Romans 12 · Passage · Goodness
Overcome Evil with Good
Paul tells the church at Rome to repay no one evil for evil, to feed a hungry enemy, and to overcome evil with good.
In 1569 Dirk Willems turned back on the ice at Asperen to save the man chasing him, and the rescue cost him his life.
Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good.
- The passage
- Romans 12:17 to 21, Proverbs 25:21 to 22
- Books
- Romans, Proverbs
- When
- 1569
- Hold in memory
- Romans 12:21
Summary
In Romans 12:17 to 21, Paul tells believers what to do when someone does them wrong. The Law of Moses and the book of Proverbs had taught the same long before. So had the stories of Elisha and David. The last line of the chapter shows how the one who is hurt can win over the evil done to him. Christians from the second century to the sixteenth are on record doing what it says.
- Vengeance belongs to God. Verse 19 leaves room for His wrath, so believers do not take revenge, and God still judges.
- Verse 18 asks for peace only as far as it depends on the believer.
- The good done to an enemy is food and drink. Proverbs 25:22 adds that the LORD will reward the giver, and Paul leaves that part out.
- Jerome and John Gill say the burning coals are the shame that leads an enemy to repent. Bede says they do not mean punishment. Albert Barnes links them to the coals the high priest carried.
- In verse 21 evil can overcome the believer, or the believer can overcome evil with good.
Where the Passage Stands in Romans 12
The passage closes a chapter of commands to the church at Rome, and the chapter's first command about persecutors comes at verse 14.
The last five verses of Romans 12 are Paul's teaching on what a believer should do when someone does him evil. It belongs to goodness, the value Scripture grounds in God's own character. It shows goodness under its hardest test, when it is aimed at a person who has done harm. Every reader meets that test in a family, a workplace or a church. The passage tells him what to do in the hour after the wrong.
The question is what Paul forbids, what he commands in its place, and how good can overcome evil. The answer comes from Paul's own lines and from the Scripture he quotes from Deuteronomy and Proverbs. Two scenes in the books of Samuel and Kings show the same conduct long before he wrote. Jerome, Bede, John Gill and Albert Barnes explain the burning coals of verse 20. Aristides and the Martyrs Mirror record Christians who did good to their enemies.
Romans 12 opens with the call to offer the body to God as a living sacrifice, which is taught on The Living Sacrifice. The commands that follow describe that life inside the church and toward those outside it.
Love must be sincere. Detest what is evil; cling to what is good.Paul sets a clinging to the good beside sincere love at the head of his commands to the church.
Bless those who persecute you. Bless and do not curse.The chapter's first command about persecutors asks for blessing in place of cursing, three verses before Paul turns to evil done to the believer.
Verses 15 and 16 ask for sympathy and harmony with one another, and from verse 17 Paul turns again to people who do the believer harm. Paul's words echo Jesus' command to love enemies, which is taught on Love Your Enemies. The command to turn the other cheek is taught on Turn the Other Cheek.
Five Commands and Two Quotations
Paul gives one command in each of the five verses, in an order that runs from restraint to action.
Two commands rest on older Scripture, the ban on revenge on the Song of Moses and the feeding of an enemy on Proverbs.
A ladder of five rungs, one for each verse of the passage, each with its command in the Berean text. Rungs 3 and 4 add the opening words of the Old Testament verse Paul quotes, also in the Berean text.
Verses 17 to 20, from Restraint to Bread for an Enemy
Four verses forbid repayment and revenge, limit the duty of peace and turn the believer toward the one who wronged him.
Do not repay anyone evil for evil. Carefully consider what is right in the eyes of everybody.Paul forbids returning evil for evil to anyone, and he asks the church to weigh what all people will see as right.
In the Greek of verse 17 the word the Berean text renders right is kala, a form of kalos. The STEP Bible lexicon from Tyndale House defines kalos as beautiful and chiefly good. Paul gave the same rule to the church at Thessalonica, and Peter gave it to the churches he wrote to.
Make sure that no one repays evil for evil. Always pursue what is good for one another and for all people.Paul's earlier letter pairs the ban on repaying evil with the pursuit of what is good for all people. He makes the same pairing in the first and last lines of this passage.
Do not repay evil with evil or insult with insult, but with blessing, because to this you were called so that you may inherit a blessing.Peter puts blessing where the insult would have been returned, and he names the calling of the church as the reason.
If it is possible on your part, live at peace with everyone.The opening condition limits the believer's duty to his own side of a quarrel, since an enemy may refuse peace.
Do not avenge yourselves, beloved, but leave room for God’s wrath. For it is written: “Vengeance is Mine; I will repay, says the Lord.”Paul forbids the believer to avenge himself and gives the reason in a quotation that keeps repayment for the Lord.
In the Greek the believer is told not to be ekdikountes, avenging, because ekdikesis, vengeance, is the Lord's. The STEP Bible lexicon gives to vindicate, retaliate and punish as the senses of the verb. Paul's quotation comes from the song that Moses recited aloud to the whole assembly of Israel.
Vengeance is Mine; I will repay. In due time their foot will slip; for their day of disaster is near, and their doom is coming quickly.”The source of Paul's quotation sets a time for the repayment, so Paul's command hands judgment over to God without setting it aside.
Two older texts had already asked the same restraint of Israel.
Do not seek revenge or bear a grudge against any of your people, but love your neighbor as yourself. I am the LORD.The Law forbids revenge and grudges in the same verse that commands love of the neighbor.
Do not say, “I will avenge this evil!” Wait on the LORD, and He will save you.Proverbs tells the one who is wronged to wait on the LORD in place of avenging the evil himself.
On the contrary, “If your enemy is hungry, feed him; if he is thirsty, give him a drink. For in so doing, you will heap burning coals on his head.”Paul opens with On the contrary and quotes Proverbs. The believer who leaves vengeance to God is sent to his enemy with food and drink.
If your enemy is hungry, give him food to eat, and if he is thirsty, give him water to drink. For in so doing, you will heap burning coals on his head, and the LORD will reward you.The proverb closes with the promise that the LORD will reward the giver, and Paul's quotation stops before that clause.
1 Peter 3:9, Romans 12:18, Romans 12:19, Deuteronomy 32:35, Leviticus 19:18, Proverbs 20:22, Romans 12:20, Proverbs 25:21 to 22
Two Enemies Spared in the Old Testament
The books of Kings and Samuel tell of enemy soldiers fed at a feast and of an enemy king let go from a cave.
In 2 Kings 6 the king of Aram sent horses, chariots and a great army by night to seize Elisha at Dothan. At the prophet's prayer the LORD struck the soldiers with blindness. Elisha led them to Samaria, and when their eyes were opened they found themselves in the city where the king of Israel was.
And when the king of Israel saw them, he asked Elisha, “My father, shall I kill them? Shall I kill them?” “Do not kill them,” he replied. “Would you kill those you have captured with your own sword or bow? Set food and water before them, that they may eat and drink and then return to their master.” So the king prepared a great feast for them, and after they had finished eating and drinking, he sent them away, and they returned to their master. And the Aramean raiders did not come into the land of Israel again.The king asks twice whether to kill the captives, and Elisha has him feed them instead, after which the raids end.
Kings records the feast and its result and draws no lesson from them, and Paul does not cite the scene. The scene still shows the proverb's command to feed a hungry enemy carried out by a king of Israel.
In 1 Samuel 24 Saul took three thousand chosen men to hunt David in the wilderness of En-gedi. He stepped into the cave where David and his men were hiding. David cut off a corner of Saul's robe and restrained his men from attacking the LORD's anointed.
May the LORD judge between you and me, and may the LORD take vengeance on you, but my hand will never be against you.David asks the LORD to judge between them and to take vengeance, and he promises that his own hand will never be against Saul.
and said to David, “You are more righteous than I, for you have rewarded me with good, though I have rewarded you with evil. And you have shown this day how well you have dealt with me; for when the LORD delivered me into your hand, you did not kill me. When a man finds his enemy, does he let him go away unharmed? May the LORD reward you with good for what you have done for me this day.Saul names David's act as good returned for evil, the exchange that Paul asks of the believer in Romans 12.
Verse 21, Evil Overcome with Good
The last verse uses one Greek verb twice and sets good and evil against each other as the two sides of one contest.
The Greek of verse 21 reads mē nikō hupo tou kakou alla nika en tō agathō to kakon. Word for word it runs "not be overcome by the evil, but overcome with the good the evil".
The verb nikao, which the STEP Bible lexicon defines as to subdue and glosses to conquer, stands twice. It is passive in the first half and active in the second. So the believer is either the one conquered by evil or the one who conquers it.
The two adjectives are kakos and agathos. Abbott-Smith's lexicon, as the STEP Bible prints it, sets kakos in general as the opposite of agathos and kalos. Agathos is the word of Acts 11:24, where Barnabas is called a good man.
Origen of Alexandria explained the two halves of the verse in his Commentary on the Epistle to the Romans. He wrote, "He is overcome by evil who, provoked by evils, returns evil; but he overcomes evil with good who, having received evils, repays them with good things". He held that evil "is increased and grows from things like itself", and he closed, "But if you apply good, evil is destroyed."
Theophylact of Ohrid, in his Commentary on Romans, reads the verse as a warning about motive: "Do not feed your enemies with the thought that you will bring greater punishment upon them."
Christians Who Kept Paul's Commands
An apologist of the second century, a treatise of the third and a martyrology of 1660 record the passage kept toward oppressors, persecutors and a pursuer.
Aristides2nd century
Aristides addressed an Apology to an emperor in the early second century and described the Christians in it. In chapter 15, in D. M. Kay's translation from the Syriac (1896), he says that "their oppressors they appease" and "make them their friends; they do good to their enemies".
He adds that when they have no food to spare for someone in need, "they fast two or three days in order to supply to the needy their lack of food". The account is a Christian's description of his own people, and no outside witness confirms it.
Cyprian3rd century
Cyprian's Address to Demetrianus quotes the line Paul took from the Song of Moses and draws the church's conduct from it. He wrote that "none of us, when he is apprehended, makes resistance, nor avenges himself against your unrighteous violence, although our people are numerous and plentiful", and he gave the reason in one sentence: "Our certainty of a vengeance to follow makes us patient."
The same treatise warns that the vengeance would fall on the persecutors, so Cyprian joined the patience Paul asks for to a firm expectation of God's judgment.
Dirk Willems1569
The Martyrs Mirror, compiled by Thieleman J. van Braght in Dutch in 1660 and translated by Joseph F. Sohm in 1886, tells what happened at Asperen. "When he fled he was hotly pursued by a thief-catcher, and as there had been some frost, said Dirk Willems ran before over the ice, getting across with considerable peril. The thief-catcher following him broke through, when Dirk Willems, perceiving that the former was in danger of his life, quickly returned and aided him in getting out, and thus saved his life."
The thief-catcher "wanted to let him go, but the burgomaster, very sternly called to him to consider his oath", and Willems was seized again and burned. Van Braght wrote ninety years after the event from the reports of "trustworthy persons", and his book is the one source for the account.
Cyprian (3rd century), Dirk Willems (1569)
The Burning Coals of Verse 20
Teachers of the church have read the coals in two ways: as a good done to an enemy for his sake, and as a picture drawn from the rite of incense.
Proverbs 25:22 and Romans 12:20 both say of the one who feeds his enemy, "you will heap burning coals on his head". Neither verse says what the coals do to him.
Kindness meant for an enemy's goodJerome; Bede; John Gill
“We are not to revile and condemn our enemy, as the world does, but rather we are to correct him and lead him to repentance so that, being won over by our good deeds, he may be softened by the fire of charity and may cease to be an enemy.”
Jerome · Against the Pelagians 1.30 · on Romans 12:20Patristic
Bede, in his Commentary on Proverbs, writes that the verse "does not speak of the burning of punishments". He gives the reason that "wisdom would not teach that you should minister good to an enemy for the cause of his destruction".
John Gill's Exposition of the Old Testament (1748 to 1763) reads Proverbs 25:22 in the same way. He says the coals are heaped "Not to increase his punishment and damnation". Their purpose, he writes, is "to bring him by such means to a sense of former injuries, and to shame for them, repentance of them, and love of the person injured".
The objection: Proverbs 25:22 joins the coals to the LORD's reward of the giver and says nothing in that verse of the enemy's change of heart.
The coals of the high priest's censerAlbert Barnes
Albert Barnes, in his Notes, Explanatory and Practical, on Proverbs 25:21, grants that the second clause "seems at first sight to suggest a motive incompatible with a true charity". He turns for the explanation to the Day of Atonement, when the high priest filled his censer with coals and laid incense on them "for a sweet-smelling savor", and he writes, "So it is here."
Then he must take a censer full of burning coals from the altar before the LORD, and two handfuls of finely ground fragrant incense, and take them inside the veil.The high priest fills his censer with burning coals from the altar before he takes fragrant incense inside the veil, and Barnes builds his reading on these coals.
The objection: Leviticus 16:12 sets the coals in a censer before the LORD, while Proverbs 25:22 sets them on an enemy's head, so the likeness rests on the one phrase.
Good Returned for Evil
The passage leaves the believer two answers to the evil done to him, and Paul names the one that wins. The good he is told to cling to in verse 9 becomes in verse 21 the means by which evil is defeated. Paul gave the same charge to the churches of Galatia.
Therefore, as we have opportunity, let us do good to everyone, and especially to the family of faith.Paul's charge to do good to everyone takes in the hungry enemy of this passage as well as the family of faith.
Sources
Scripture is the Berean Standard Bible.
- The tagged Greek text of the New Testament, with Strong's numbers, morphology and glosses (STEP Bible, Tyndale House, Cambridge, CC BY 4.0)
- STEP Bible TBESG, the brief lexicon based on Abbott-Smith (1922), entries g3528, g2556, g1556 and g2570 (Tyndale House, Cambridge, CC BY 4.0)
- Origen of Alexandria, Commentary on the Epistle to the Romans, on Romans 12:21.
- Jerome, Against the Pelagians, book 1, chapter 30, on Romans 12:20.
- John Gill, Exposition of the Old Testament (1748 to 1763), on Proverbs 25:22.
- Albert Barnes, Notes, Explanatory and Practical, on the Old and New Testaments, on Proverbs 25:21.
- Bede, Commentary on Proverbs, on Proverbs 25:22.
- Theophylact of Ohrid, Commentary on Romans, on Romans 12:21.
- Cyprian, Treatise 5, An Address to Demetrianus.
- Aristides, Apology, chapter 15, translated from the Syriac by D. M. Kay, Ante-Nicene Fathers, volume 9 (1896)
- Thieleman J. van Braght, Martyrs Mirror (Dutch, 1660), translated by Joseph F. Sohm (Elkhart, Indiana, 1886), page 741.
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