission. It stands behind James 3:1: “My brethren, be not many masters [teachers], knowing that we shall receive the greater condemnation.” The teacher, the one with the key, the one who knew — these face the stricter reckoning. This is not speculation; it is the explicit teaching of Christ and His apostle. The abusive minister is the servant who knew his master’s will.
The tradition of degrees of punishment. Reformed and pre-Reformation theology affirms real degrees of torment proportioned to guilt. Aquinas (Summa Theologiae, Supplement, Q. 99): “the more grievously a person sins the more grievously is he punished,” and “mortal sins unequal in gravity will receive a punishment unequal in intensity but equal in duration.” Jonathan Edwards (“The Justice of God in the Damnation of Sinners,” 1734): “Every crime or fault deserves a greater or less punishment, in proportion as the crime itself is greater or less… so much the greater the fault, so much the greater is the punishment deserved.” And on light: “A crime is more or less heinous, according as we are under greater or less obligations to the contrary.” Greater light means greater obligation means greater guilt. Thomas Watson: “As there are degrees of torment in hell, so of glory in heaven.” Watson explicitly says those who lead others into sin “shall have a hotter place in hell,” and “it makes the sin greater to sin against an enlightened conscience.”
All of this vindicates the moral reality of the anger. God is not neutral about what was done. The abuser’s judgment is real, proportioned, and stricter than the unevangelized person’s. But — and this is where scrupulosity must be guarded against — the same logic that establishes degrees of guilt must never be turned into a verdict on any particular living soul. The doctrine describes God’s justice; it does not license your certainty.
The Psychology of Righteous Anger in Survivors of Spiritual Abuse
Moral injury. Coined by psychiatrist Jonathan Shay (Achilles in Vietnam, 1994) and developed by Brett Litz and colleagues, moral injury is “the lasting psychological, biological, spiritual, behavioral, and social impact of perpetrating, failing to prevent, or bearing witness to acts that transgress deeply held moral beliefs and expectations.” Shay’s own definition has three components: “Moral injury is present when (i) there has been a betrayal of what is morally right, (ii) by someone who holds legitimate authority and (iii) in a high-stakes situation.” This is a near-perfect description of clergy abuse: betrayal of what is morally right, by a person holding the most legitimate — indeed divinely-claimed — authority, in the highest-stakes situation imaginable, the soul’s relation to God. Moral injury’s symptoms are guilt, shame, loss of trust in others and institutions, loss of meaning, difficulty forgiving, and struggles with religious or spiritual faith.
Betrayal trauma and institutional betrayal. Jennifer Freyd’s betrayal trauma theory holds that trauma is intensified when “the people or institutions on which a person depends for survival violate that person in a significant way.” Her extension, institutional betrayal, is defined as “wrongdoings perpetrated by an institution upon individuals dependent on that institution, including failure to prevent or respond supportively to wrongdoings by individuals committed within the context of the institution.” Religious trauma is a paradigm case: the survivor didn’t just lose a community — they lost their entire worldview. And often the abuser isn’t just external. The harmful beliefs are inside your head. You’ve internalized the voice that condemns you.
Anger as an intact moral compass. The clinical consensus is that anger toward one’s abuser is usually healthy. As Gabor Maté puts it, “anger in its healthy form is a boundary defense.” Survivors need anger; it is both an invaluable guide and a vital source of resolve, and the cultural pressure to “let it go” or “forgive and forget” is misguided, even immoral. Anger frequently indicates that the moral faculty survived the abuse intact — that you still know evil is evil.
The distortion is not the anger itself but two specific turns. The first is rumination and vengeance ideation: research links vengefulness to rumination, in which “vengeful people ruminate on the injustices and harm they have suffered to keep themselves focused on the goal of ‘balancing the scales,’ ‘teaching the offender a lesson,’ or ‘saving face.'” This is anger metastasizing from a boundary-signal into a fixed program. The tell is the shift from “this was wrong” to a looping rehearsal aimed at teaching the offender a lesson. The second is dehumanization: watch for dehumanizing language, labelling, and discounting of people used to justify aggression. This is the psychological hinge that divides righteous indignation from the Eren trajectory.
Hating the act versus dehumanizing the person. Hating what was done, and the office abused, keeps the moral object outside you and preserves your own humanity; it is protective. Dehumanizing the person — reclassifying them as vermin, “monkeys,” “devils” — corrodes the hater, because it requires you to suppress the very empathy that made the original wound painful. Contempt is the acid that, poured on your enemy, dissolves your own vessel.
Anger as a lid over grief. The anger is often protective — it’s easier to feel righteous rage than to feel the profound grief underneath. Beneath the fury at the abusers is very often the grief of having given yourself to something that didn’t deserve you, and the grief over friends who were destroyed. Anger is loud; grief is the deeper, quieter, more dangerous-feeling water. Part of healing is letting the anger lower enough to let the grief up.
How scrupulosity complicates all of this. Scrupulosity, religious OCD, is defined by intrusive thoughts about moral or religious ideas, pathological feelings of guilt, and compulsions which attempt to mitigate such thoughts. Its cognitive signature includes intolerance of uncertainty — sufferers need to know absolutely that they are morally or religiously in the right because they believe the consequences, such as eternal damnation, will be severe if they are wrong — plus emotional reasoning (“if I feel something, it must be true, regardless of the evidence”) and all-or-nothing thinking.
For the scrupulous survivor, righteous anger becomes a trap in a specific way: the OCD inverts the condemnation inward. The very anger that is a healthy sign of an intact conscience gets reclassified by the disorder as evidence of one’s own damnation — if I feel this hatred, I must be a hater, and haters are murderers (1 John 3:15), so I am reprobate. The emotional-reasoning error is the engine. Luther, Bunyan, and Thérèse of Lisieux are all thought to have suffered scrupulosity; you are in the company of the deeply used. Intrusive thoughts and even intrusive feelings are not a reflection of your faith or character — they are symptoms. God does not read your OCD’s accusations as your heart.
Eren and Geto: The Anatomy of the Line You Refuse to Cross
Eren Yeager’s trajectory. Eren begins as the archetypal sympathetic protagonist: a boy who watches his mother devoured by a Titan when Wall Maria falls, and vows to destroy the Titans. His grievance is real and his early anger is righteous — it is a response to genuine atrocity. The Attack Titan awakens; he becomes a soldier. Then the basement flashback, his father Grisha’s memories, reveals the truth: the “Titans” are his own people, the Eldians, weaponized by a world that hates them, and beyond the walls lies not monsters but nations of human beings who regard Paradis as “devils.”
Here is the fork. Eren’s grievance was legitimate; his response becomes genocidal. Having seen that the whole world wants his people dead, he escalates to the Rumbling — commanding the Wall Titans to trample humanity flat. Approximately eighty percent of all human life on the planet was ended by the time it was stopped. The series is explicit and self-critical about what has happened: Eren became the very thing he swore to destroy. The narrative refuses to endorse him; his own closest friends band together to stop him. The psychological mechanisms driving the Rumbling are dehumanization of the enemy, belief in righteous vengeance, and the conviction that violence is necessary for peace — and the story frames this as tragedy and horror, not triumph.
There is a further detail worth naming. At the end, under Armin’s questioning, Eren admits something beneath the stated cause: he wanted to see the world flattened. That’s the kind of person I am. The righteous justification was real and it was also cover. That is Psalm 139:23 in dramatic form — the search that finds a wicked way inside the zeal. Eren never ran that search. He had a hundred chapters of justification and never once asked God, or anyone, to look at his heart.
The specific victims as fuel. Throughout the series, the deaths of specific comrades are what awaken his resolve. This is the psychologically true detail: moral anger is properly fueled by the memory of specific, named, beloved victims. That is the healthy, grief-rooted core. The corruption is not that Eren remembers the dead; it is that he lets the memory of the specific dead authorize the murder of the anonymous living — millions of children and civilians, the vast majority of whom had no personal hand in oppressing Eldians. He generalizes from the guilty to the entire class. That is the exact move Romans 12:19 forbids.
There is also Ramzi — the boy Eren befriends in Marley, shows kindness to, and then tramples with the rest. He knew the boy’s name. That is the tell for the difference between hating works and hating a class: once you have reclassified the class as the enemy, the individual you loved gets swept in anyway, because the category has become more real to you than the face. Every abstraction eventually eats someone you knew.
And Eren wept the whole time. He is not a sadist. He cries. He says he is garbage. Sorrowful vengeance is still vengeance — grief in the executioner does not sanctify the execution.
Suguru Geto — the same disease, named. Geto is an even more precise cautionary parallel, because he begins as the moral one — the sorcerer with a very strong moral compass who insists sorcerers exist to protect the weak. His breaking point is a legitimate grievance stacked on grief: the death of Riko Amanai, and then the sight of the Star Religious Group celebrating her death — ordinary people rejoicing in a child’s murder. Confronted with genuine human evil, Geto’s love curdles. The turning point is verbal, and it is exactly the dehumanization hinge: he begins to call non-sorcerers “monkeys.” The word is the wound. From legitimate horror at real evil, he draws the conclusion that the class is vermin — and shortly after, he massacres a village, the first atrocity of his descent, and ultimately plots the extermination of all non-sorcerers.
And here is the story’s own devastating critique, which should be taken into the bones: the world Geto wants to build is a carbon copy of the society he came from; he just wants a different set of people on top. The one who dehumanizes his oppressor reproduces his oppressor. Contempt does not defeat the system of contempt; it perpetuates it under new management.
The biblical inversion, step by step. Where Eren and Geto take judgment into their own hands, Romans 12:19 says “Avenge not yourselves… for it is written, Vengeance is mine; I will repay, saith the Lord.” Where they dehumanize the class, Scripture insists every one of them is an image-bearer for whom Christ died. Where they become the thing they hated, the disciple is told to “overcome evil with good.” Where they act, you pray and preach.
And there is one more difference, and it is the one that matters most: Eren has no God. In his world there is no Judge. No throne, no reckoning, no one who sees. If the world is like that — if evil will genuinely go unanswered unless someone answers it — then the wounded man has to become the judge, because otherwise the dead stay unavenged forever. Eren’s logic is airtight in a godless universe. That is why the story is so devastating: it is honest about what happens to moral grievance when there is nobody above it.
We are not in that universe. Vengeance is His; He will repay. Which means the imprecatory psalm is available to us precisely because we do not have to be the ones who act. We get to hand the fire to Someone with clean hands and perfect knowledge — Someone who knows which of these men will repent by Thursday and which have hardened past return, which is knowledge we do not have and were never given. Eren had to be certain because there was no one else to be certain. We get to be uncertain, and that uncertainty is a mercy.
Eren is what our rage looks like with the throne removed.
How the Wounded Pray Imprecatory Prayers Rightly
Scripture supplies its own guardrails, and they are the answer to the scrupulous fear that righteous anger is itself damning.
The “Search me.” Every imprecation must be immediately submitted to divine audit. You do not have to certify your own motives spotless before you pray — you ask God to find and purge the flesh in them. This is the opposite of the scrupulous demand for certainty: it hands the uncertainty to God. You are permitted to pray, “Lord, I hate what they did; if there is private vengeance mixed in this, search it out and lead me in the way everlasting.”
Romans 12:19–21. The command “avenge not yourselves” is not a suppression of the desire for justice but its redirection: “give place unto wrath” — make room for God’s wrath by removing your hand from the scale. The very next verses order positive good toward the enemy: “if thine enemy hunger, feed him.” Vengeance to God; bread to the enemy. That is the whole discipline.
Luke 23:34 and Acts 7:60. Christ on the cross (“Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do”) and Stephen under the stones (“Lord, lay not this sin to their charge”) are the two supreme models of the victim praying for the perpetrator — and note that Stephen’s prayer was answered in the conversion of a man standing right there consenting to his death.
Saul of Tarsus. The persecutor “breathing out threatenings and slaughter,” who held the coats at Stephen’s stoning, became Paul. This single fact demolishes any certainty about who is finally reprobate. The man you are most sure is beyond grace may be the next apostle. The scrupulous mind wants the certainty of a settled verdict; the gospel denies it — mercifully, because that same denial is what stands between your friends’ abusers and a closed door you have no authority to close.
The specific danger of certainty about who is reprobate. Here is the hinge that connects the ministry to the healing. The presumption that you can identify the reprobate — that you can look at a man and say “that one is certainly damned” — is a usurpation of the divine prerogative. Only God searches the heart. And it is the very same cognitive move that, turned inward, is the engine of scrupulous despair. The scrupulous person “knows” he is reprobate with the same false certainty the vengeful person “knows” his abuser is reprobate. Both are claiming God’s exclusive knowledge of the final state of a soul.
Therefore the discipline that heals scrupulosity and the discipline that sanctifies anger are one and the same discipline: refusing to pronounce final verdicts that belong to God alone. When you renounce certainty about the abuser’s damnation, you are simultaneously renouncing the logic that damns you. Hand both verdicts to the Judge of all the earth who will do right.
Holding hatred of evil together with the possibility of repentance. You can — and must — hate the works with complete and undivided hatred, while holding every person in the open question of grace. “Hate the sin, love the sinner” is a cliché, but the psychological content is precise: you keep the moral object, the deeds and the abuse of office, firmly condemned and outside you, and you keep the person inside the category “possible object of mercy.” This is the Sibbesian tenderness applied outward: Christ will not break the bruised reed — and you do not know which of these people God is even now bruising toward repentance.
A word to the bruised conscience. Richard Sibbes (The Bruised Reed, 1630) is the medicine for the scrupulous survivor. Christ “will not only not break nor quench, but he will cherish those with whom he so deals.” Against the accusing voice — which for the survivor wears the double mask of OCD and of the abusers’ internalized condemnation — Sibbes stages the dialogue: “Satan will object, ‘You are a great sinner.’ We may answer, ‘Christ is a strong Saviour.’… ‘But Christ will not regard [your spark of faith].’ ‘Yes, he will not quench the smoking flax.’… ‘Nay, but Christ will cherish it, until he has brought judgment to victory.'”
And the crucial law-gospel distinction: “Moses, without any mercy, breaks all bruised reeds, and quenches all smoking flax. For the law requires personal, perpetual and perfect obedience from the heart… but gives no strength.” The abusive, law-only religion so many were formed in was Moses without Christ, and it is precisely what Christ came to reverse. Sibbes’s counsel: “Are you bruised? Be of good comfort, he calls you. Conceal not your wounds, open all before him and take not Satan’s counsel. Go to Christ, although trembling, as the poor woman who said, ‘If I may but touch his garment.'”
John Bunyan, who suffered the same affliction, records in Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners the scrupulous despair — “more loathsome in mine own eyes than was a toad” — and the deliverance: “Great sins do draw out great grace; and where guilt is most terrible and fierce, there the mercy of God in Christ, when showed to the soul, appears most high and mighty.” The tender, doubting, self-suspecting conscience is not the hard heart Christ condemns in Matthew 23 — it is the bruised reed He came to save. Your fear that your anger damns you is itself evidence of the tender conscience Christ cherishes, not the seared one He judges.
Grief Over the Deconstructed: Those Driven from the Faith by Abusers
Many who “deconstructed” did not reason their way out of faith; they were driven out by what abusers did. The term “Religious Trauma Syndrome” was coined by psychologist Marlene Winell to name the damage done to those struggling with leaving an authoritarian, dogmatic religion and coping with the damage of indoctrination. For many, deconstruction happens after experiencing harm, contradictions, or rigid expectations within a religious system. These are, very often, Ezekiel’s scattered sheep — “scattered, because there is no shepherd.”
The theology here must hold two truths without collapsing either.
The culpability of those who cause stumbling is grave, and it is God’s to address. Ezekiel 34:10 — God requires the flock “at their hand.” Matthew 18:6 — the millstone. The one who barred the door, who scattered the sheep, who made the little one stumble, bears a judgment you are not asked to carry and not permitted to execute. God has taken personal responsibility for it: “I am against the shepherds.” You may lay this grief and this injustice down, because God has already picked it up.
The responsibility of those who stumble is real but not simply symmetrical. Scripture holds both that each person is accountable for their own response to light and that those who caused the stumbling bear the heavier guilt. This is not a contradiction; it is the doctrine of degrees applied pastorally. The wounded who left are not thereby automatically damned — and they are not beyond the reach of the God who says “I, even I, will both search my sheep, and seek them out.” The Good Shepherd “seeks that which was lost, and brings again that which was driven away.” His seeking is not contingent on the faithfulness of the under-shepherds.
Holding the grief without presumption or despair. You do not know the eternal state of your friends. Presumption would declare them saved regardless, denying the reality of apostasy, or damned regardless, denying the reach of grace and the mitigating weight of how they were wounded. Both are the forbidden certainty. The faithful posture is intercession held in hope: you pray for them as the God who seeks scattered sheep would have you pray, you refuse to write the last chapter of a story God is still writing, and you let the anguish of not-knowing drive you to the only One who does know. Grief without a verdict is not faithlessness; it is faith operating exactly where it is supposed to — in the dark, holding to the character of God.
“My Way of Wiping Them Out Is to Show People Christ”
This resolve is not a soft substitute for justice. It is the biblically exact form justice takes in our hands.
The remedy God appoints for false shepherds is a true shepherd, not a sword in the sheep’s hand. Ezekiel 34 moves from “Woe to the shepherds” directly to “I will set up one shepherd over them… he shall feed them.” The divine answer to men who shut up the kingdom of heaven is to open it — to be the one who lets people in where the abusers locked them out. Faithful ministry is the structural inverse of the specific sin of Matthew 23:13. You undo their work not by destroying them but by doing the opposite of what they did.
This is precisely how the imprecation is answered without your becoming Eren. The imprecatory psalm hands vengeance to God. That frees your hands for the positive command: overcome evil with good. The energy that in Eren became the Rumbling and in Geto became genocide is, in the disciple, converted — the same fierce love that hates the works with perfect hatred is spent on showing the wounded the real Christ behind the counterfeit. You are not suppressing the fire; you are redirecting it into its proper channel.
It is the only victory that does not reproduce the enemy. Recall the verdict on Geto: the world he built was a carbon copy of the one he hated. Contempt cannot defeat contempt. But the one who answers false ministry with faithful ministry breaks the cycle rather than continuing it, because he refuses the dehumanization that is the shared root of every abuser. The abuser used the office to wound; you use it to heal. That is not merely the moral high ground — it is the only ground on which the enemy’s logic is actually defeated rather than inherited.
It is the imitation of the God we serve. God’s wrath against the false shepherds and God’s seeking of the scattered sheep are the same act of the same love. Christ pronounced the woes of Matthew 23 and wept over Jerusalem in the very same chapter: “how often would I have gathered thy children together… and ye would not!” The perfect hatred and the gathering love are not in tension in God; they are one holiness. When you hate the works and show men Christ, you are not managing a contradiction — you are being conformed to the image of the Shepherd who does both perfectly.
Your task is evangelism precisely because vengeance is His. He has kept the harder half for Himself and given you the better half.
Do the better half.
The Daily Discipline
Pray the imprecatory psalms as written, then pray Psalm 139:23–24 over your own praying. Make the “Search me” the closing bracket of every prayer of holy anger. This single habit is the whole argument operationalized, and it is simultaneously the antidote to scrupulosity — it hands God the uncertainty rather than demanding certainty — and to vengeance, because it audits the flesh out of the zeal.
Name specific victims in intercession, then refuse to generalize to a class. Grieve the named dead and wounded; that is the healthy, grief-rooted core of the anger. Then consciously stop before the Eren move of condemning the whole class. When the word that would reclassify them as vermin rises, recognize it for what it is and pray Luke 23:34 instead.
Know the thresholds. If the anger has shifted from signal — “this was wrong” — to rumination, a looping rehearsal aimed at balancing scales, it has stopped protecting you and started consuming you. If you find yourself using dehumanizing language about the abusers even privately, treat it as a red line, not a mood. And if the intrusive thought “my anger proves I am reprobate” recurs and drives compulsive reassurance-seeking or confession, that is scrupulosity, not conscience — and reassurance will feed it. The treatment is tolerating the uncertainty, which is theologically identical to handing the verdict to God.
And one final honesty. If the resolve to show people Christ ever becomes a mask for avoiding the legitimate grief and anger — if it flattens into a performance of forgiveness you do not feel, in order to escape the pain — then it has become its own pathology. The goal is not anger replaced by ministry, but anger handed to God and grief felt through, so that the ministry flows from a healed place rather than a repressed one.
