Abusers are not classically those who just abuse. Their pattern is in the malignancy of their more holistic behaviour.
They don’t simply harm their victim; they continue to redouble the initial harms they cause by gaslighting their victims and moving on to unsuspecting future victims as they refuse to take responsibility for their behaviour.
They don’t care about the harms they cause; this is seen in their lack of repentance. They show their disregard of their fellow humanity by their complete disregard of the person’s soul they trod through.
If they can’t own up to their wrongs, it only gets worse, because whenever any of us live out a lie it always catches up with us. But how?
There is a God-built BS meter in all of us, and besides the most seared conscience, these lies live out in anxiety, in body language, in responses to similar situations, etc, and this doesn’t include direct affronts to the conscience through grievances people express, revealing the damaged relationships that are left to rot in the ruins.
The abuser does not get away with their abuse.
Besides the most iron-clad fact that they do their harms before the full court of heaven — God the Father and God the Son presiding — they stand guilty as they continue unrepentant before all those who know the truth in the presence of the Holy Spirit. And time continues to tick.
They get away with nothing. Which helps us deal with our feelings of injustice toward them, even if it seems they’re prospering, when in reality God’s holding us all to account — eventually and amid our times.
We’re self-adjudged through the conscience, and what a glorious gift it is to be convicted by the Holy Spirit. That is God’s opportunity to reconcile yet again.
God is the God of reconciliation, not just once, but continually, because reconciliation is a relational concept, and God is most deeply relational.
We all need to hold these truths in tension with the realities that we meet and the realities of our past.
When an abuser continues in their way of refusing to attend to what they did, they not only continue as they were, acting out the same heinous travesties and harming people, they also pile up the charges that one day will be read out in God’s highest court. There will be no lying that day.
It is the clearest insanity to do crimes directly in front of the Judge.
We ought not to fail to heed the reality of what we are doing. When people do, they not only face the specific charge, they face the supreme charge of treason against faith.
By going wilfully against the will of God — yes, intentionally! — they call their entire faith system a lie. Nobody cheats God. This is I’m sure what Jesus was referring to in Matthew 7:15-27.
We all get this life as our opportunity to live honestly before God. No matter how much we suffer at the hands of our abusers, we can have peace in this holy idea.
We alone are accountable to God.
As are they.
As everyone is.
Nobody gets away with anything.
As are they.
As everyone is.
Nobody gets away with anything.
If they’re not honest before God, they call their faith a lie. It serves them no good. They built ‘their house’ in vain; they built for themselves (no matter what they achieved), and not for God’s Kingdom, and they will suffer for it.
The diabolical thing is all humanity know this. Every human being has the choice for good or evil, truth or falsehood, and though the good costs us dearly, and though the truth is harder, evil and falsehood are on another level in terms of cost — the consequences are eternal.
How can we trust this? Is anyone worthy of more trust than God? Is it worth doubting what’s written in God’s Word? Is it worth it to risk thinking about these concepts any other way?
These are all very, very serious issues — the most serious we will ever see.
God is faithful. God keeps every promise.
Photo by Tony Eight Media on Unsplash
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