Grace vs law? How should Christian parents respond when children are bullied?

Setting the scene

Imagine…

Your 13-year-old child comes in from school. She collapses on the floor and from her place of brokenness she cries, ‘Mum, I just can’t do it anymore. Life just isn’t worth living.’ Your heart fills instantly with sadness for the desperation that your child is feeling. Then in an instant it is replaced with rage for the injustice that she is having to face. You see, your daughter has faced relentless bullying over the past year by one group of children in her class. The bullying has often been physical and has continued online in places where your child once felt safe; her home, her bedroom; her church. There has been no escape and respite. And as a parent, you’ve approached the school numerous times over the past year. You’ve gone down all the right channels and complained in all the right ways. You have raised concerns, spoke to the senior leadership team, made formal complaints, but the bullying still continues.

You look at your daughter again, collapsed on the floor, her face a mixture of tears and snot. She is broken. All you can see is the baby that you bore, that you raised to become a strong independent girl, with a strong sense of faith and justice, now fully broken and contemplating the value of her own life. Enraged with the injustice of it all, you pick up your coat, run to the school and confront the bully yourself. Mama bear has been poked, and the reaction is instinctively protection. 

What would you do? This story comes from one Australian mum’s reaction to the bullying that her daughter faced. But this isn’t an isolated case. There are hundreds of these types of stories across the world every year. You might have been privy to a conversation between a parent and their child where the child has been hit and encouraged to hit the person back, but twice as hard so they won’t do it again. Maybe you have had a similar conversation with your own child.

The quandry for Christian parents

What should our message be as Christians? One full of grace or one that requires us to implement every aspect of the law in order to bring justice to a situation? Does operating out of grace mean that you become a target to bullies? Should we ‘turn the other cheek’ like the Bible advises us (Matthew 5:39)? Does the well-meaning advice of ‘hitting them harder’ turn the victim into the aggressor? Or do we rely on the law to fight the injustices that we face? Which is it? grace or law?

I have felt the raw emotions of the mama bear who wants only to protect her children from the harm that was done to them

I highly value justice. When I first graduated from the school of law, I worked at defending injustices. I remember reading cases that would enrage the human part of me; that part that just wanted to be that mama bear and run to naturally make right the injustice that had occurred. But I was rightly confined by the parameters of the law. Without law, we would become a chaotic society where everyone’s sense of right and wrong would be defined by their own sense of morality (or simply their rage). As Christians, we know that our sense of morality comes from our relationship with God, so what does the Bible say about grace versus law?

Refuse to take the law into your own hands

The Bible recounts the life of David. He was a man who chased after God’s own heart (1 Samuel 13:14). God chose David to replace Saul as King after Saul refused to keep God’s commands. But there was a long period of waiting from when David was privately anointed as king at his father’s house, to when he was publicly anointed as king over Judah and eventually king over Israel. During this period, Israel was still being led by a crooked king who was not leading by God’s grace. There were many moments during these years when David had the opportunity to kill King Saul and take his rightful place as king. After all, King Saul was not following God’s commands and was pursuing David in order to kill him. Surely it would be classed as self-defense if David had killed Saul? But David refused to take the law into his own hands and instead operated out of grace. The Bible recounts a conversation between King Saul and David, where David tells Saul that it is the Lord who will avenge the wrongdoings and not human hands (1 Samuel 24).   

But can we truly operate out of a position of grace as a Christian? Or is there room to also work within the parameters of the law?

Remember to use law rightly

David had lots of sons and daughters. The Bible tells us a story of two of them; Absalom and Amnon. Amnon ‘fell in love’ with his half-sister, Tamar and raped her out of his lust and desire. Both her father King David, and her brother, Absalom, knew of what had happened to Tamar, but did not use the law to punish Amnon or restore Tamar. David was furious at the act but ignored the action that needed to follow. It wasn’t grace that David operated out of, because grace would have had room for disciplining his son Amnon and restoration of Tamar. David operated from a place of ignorance hoping that time would heal. What eventually happened was that Absalom killed his brother for the act of indecency two years later! King David eventually banished Absalom from the Kingdom and later allowed him back, but no restoration of relationship occurred. Both David and Absalom failed to talk about how they should have sought justice for Tamar through the law.

As a mum, I have felt the raw emotions of the mama bear who wants only to protect her children from the harm that was done to them. I have had to work within the parameters of the law when protecting them from a bully who abused all three of them for years in a system that was very often not fair for the victim. I have campaigned for the rights of victims in order to invoke a change in the law to protect a group of people. But for me the most tangible way that I’ve fought injustice has been to allow God’s grace to work in the situation and to trust that God will indeed keep his promises to ultimately bring justice. It is never easy. I still work within the parameters that the law allows me to, but I partner a sense of earthly justice with God’s grace and love that he will work all things for his glory.