In his first epistle to Timothy, Paul encourages him to show rather brutal grace.
Officially, the veteran evangelist identifies the proper place for the Old Testament Law in evangelism: convicting sinners. However, Paul then identifies the type of sinners Timothy needs to convict: “murderers of fathers” and “murderers of mothers.”
They deserve an opportunity to repent, Paul writes. They deserve grace.
And Paul doesn’t stop there. The Law, he says, can even convict “manslayers” and “kidnappers.”
God can even convert them, Paul declares.
And he should know, as Luke’s account in Acts proves.
Ultimately, Paul told Timothy to employ the Law as a means to ignite grace, even when that grace threatens — and understandably so — to offend those called to offer it.
Christian author and pastor Randy Alcorn certainly didn’t want to show grace to Westley Allen Dodd.
As Alcorn once wrote, “I couldn’t sleep the night of January 4, 1993, so I turned on the coverage of the execution of Dodd. He was the man who tortured, raped, and murdered three young boys … about twenty minutes from where I live.
“Earlier that evening our family had prayed together. Both our daughters had asked God to intervene, praying that Dodd would repent and place his faith in Christ. I agreed with their prayer because I knew I should.
“But something in me resisted. What Dodd did was so unspeakably horrible that I was sickened by it … If any man ever deserved to go to Hell, it was this one.”
Oh yes, Dodd certainly deserved to go to Hell. Reck did too.
“You know, I am God,” the communist told the imprisoned Christian, Grecu, as he tortured him. “Everything depends upon me. If I wish, you live. If I wish, you are killed.”
Andrew van der Bijl also deserved God’s punishment. When the Dutchman joined the army, he couldn’t wait to kill as many communists as he could. Instead, he and his fellow soldiers slaughtered a village of innocent civilians.
“About halfway through (a) peaceful-looking village, we stepped into a nest of mines,” he wrote. “The company went berserk. We simply started shooting. When we came to ourselves, there was not a living thing in the village … a young Indonesian mother lay on the ground … a baby boy at her breast. Both had been killed by the same bullet.
“I think I wanted to kill myself after that.”
Years after that, van der Bijl would once again travel to communist countries, this time carrying a far more powerful weapon. “Brother Andrew,” as many know him today, smuggled Bibles behind the Iron Curtain. He also helped start the organization Open Doors, which provides relief to persecuted Christians.
After the slaughter at the village, God showed him grace.
God showed grace to Reck too, who converted after the Spirit convicted him through Grecu’s words to him: “Every caterpillar is in reality a butterfly, if it develops rightly. You have not been created to be a torturer, a man who kills … Your real calling is to be Godlike—to have the character of God, not a torturer.”
And before the state hanged Dodd, he told reporters, “I have found hope and peace in the Lord Jesus Christ.”
“Is Westley Allen Dodd in Heaven? I can’t say, because I don’t know his heart,” Alcorn wrote, “but I do know this — if (his final words) did reflect a turning to Christ, then the answer to the question is a certain and resounding ‘yes.’”
Of course, such grace does not promote naiveté. Brutal grace still hates evil and weeps for its victims.
The same apostle who told Timothy to reach out to “murderers” and “kidnappers” also wrote, “For (government authority) is God’s minister, an avenger to execute wrath on him who practices evil.”
Grace does not resent God for showing justice and wrath, but grace recognizes that God alone knows how to perfectly unleash that justice and wrath and at the perfect time.
And until He does, grace searches for the Paul smothered beneath the Saul; he prays for the “Brother Andrew” trapped inside the maniacal soldier. He testifies to the Reck waiting to fly free from sin.
“For scarcely for a righteous man will one die; yet perhaps for a good man someone would even dare to die,” Paul the former persecutor wrote to the Romans. “But God demonstrates His own love toward us, in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us.”
Perhaps he wrote that with tears streaming down his face, not just for himself, but for every Saul still out there.
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