Why God Uses Warriors Who Have Seen Violence
A Study on Paul and the Redeeming Purpose of God
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NOBODY TAUGHT ME
I grew up in the same church from the time I was a child until I left for the Army. It was a good church. Presbyterian. The people were faithful and the teaching was solid. They told me what they believed I needed to know about the Christian life. They walked me through what Christ had done for me, the love of God, the hope of salvation, the basics of the faith. And I am grateful for every bit of it.
But they never taught me what the Bible says about being a warrior.
They never showed me the Scriptures that speak directly to the men who carry weapons, who stand between the innocent and the violent, who are sent into places where evil has taken root. They never told me that God ordained warriors. They never explained that the force a soldier applies, or a police officer applies in the line of duty, is not just legally permitted but Scripturally authorized. Nobody sat me down and said: the Bible speaks to what you are about to do with your life. Here is what it says.
So when I came home from service, and later when I spent years in law enforcement, and I saw what I saw and did what I did, I carried it alone. I carried it without any theological framework to put it in. And for thirty years, I genuinely believed I was probably going to hell. Not because anyone told me I was. But because no one ever told me I was not. No one ever opened the Word and showed me that what I had done was not just permissible in God’s eyes but that He had, in fact, sent me there to do it.
Thirty years is a long time to carry that weight without an answer.
If you are carrying the same weight right now, this article is for you. And I want you to know before we go any further that I am not writing this from a classroom or a seminary. I am writing it from the other side of a career that took me to places most people will never go. I have stood where you have stood. I have carried what you are carrying. And what I am about to show you from Scripture changed everything for me. I believe it will do the same for you.
WHAT THE CHURCH MISSED
The church did not lie to me. It just left things out. And what it left out cost men like me decades of unnecessary weight.
Here is what most churches never teach: God has always used warriors. He raised them up, equipped them, sent them, and honored them. The men Scripture calls mighty are not footnotes or cautionary tales. They are presented as faithful servants who did what God required in the situations He placed them in.
Psalm 144:1 opens with these words from David, a man who had seen more violence than most:
“Blessed be the LORD, my rock, who trains my hands for war, and my fingers for battle.”
Psalm 144:1, ESV
David did not apologize for that verse. He led with it as an act of worship. He credited God with his training and his capability as a warrior. The same man who wrote about still waters and the valley of the shadow of death also wrote about God training his hands for war. Both are true. Both belong in the same Bible. Both describe the same God.
The church tends to teach the 23rd Psalm and leave out the 144th. That is a disservice to every man sitting in the pew who has ever had to use force in the line of duty. It leaves warriors carrying weight that Scripture was always meant to address, alone in the dark with questions that have answers, if anyone would just open the book all the way.
GOD ORDAINED WARRIORS TO STOP EVIL
Here is the verse that changed the way I understood my entire career.
Genesis 9:6. Right after the flood, God is speaking to Noah and establishing the order of the world going forward. He says this:
“Whoever sheds the blood of man, by man shall his blood be shed, for God made man in his own image.”
Genesis 9:6, ESV
Read that carefully. Because man bears the image of God, violence against the innocent is an offense against God Himself. And God’s response to that offense is not to reach down from heaven and strike the violent man down. His response is to ordain that it be done by human hands.
By man shall his blood be shed.
That is not a description of what sometimes happens in a fallen world. That is a divine decree. God established from the earliest pages of Scripture that stopping violent men is a task He assigned to human beings. He built that into the order of creation. He looked at a world where evil men would prey on image-bearers, and He raised up other men to stand in the gap and stop it. That has been His design from the beginning.
And then the Apostle Paul made it even more explicit in Romans 13:
“For he is God’s servant for your good. But if you do wrong, be afraid, for he does not bear the sword in vain. For he is the servant of God, an avenger who carries out God’s wrath on the wrongdoer.”
Romans 13:4, ESV
Paul calls the governing authority, the man with the badge and the weapon, the servant of God. Not a necessary evil. Not a compromise with a violent world. A servant. An avenger who carries out God’s wrath on the wrongdoer. That word avenger is not soft language. Paul meant exactly what he wrote. The man with lawful authority who stops a violent offender is carrying out something God authorized and God directed.
I want to tell you about two days from my career that I have carried for a long time. I am telling you these stories because I want you to understand that I am not teaching you theory. I have stood exactly where you have stood. And I want you to see what Genesis 9:6 and Romans 13:4 look like in real life.
1993: MY FIRST SWAT CALLOUT
It was 1993. It was my first SWAT callout.
A gang from Los Angeles had come to our city. These were not small-time criminals. They were known for bank takeover robberies. Their method was to walk into a bank and take it over by force, firing shots inside to establish control, then stripping the place and running. They were violent, they were organized, and now they were in our city.
We knew they were there. We knew they were planning a job. When they left their hotel room to go hit the bank, we were ready. We moved to initiate a high-risk car stop before they could get inside and put civilians in danger.
During that stop, the suspects tried to access fully automatic weapons from the trunk of their vehicle. The situation went from a car stop to a gunfight in seconds. In the melee that followed, one of the suspects was shot.
I took that suspect into custody as he was bleeding out on the ground. I was right there with him. A paramedic from Oakland came over to render aid, and I remember him like it was yesterday. He was crusty. He had seen everything. He worked on that man with the kind of nonchalance that only comes from years of treating people in the worst moments of their lives.
Then something happened that I have never forgotten.
The suspect regained consciousness for a moment. He looked up at me and at the paramedic and asked us if he was going to die.
The paramedic looked him square in the eye and said: “You’re already dead.”
His eyes rolled back in his head and he died.
I have thought about that moment hundreds of times over the years. A violent man who came to our city to terrorize innocent people, who reached for a fully automatic weapon, who was about to harm people who had done nothing to deserve it. And for a long time, I had nothing to put around it. No framework. No Scripture. No answer. Just the memory and the weight of it, sitting in the dark with no place to go.
The church I grew up in never taught me Genesis 9:6. And I want to tell you something that I think is important: the church I am in right now recently went through the book of Genesis and they skipped right over that verse. Did not stop. Did not address it. Moved on like it was not there.
That verse has been in the Bible the entire time. And nobody taught it to me.
I found it myself. After I retired, I started reading the Bible in a way I never had before. I had the time and I had the weight of a career’s worth of unanswered questions, and I started digging. And when I got to Genesis 9:6, something shifted. Whoever sheds the blood of man, by man shall his blood be shed, for God made man in his own image. I read it and I stopped. I read it again. And for the first time, I understood my place. I understood why I was on that street in 1993. I understood what it meant that we were the ones who were there. God did not send lightning from heaven. He did not intervene in some supernatural way. He sent men. He built that into the order of creation from the very beginning. And on that day in 1993, we were those men.
I wish I had known that thirty years earlier. I wish someone had opened that book and shown it to me before I ever put on a uniform. But nobody did. And so I carried it alone, for years, wondering what it meant, wondering if I was right with God, wondering if the things I had done in the line of duty had put something between me and Him that could not be undone.
They had not. They never had. Scripture said so the whole time. Nobody just told me.
JOSIAH
The second story involves a man I will only call Josiah. I have thought about that name often and wondered if he came from a Christian family, what they must have felt when they found out what he had become.
Josiah was a white supremacist. He was a dangerous and violent man. At some point he took hostages inside an apartment and we were called out.
I was on a four-man react team staged at the door. Our job during a standoff is to be ready to make immediate entry and stop the threat if the suspect tries to kill the hostages before negotiations can resolve the situation. You stage at that door and you wait, and you stay ready, and you do not let your mind go anywhere that takes your edge away.
During the standoff, Josiah made his move.
He came out of the apartment with a Mac-11 submachine gun in his hand, concealed under a blanket, with the hostages pulled close to him. He was trying to move them to a vehicle so he could flee. He believed that if he could get to that vehicle, he could get away. He was not planning on releasing those people. Men like Josiah do not release hostages. They eliminate witnesses.
What he did not know was that just a few weeks before that callout, we had trained for exactly that scenario. We had drilled the specific situation of a suspect trying to move hostages to a vehicle. We had worked the tactics, rehearsed the responses, and built the muscle memory for what to do when it happened.
In SWAT, we used to operate on a concept called speed, surprise, and violence of action. That language is not used anymore because it is not considered politically correct. But it is the correct and appropriate response when you are executing a hostage rescue and someone is about to kill innocent people. You do not have the luxury of hesitation. You act with speed, you act with surprise, and you act with overwhelming force before the threat can carry out what he intends to do.
We used violence of action on Josiah that day.
He went to prison. Last I checked he was still there, though he was close to getting out. He is a very dangerous man. He would have gone on to hurt and kill people if we had not stopped him that day. I do not say that casually. I say it because it is true, and because I have thought about it many times since.
I think about that day often. I think about the training that happened just weeks before, that prepared us for that exact situation. I think about the fact that those hostages went home. And I think about what it means that God orchestrated all of that. The timing. The training. The placement of four specific men at that door at that moment.
That was not coincidence. That was providence. He sent us there. He equipped us for exactly that situation weeks in advance. And those innocent people walked out because God ordained that they would be protected by men He had already prepared.
If the church had taught me Genesis 9:6 before I put on a uniform, I would have understood all of that thirty years ago instead of carrying it as shame.
HE SENT YOU THERE ON PURPOSE
There is a verse in Ecclesiastes that most people glide past without stopping:
“A time for war, and a time for peace.”
Ecclesiastes 3:8b, ESV
Solomon, the wisest man who ever lived, writing under the inspiration of God, includes war in the list of things that have their proper time and place under heaven. He does not call it a failure of peace. He does not apologize for it. He acknowledges it as part of the created order that God governs.
And then there is Romans 8:28, which warriors often hear quoted without anyone applying it to what they actually carried:
“And we know that for those who love God all things work together for good, for those who are called according to his purpose.”
Romans 8:28, ESV
All things. Paul does not say some things. He does not say the pleasant things, or the things that look obviously redemptive from the outside. He says all things. That includes the deployments. The callouts. The decisions made in fractions of a second. The scenes you cannot unsee. The men you had to stop.
God was not absent from any of that. He was not surprised by any of it. He does not waste the experience of men who belong to Him. He shapes it. He redirects it. He uses it in ways that a life without hardship could never produce.
Think about the SWAT training that happened just weeks before Josiah made his move. God knew what was coming. He made sure we were ready. That is not a small thing. That is the sovereign hand of God moving in the middle of a law enforcement career, preparing His servants for what He was about to send them to do.
The same thing is true of your career. The training you did. The calls you answered. The situations you were placed in. He was not absent. He was present and purposeful in every one of them.
PAUL, THE VIOLENT MAN GOD APPOINTED
If you need one more piece of evidence that God uses men marked by violence, look at the man He chose to write most of the New Testament.
Before Paul was an apostle, he was a persecutor. He did not just stand nearby. He held the coats of the men who stoned Stephen to death. He entered homes, dragged believers out, and handed them over to imprisonment. He hunted the church of God with institutional authority and genuine conviction, believing he was doing God’s work. By any measure, Paul was a dangerous man.
And then Christ stopped him on the road to Damascus. And this is what Paul wrote about it later:
“I thank him who has given me strength, Christ Jesus our Lord, because he judged me faithful, appointing me to his service, though formerly I was a blasphemer, persecutor, and insolent opponent. But I received mercy because I had acted ignorantly in unbelief.”
1 Timothy 1:12–13, ESV
Paul does not hide from his past. He names it plainly: blasphemer, persecutor, insolent opponent. He puts it right there in his own letter for anyone to read. And then he says God judged him faithful and appointed him.
That appointment was not made in ignorance of Paul’s history. It was made in full view of it. God did not look past what Paul had done. He looked at it directly and said: I can use this man.
Your history does not disqualify you from service. The men who have been to the hardest places and come back with the most weight are often exactly the ones God can use in ways no one else can. Not because hardship is good, but because a man who has been in it understands grace at a depth that comfortable living simply cannot produce. A man who has held someone while they died understands the weight of human life in a way that cannot be taught in a classroom. God can work with that. He has always worked with that.
THE WEIGHT IS THE PLATFORM
Many warriors cope by locking down. Shutting off emotion. Going quiet. It can feel like toughness. What is actually happening is you are sealing off the part of yourself that God wants to meet.
I did it for years. Carrying what I carried, not knowing what to do with it, not having a framework for it, defaulting to silence and compartmentalization because that is what the job teaches you to do. And the weight does not get lighter in that room. It just sits there.
Paul had what he called a thorn in the flesh. He begged God three times to remove it. And God said no. Here is what He said instead:
“But he said to me, ‘My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.’ Therefore I will boast all the more gladly of my weaknesses, so that the power of Christ may rest upon me.”
2 Corinthians 12:9, ESV
God did not remove Paul’s weakness. He inhabited it. He made it the platform for His power. For a warrior, weakness may look like intrusive memories. It may look like a dying man’s face when he asks if he is going to make it. It may look like the weight of a decision made in a fraction of a second that you have replayed a thousand times since. It may look like thirty years of quietly wondering if you are going to hell.
Grace does not mean pretending those things are not real. It means bringing them to Christ instead of locking them in a room. It means trusting that the same God who sent you to stop evil people has something to say about what you carried home from doing it.
He does not waste it. He redeems it. And He uses men who know their limits in ways He simply cannot use men who have never been tested.
THE CHARGE
Thirty years is too long to carry something God already has an answer to.
You were not an accident in those situations. You were not operating outside of God’s design. You were His servant, bearing the sword He authorized, stopping the evil He will not leave unanswered, protecting the image He placed in every innocent person at risk. He trained you for it. He placed you there. He was present in every callout, every deployment, every decision made under pressure.
Genesis 9:6 says by man shall his blood be shed. Romans 13:4 says you are God’s servant, an avenger who carries out His wrath on the wrongdoer. Psalm 144:1 says the Lord trains your hands for war. Scripture is not embarrassed by any of that. You should not be either.
God is not looking for men with clean histories and no hard memories. He is looking for men who have been tested enough to know they cannot do this alone, and who are willing to bring what they carry to the only One who can actually redeem it.
That is you.
Stop disqualifying yourself from something God already qualified you for. Submit your history to Him. Trust His sufficiency. Step into what He built you for.
The men coming up behind you need someone who has been there to tell them the truth. Not the version the church left out. The whole truth. The one that includes Genesis 9:6 and Romans 13:4 and what it actually means that God sent you there. They need to hear it from a man who held someone while they died and came out the other side knowing that God was present in that moment and that He had a purpose in it.
Be that man.
Reflect on the study this week by completing this study guide.
Excellent article Keith. I wish I had understood that verse early in my 30 year career. Those dark nights can hang over you for many years.
Great article, keep up the good work 👏