Romans 12:19

μὴ ἑαυτοὺς ἐκδικοῦντες, ἀγαπητοί. Even when the Christian has been wronged he is not to take the law into his own hand, and right or vindicate himself. For ἐκδικεῖν see Luke 18:3; Luke 18:5. ἀγαπητοί is striking, and must have some reason; either the extreme difficulty, of which Paul was sensible, of living up to this rule; or possibly some condition of affairs in the Church at Rome, which made the exhortation peculiarly pertinent to the readers, and therefore craved this affectionate address to deprecate, as it were, the “wild justice” with which the natural man is always ready to plead his cause. ἀλλὰ δότε τόπον τῇ ὀργῇ : the wrath spoken of, as the following words show, is that of God; to give place to God's wrath means to leave room for it, not to take God's proper work out of His hands. For the expression cf. Luke 14:9, Sir 13:22; Sir 19:17; Sir 38:12, Ephesians 4:27. For ἡ ὁργὴ used thus absolutely of God's wrath cf. Romans 5:9; 1 Thessalonians 2:16. The idea is not that instead of executing vengeance ourselves we are to abandon the offender to the more tremendous vengeance of God; but this that God, not injured men or those who believe themselves such, is the maintainer of moral order in the world, and that the righting of wrong is to be committed to Him. Cf. especially 1 Peter 2:23. γέγραπται γάρ : Deuteronomy 32:35. Paul gives the sense of the Hebrew, not at all that of the LXX, though his language is reminiscent of the latter (ἐν ἡμέρᾳ ἐκδικήσεως ἀνταποδώσω). It is singular that Hebrews 10:30 has the quotation in exactly the same form as Paul. So has the Targum of Onkelos; but whether there is any mutual dependence of these three, or whether, independent of all, the verse was current in this form, we cannot tell. The λέγει κύριος (cf. Romans 14:11) is supplied by Paul.