How to Overcome Offence: The Poison That Tastes Like Justice

There is one weapon the enemy reaches for before any other, and it works on everyone. It has quietly ended marriages, emptied ministries, and pulled people out of their destinies, and it does its worst damage precisely because it never feels like an attack. It does not feel like sin. It feels like being right; it feels like justice. Learning how to overcome offence is one of the most important things a believer can do, because offence is the poison that tastes like justice, and grace is the medicine that heals it.

This post will show you the difference between hurt and offence, the twelve hidden stages that carry a person from a small wound to destruction, and the steps that break its grip. We will trace the journey through one man who walked every stage: Absalom, the son of David. For companion truths, read how to overcome sin and the earlier teaching on how to deal with offense.

1. Offence Is Guaranteed, and It Is Bait

Jesus did not say offence might come. He said it is impossible for it not to.

“It is impossible but that offences will come: but woe unto him, through whom they come!” — Luke 17:1

No one is immune. The enemy does not need you to fall into scandalous sin; he only needs to keep you hurting, because a hurt believer becomes inactive, shut down in heart, relationships, and future, all while believing they are simply standing up for themselves.

So hold this distinction. Hurt is what happens to you. Offence is what you do with it. A wound is done to you, often unfairly. Offence is what you decide about that wound afterward, and left undealt with it becomes a residence, a place you now live. The word Jesus used is the Greek skandalon, the part of a trap where the bait is fastened. So offence is bait, and behind it is a hook. The mouse never sees the steel bar, it sees the cheese; the offended believer never sees the prison, they only see that they are right. That is what makes it different from every other sin: lust feels like lust, but offence feels like righteousness. Every offended person in history felt completely justified.

2. The Twelve Stages of Offence

Offence is not a single moment; it is a staircase, and Absalom walked every step of it. The mercy hidden in a staircase is that you can step off at any point.

Stage 1: Expectation. Unspoken, unsurrendered expectations are pre-written accusations. When you silently expect something and never voice it, you have already drafted the charge you will one day file.

Stage 2: Disappointment. The expectation goes unmet. This is the crossroads: you either take the thought captive or let disappointment write a story. Absalom’s was real; his sister Tamar was violated and justice never came. The wound was legitimate, which is exactly what makes the next stages so deceptive.

Stage 3: Misinterpretation. You begin to misread everything. Neutral actions get assigned hostile motives. What was about a situation quietly becomes about a person.

Stage 4: The internal conversation. The dialogue moves inside your head, where you always win the argument with someone who is not in the room. You overanalyse a tone, replay a message, rehearse a rejection that never happened; the Global School of Ministry unpacks this spiral in Why Am I Triggered? Hebrews calls it a “root of bitterness”, and a root grows underground, unseen, before it breaks the surface.

Stage 5: Emotional attachment. The offence stops being something you feel and becomes something you feed. It becomes part of your identity, something you nurture rather than something you want gone.

Stage 6: Confirmation bias. You actively collect evidence. Everything the person does is read as proof. This is the last of the hidden stages; after it, the harvest becomes visible.

Stage 7: Withdrawal. You pull back, from the person, then the community, then fellowship. This is usually the first outward sign, and it is precisely the wrong move, because isolation hands your imagination free rein.

Stage 8: Self-justification. You build the case aloud, explaining to anyone who will listen why your withdrawal is righteous. Every retelling reinforces the wall.

Stage 9: Bitterness. Time does not heal an undealt offence; it ferments it. And bitterness defiles not only you but the many around you.

Stage 10: Division. The offence turns contagious. Like Absalom at the city gate quietly winning hearts, the offended person pulls others into their grievance. This is the anatomy of a church split.

Stage 11: Rebellion. The mask comes off. What began as a real wound over Tamar becomes open rebellion, and Tamar is not even mentioned anymore; the fight is now about power. Offended people find each other, and the offended almost always recruit a voice that sounds like God but is not, and it counsels them into ruin.

Stage 12: Hanging between heaven and earth. Absalom was caught by his hair in a tree, left suspended between heaven and earth, and killed there. That is the final address of the offended person: too bitter to reach heaven’s peace above, too proud to repair earth’s relationships below, belonging nowhere. Coming down would have meant forgiving and making things right, and pride could not do it, so he hung there while life went on without him.

3. Offence Cannot Cost Your Salvation, but It Can Suspend Your Destiny

If you are in Christ, your forgiveness is settled; you forgive because you already are, not in order to be. So offence cannot cancel your salvation, a truth explored in why you cannot lose your salvation. But it can absolutely suspend your destiny.

Bitterness makes you fall short of grace, not because grace stops flowing, but because a clenched fist cannot receive from an open hand. This is why you can meet someone ten years into their offence and find them in the same condition, or worse: no fruit, no movement, saved and completely stuck. It is the quiet root beneath much Christian entitlement, and it reaches into ordinary life too, where people resent a boss and then wonder why promotion never comes. God will often not move you forward while your heart is in this condition.

Notice what caught Absalom: his hair, his glory, the thing he refused to cut. When you refuse to cut your pride, it eventually catches you, and the moment you step in to defend yourself, God steps back.

“Avenge not yourselves, but rather give place unto wrath: for it is written, Vengeance is mine; I will repay, saith the Lord.” — Romans 12:19

4. How to Overcome Offence: The Way Down From the Tree

Grace offers an exit at every stage. Here is how you get down.

Step 1: Go to the person directly, and alone. Do not recruit at the gate like Absalom.

“Go and tell him his fault between thee and him alone: if he shall hear thee, thou hast gained thy brother.” — Matthew 18:15

The goal is gaining your brother, not winning the verdict. The question is never who was right; it is whether the relationship matters more than the offence. The Global School of Ministry reflects on this in The Relationship You Left That Never Left You.

Step 2: Forgive fast, and from the heart. Not eventually, not once they have earned it, not merely in word. It does not matter whether they were wrong; immediate forgiveness is what keeps the wall from ever being built.

Step 3: Stay planted. Withdrawal is the enemy’s first visible win. Do not leave the very place that could heal you over a wound that will pass; this is one of the great reasons for being planted under one shepherd, because the offended heart always wants to uproot, and staying rooted is often what saves it.

Step 4: Keep the cross bigger than your case. Jesus, crucified, said Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do. If the cross stays larger than your grievance, no offence can hold you. And forgive from grace, not for it: God’s forgiveness of you is not earned by your forgiveness of others, which would put your salvation back onto your own performance, the mixture unpacked in grace vs performance Christianity. You forgive because you have already been forgiven.

Conclusion: a mirror, not a weapon

Take this as a mirror, not a witch-hunt. The temptation is to think of who else needs it. Resist that, and ask honestly which stage you are standing on right now. Whether it is stage one or stage eleven, His mercies are new every morning, and the staircase has an exit at every level.

Offence is not worth your destiny, not worth being suspended between heaven and earth over something someone did, whether their fault was real or imagined. So do the thing offence hates: pick the one relationship you have been avoiding, and go make it right, not to prove you were right, but to heal what was broken.

Pray this with me: Heavenly Father, in the name of Jesus, forgive me where I have taken offence. I choose today to repent and to go and make things right with whoever hurt me, not to prove my righteousness, but to heal the relationship. I let go of every case I have been building. Keep the cross bigger than my grievance, and let me draw freely from Your grace again. In Jesus’ mighty name, amen.

This post is adapted from Prophet Leon du Preez’s sermon “Offence: The Poison That Tastes Like Justice.”