The Lord is a God who avenges.
O God who avenges, shine forth.
2 Rise up, Judge of the earth;
pay back to the proud what they deserve.
3 How long, Lord, will the wicked,
how long will the wicked be jubilant? Psalm 94:1-3

Without God in their lives, people will sin more and more.

It’s like an addiction.

At first there’s a euphoric feeling and nothing can ever change that, until you come down from the high about an hour or two later. Then it becomes reality again. But you want to go back to that high because it felt so good and didn’t harm anyone except for yourself. So you do it again and again and again. You can’t stop and you can’t get enough. It’s the very definition of a “vicious cycle.”

And because people sin without apparent consequence, they continue to sin. There’s no end to what they can do.

Or so they think.

As practicing Believers, we know that there will be a day of reckoning. It may not be in this life (though often it is), but it will come.

The Judge of the earth will in fact return. Nobody gets away with anything. Those who went to their graves thinking that their deeds went unnoticed and unpunished are in for a big surprise.

So, the encouragement we can gain from this is that God sees it all. He may not act right away (or even at all) but He sees it all.