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I'm going to also echo my thanks to all of you for coming and my admiration for your devotion

to vengeance, which is my topic for today.

I'm sure it's actually a devotion to truth and wisdom. So to come

in spite of weather shows that you really love, you really love truth. You really seek

wisdom. I'm going to give you my title and then introduce with a little bit of Socrates and we'll eventually get to

the gospel, get to the sermon on the Mount. But in between that, we're going to talk about vengeance

on a more natural level, you might say, which I think is foundational to what our Lord then

teaches in the sermon on the mat.

So my title is, is it wrong to want the bad guy to suffer? Subtitle,

A Christian Approach to Vengeance. Plato wrote a dialogue called Gorgias.

Gorgias was a famous sophist teacher, after whom the dialogue is named.

And in this dialogue, we have Socrates, who is trying to convince a student of Gorgias,

the student's name is Paulus, trying to convince a student of Gorgias, basically that he's on the wrong track.

Socrates tells Paulus that when we harm someone,

that is when we say, kill someone or banish him to another country

or take his property.

We do it, Socrates says, for the sake of what is good.

Hence, we don't simply want to, it's a quotation, we don't simply want to slaughter people or exile them from their cities and confiscate their property as such.

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