A LESSON FOR THE PRESENT.
WHAT a self-exaltation has taken possession of many in the professed Christian churches! This is especially manifest in the demands which have been so freely made that this nation or England should chastise Turkey or Spain, and thus avenge Armenia or Cuba or some other people. Right in the very beginning God gave an emphatic lesson in a most aggravated case concerning this matter of avenging. It was not till millenniums later that He gave us the words, "Vengeance is Mine, I will repay, saith the Lord," but He gave us a demonstration of those words so plain as not to be mistaken. Surely if there was ever a man whose death ought to have been avenged it was Abel's. If ever there was a man who ought to have been slain it was Cain, not alone for killing his brother, but for bringing by his crime an additional curse upon the ground. But God in His mercy lets the criminal live and reap the fruit of his own sowing. Cain recoils from it, appreciates to some extent the wrong he has brought upon others, and what their feelings will be, and he tells the Lord, "Whosoever findeth me shall slay me." But the Lord would not permit this. Vengeance belongs to Him; therefore He declares: "Whosoever slayeth Cain, vengeance shall be taken on him sevenfold. And the Lord appointed a sign for Cain, lest any finding him should smite him." Gen. 4:15, R.V. God would give the wretched man opportunity to repent, and reserve the punishment if he did not; and He would even more severely punish any one who assumed His own prerogatives of Judge or Avenger. Lamech pleads this act of the Lord in his own case. He sings to his wives (Gen. 4:23, 24, R.V.):— "I have slain a man for wounding me,
And a young man for bruising me;
If Cain shall be avenged sevenfold,
Truly Lamech seventy and seven fold." That is, if the Lord would avenge Cain's killing by some self-appointed judge, when Cain killed a righteous man, surely He would avenge the killing of him who should slay Lamech, when Lamech killed a man in self-defense. The lesson is that God Himself is Judge and the Executor of judgment upon all who transgress His holy law. Let Christians learn this lesson which God has so beautifully repeated in Deut. 32:35 and Rom. 12:17-20.