Upholding justice on behalf of heaven, vigilante justice？
Why do many victims become perpetrators? Reflecting on the massacre at Shechem in the Book of Genesis, let us consider whether one can truly navigate injustice and unrighteousness without──
Upholding justice on behalf of heaven, vigilante justice？
Now Dinah, the daughter Leah had borne to Jacob, went out to visit the women of the land. When Shechem son of Hamor the Hivite, the ruler of that area, saw her, he took her and raped her. His heart was drawn to Dinah daughter of Jacob; he loved the young woman and spoke tenderly to her. And Shechem said to his father Hamor, 'Get me this girl as my wife.' When Jacob heard that his daughter Dinah had been defiled, his sons were in the fields with his livestock; so he did nothing about it until they came home. Meanwhile, Jacob’s sons had heard about it, and they were shocked and furious...
Because their sister Dinah had been defiled, Jacob’s sons replied deceitfully as they spoke to Shechem and his father Hamor. They said to them, 'We can’t give our sister to a man who is not circumcised. That would be a disgrace to us. We will enter into an agreement with you on one condition only: that you become like us by circumcising all your males. Then we will give you our daughters and take your daughters for ourselves. We’ll settle among you and become one people with you. But if you will not agree to be circumcised, we’ll take our sister and go.
Three days later, while all of them were still in pain, two of Jacob’s sons, Simeon and Levi, Dinah’s brothers, took their swords and attacked the unsuspecting city, killing every male. They put Hamor and his son Shechem to the sword and took Dinah from Shechem’s house and left. The sons of Jacob came upon the dead bodies and looted the city where their sister had been defiled. They seized their flocks and herds and donkeys and everything else of theirs in the city and out in the fields. They carried off all their wealth and all their women and children, taking as plunder everything in the houses. (Genesis 34)
The historical trajectory of migration and immigration is filled with tension.
Tension During the Migration Process
From the perspective of the Old Testament, particularly the Pentateuch, human history is essentially a history of migration. The patriarchs of the Hebrews, such as Abraham, Jacob, Joseph, and Moses, all experienced migration and resettlement. When viewed in its entirety, the Book of Genesis reveals that the defining characteristic of migration trajectories is "tension," with Jacob serving as the prime example.
Jacob's life is a microcosm of "tension": from birth, he grasped the heel of his twin brother Esau (the name "Jacob" in the original text means "to grasp"). As he grew older, he conspired with his mother Rebekah to deceive his father Isaac. Although he gained the birthright and his father's blessing, he fled in fear of his brother's revenge, becoming a migrant in the process!
In a foreign land, Jacob was deceived by his uncle and father-in-law, Laban, who changed his wages ten times. After finally escaping Laban's grasp and returning to Canaan with his family and possessions, Jacob faced the looming fear of confronting Esau, who might settle the score for the wrongs of 20 years earlier. Fortunately, at the Jabbok River, God intervened. Jacob, through a combination of persistent pleading and lavish gifts of livestock, sought to win his brother’s favor and forgiveness. Unexpectedly, Esau fully forgave him and bore no grudge, welcoming him without any difficulty (see Genesis 32–33).
Just as the tensions within Jacob’s immediate family began to ease, he tragically found himself entangled in conflict with his neighbors during his journey home. His daughter Dinah was raped, and while Shechem and his father Hamor earnestly negotiated with Jacob to take Dinah as Shechem’s wife and ensure peaceful cohabitation (a stark contrast to Amnon’s treatment of Tamar in 2 Samuel 13, where he discarded her after raping her), Jacob’s sons responded with hypocrisy and deceit. Despite the family’s original refusal to intermarry with foreigners, they pretended to agree, turning the assault into a pretext for a massacre. The Shechemites suffered the full extent of the brothers’ hatred and vengeance, intended to uphold their sister’s honor and seek justice: all the men were slaughtered, and their wealth was plundered. This act of brutal and excessive revenge was so savage that even Jacob, accustomed to cunning and deception, found it intolerable.
The bloody actions of Jacob’s sons against their neighbors further exposed and intensified the tensions within Jacob’s family. When he heard that his only daughter, Dinah, had been raped, he "remained silent," a stark contrast to his reaction when he believed Joseph had been killed by a wild animal, tearing his clothes in anguish. The reason is simple: Joseph was the son of Rachel, the wife Jacob loved (for whom he served Laban for 14 years), while Dinah was the daughter of Leah, whom he did not love. In contrast, Dinah's brothers, seeking to uphold "justice," took matters into their own hands with an act of "vigilante justice," thereby transforming themselves into perpetrators.
Hurt People Hurt People
Human history proves that victims often become perpetrators. Psychologists have long recognized this principle, as highlighted by Dr. Sandra Wilson in her renowned book *Hurt People Hurt People* (provisional Chinese translation).
After World War I, the victorious Allied Powers and the defeated Central Powers signed the Treaty of Versailles, forcing Germany to accept full responsibility for the war. This became one of the main causes of the rise of Nazism and the outbreak of World War II.
Over two thousand years after losing their nation, Israel was restored as a state but has endured immense suffering, including the Holocaust during World War II, where six million Jews were murdered by Hitler. In the aftermath, Israel has taken a firm stance against aggressors, responding decisively to threats, including employing harsh measures against groups like Hamas, as a means of deterrence and retaliation.
The ongoing Russia-Ukraine war is a poignant example of the unfortunate cycle where victims often become perpetrators. Today’s international political landscape seems to mirror the end-times wars described in the New Testament: "Nation will rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom," a boundless quagmire of conflict and strife.
Victims often focus narrowly on the faults of their aggressors. Jacob's sons could clearly see the speck in Shechem's eye (his violation of Dinah) but failed to notice the plank in their own (Jacob building an altar to worship while Dinah ventured out to see the women of the land, sparking the chain of events leading to the massacre). Consumed by the desire for extreme retaliation, Simeon and Levi ignored Shechem’s father Hamor’s earnest attempts to negotiate peace and propose marriage. Instead, they deceitfully suggested that all the men of Shechem undergo circumcision, planning to kill them during their recovery on the third day. This act revealed the lethal potential of "religion," as their deceitful use of a sacred practice for murder bore traces of Jacob's own cunning but surpassed it in brutality. As G.K. Chesterton aptly observed: "Original sin is the only doctrine of Christianity that is empirically validated by human history."
Is "upholding justice on behalf of heaven" truly a way to establish righteousness?
After the Shechem massacre, Jacob's primary concerns were his reputation and the safety of his family, while Simeon and Levi were focused on "justice"—"Should he have treated our sister like a prostitute?"—a sentiment resembling the mindset of a typical postmodern youth. Similarly, 40-year-old Moses struck down an Egyptian taskmaster, an act comparable to Zhang Liang enlisting a strongman to assassinate Emperor Qin Shi Huang or Dietrich Bonhoeffer returning to Germany with plans to assassinate Hitler.
In contemporary history, Islamic believers who perceive themselves as long-oppressed by Western powers since the Crusades delivered a devastating blow to the United States—symbolizing Western freedom and democracy—through the 9/11 terrorist attacks. In response, the U.S. launched the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq under the banner of eradicating terrorist remnants, causing countless innocent lives to be lost in the crossfire. Inevitably, the victim also became the perpetrator.
It turns out that under the influence of original sin, victims often wield the banner of "upholding justice on behalf of heaven" as a guise for "vigilante justice." But is this truly "justice"?
Shechem showed no signs of repentance, and during Hamor’s negotiations for his son’s marriage, there was no apology to Jacob’s family for Shechem’s violation of Dinah. Instead, they held Dinah captive, revealing their selfish motives. Their ulterior plan was exposed when they said, "Won’t their livestock, their property, and all their other animals become ours? So let us agree to their terms, and they will settle among us" (Genesis 34:23). This highlights the greed and selfishness of Shechem’s family.
On the other hand, after Dinah was violated, Jacob’s sons used religious rituals as a pretext to carry out murder, looting, plundering, and the massacre of an entire city. This mirrors Shakespeare’s observation: "The evil that begins must be sustained by more evil." Similarly, after committing adultery, David resorted to deceit (calling Uriah home to sleep with Bathsheba), and when that failed, he orchestrated the heinous crime of murder by proxy. This demonstrates how difficult it is for humans to commit just one sin in isolation, as sin is inherently contagious by nature.
Under the shadow of original sin, true justice is even harder to find in the human realm. Albert Einstein, fearing that Hitler might develop the atomic bomb first and destroy the world, fled to the United States and urged President Roosevelt to create the bomb, leading to Japan's eventual surrender. While World War II came to an end, both Einstein and the "father of the atomic bomb," J. Robert Oppenheimer, were deeply saddened and even remorseful for Japan's suffering. Oppenheimer went so far as to apologize to Japan. Yet, should Japan not also apologize for its invasions and atrocities against the Chinese people during World War II?
In an unjust world, where can truth and justice be found? Habakkuk once prayed to the Lord in this way: "Why do you tolerate wrongdoing? Why do you look on while oppression continues?" (See Habakkuk 1:3).
Living Out Heaven's Way on Earth
Throughout history, humanity has endured endless migrations, displacements, and unjust suffering. May the victims, as sojourners on this earth, take care to heal the wounds of their lives and refrain from employing religious pretexts for vigilante justice, as Levi and Simeon did. Let us not turn the cross into a crusade.
Henri Nouwen once said, "Each person has their own poverty, and that is where God wants to dwell." In the journey of God's children on earth, wounds and pain from life's collisions are inevitable—and it is precisely there that Jesus wants to dwell. This prevents us from forcefully masking the sorrow of being victims with the harsh face of a perpetrator, engaging in vigilante justice under the guise of upholding divine righteousness.
The inability to tolerate injustice stems from the fact that humans bear God's image and likeness. But is taking matters into our own hands to enforce justice truly "upholding heaven’s way"? The early church endured nearly 300 years of persecution under Roman authorities, yet the apostles never encouraged the church to "enforce divine justice," let alone engage in vigilante acts. Instead, they urged believers to follow in Jesus' footsteps, honor Christ as Lord, and "always be prepared to give an answer to everyone who asks you to give the reason for the hope that you have, but do this with gentleness and respect" (see 1 Peter 3:15).
The Bible does not endorse a theology of "revenge," but it is filled with examples of a "theology of suffering." Only by entrusting the cause of the victim to God and relying on Him can one understand John Milton's words: "God can turn the sufferings of one generation into the spiritual soil of the next." The millions of Chinese believers who emerged from the suffering of the Cultural Revolution stand as a powerful testament to this truth. In the face of suffering, victims must look to God to break free from the flawed mindset of enforcing justice on His behalf.
Victims often long for immediate retribution, or "justice in the present," while the Bible teaches, "Do not take revenge, my dear friends, but leave room for God’s wrath," and, "It is mine to avenge; I will repay"—a principle of "justice in the end times" (see Romans 12:19). The prophet Jonah built a shelter east of Nineveh, hoping to witness God's righteous judgment on the Assyrian Empire with fire from heaven. However, God commanded him to preach a message of forgiveness and repentance, granting the sinful city a chance to repent—a judgment that only came over a century later, as foretold by the prophet Nahum. Jesus’ two comings to the world reflect this balance: the first was for redemption, and the second will be to execute final judgment and justice (see Revelation 19–20).
Before His second coming, when God's children suffer, they must stand firm in the Lord, entrusting themselves to Him who judges justly. They are called to emulate His prayer in the face of suffering: "Father, forgive them!" Rather than resorting to vigilante justice or claiming to uphold heaven's way, they are to overcome evil with good. Through acts of kindness, gentleness, and good deeds, they are to live out heaven's way on earth.
"Make sure that nobody pays back wrong for wrong, but always strive to do what is good for each other and for everyone else." (1 Thessalonians 5:15)
In the face of injustice and unrighteousness, repay evil with good and show kindness to others.
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Rev. Timothy San-Jarn Wu, professor of Old Testament at China Evangelical Theological Seminary, director of the Doctoral Department of Pastoral Studies and Doctoral Department of Mission.
Professor Wu has written numerous books, whether they are commentaries, sermons, character studies, or reflections on important issues. He always keeps the church and believers in mind, and presents the essence of biblical theology with a caring eye. His words contain theologians, The playwright and novelist's timeless insights, passion and earnestness penetrate the back of the page, and reading his writing is like seeing the person himself.