A Sip
Salut blogworms! The Lord’s Grace, mercy and peace, through forgiveness, to you. Well, with university back in the swing of things and rolling along, this is the first blog for 2010 based on a message I facilitated for our university Christian ministry, ‘Bond Christian Connection’ (BCC), last night. The series we chose to do this semester is based on a book by the son of the famous and respected modern Reformed Christian theologian R.C. Sproul called “Believing God: 12 Biblical Promises Christians Struggle to Accept”.
Sproul’s son, funnily enough called R.C. Sproul Jr., wrote the book in response to what he considered a polarised reaction by primarily the orthodox side of the fence against the heresy of the prosperity gospel movement. What Sproul Jr. observed was that, whereas the proponents of prosperity theology abused, misinterpreted and perverted God’s promises, the orthodox Evangelicals had reacted against this by reluctantly believing any of the promises of God. Sproul Jr.’s book aimed to reveal the errors on both sides; the self-glorifying narcissism of one and the dangerous skepticism of the other; and how we must come together and believe God on the most fundamental promises in Scripture. And like Sproul Jr., I also pray that this message will encourage and incite you to believe on this most pivotal and beautiful of all Biblical promises!
Please note that for those who are regular readers of this blog, this post will be a little bit of revision for you, drawing upon and containing sections of a few earlier posts such as “The Lord is Cross” and “The Good, The Bad & The Vine”. Nonetheless, this content is of such a fundamental nature that it cannot hurt to reiterate and revisit it. Blessed reading!
Spring Time!
The Biblical promise from Sproul Jr.’s book that I chose to facilitate is on forgiveness. Before we get into exegetically discussing this wonderful topic, let me share with you an excerpt from Sproul Jr.’s book where he recounts a story his father told him that typifies the struggle we as Christians have with the promise of forgiveness:
“My father tells a story from his days as a college professor. Like most professors, he spent several hours a week in his office meeting with students. A young lady came to see him, deeply troubled. It seems she had been behaving inappropriately with her boyfriend. She explained that her hardship was less about what she had done and more about her current condition – though she had repented frequently and with great vigour, she didn’t feel forgiven for her sin. She poured out her story and her heart to my father, who responded with great pastoral wisdom. ‘I think I know what you need to do,’ he said. ‘I’d suggest that you go back to your dorm room, get on your knees, and plead with God to forgive you of your sin.’ The poor girl was even more heartbroken after that. ‘Dr. Sproul,’ she said, ‘I’m afraid you haven’t been listening. Repenting is all I’ve been doing, and it hasn’t done any good.’ ‘I have heard you just fine,’ my father replied. ‘This time when you repent, I don’t want you to repent for what happened with your boyfriend. I want you to beg God to forgive you for not believing His promises. He said, “If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness” (1 John 1:9). God is utterly unimpressed with our efforts to beat ourselves psychologically for our sins. What He wants is a true humility that will manifest itself as faith, as believing God.’” (p.13)
So, here lies the stimulus Bible verse and promise for this topic, that “if we confess our sins, He is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness” (1Jn 1:9). O and what a glorious promise it is! And how we take it for granted! Philip Yancey in his book, “What’s So Amazing About Grace?”, quotes a counselor called David Seamands who summarises the spiritual condition that many Christians are in as a result of failing to believe this most important of Biblical promises:
“Many years ago I was driven to the conclusion that the two major causes of most emotional problems among evangelical Christians are these: the failure to understand, receive, and live out God’s unconditional grace and forgiveness; and the failure to give out that unconditional love, forgiveness, and grace to other people…We read, we hear, we believe a good theology of grace. But that’s not the way we live. The good news of the Gospel of grace has not penetrated the level of our emotions.” (p.15)
Notice that Mr Seamands puts the problem down to a “failure to understand, receive, and live out” God’s unconditional forgiveness? Well, as such, I have divided this message into these three sections; understanding it, receiving it, and living it out; and aim to tackle these three parts of the problem. However, as always, “unless the Lord builds the house, they labour in vain who build it” (Ps 127:1). In other words, I will do my best to address these parts of God’s forgiveness faithfully, but ultimately, whether this affects you or not is dependent on the working and illumination of the Holy Spirit. Therefore, I pray that He will open your eyes to the glorious truths discussed below!
1) UNDERSTANDING THE BAD NEWS - WHY DO WE NEED TO BE FORGIVEN?
Before we delve into what forgiveness means, we must first establish the reason forgiveness is even a topic in the Christian walk to begin with. What is it that we need to be forgiven of? Whilst some of you may yawn at such a ‘basic’ question, it is one which we often either do not fully understand, or one which we exhibit great indifference towards. I am, of course, talking about the problem of sin. Far from simply consisting of a few bad but ‘normal’ mistakes we have made in life, the Bible presents sin as the very serious and critical problem that mankind faces. It is not Global Warming, world poverty or alcoholism that is the major threat that we as humans face, but rather it is the source of all these horrors and more – our own filthy sinfulness.
To demonstrate and explore this and other necessary truths, let us observe the contextual passage which our stimulus Bible verse comes from, 1 John 1:5-6:
God is light and in Him is no darkness at all. If we say that we have fellowship with Him, and walk in darkness, we lie and do not practice the truth.
What the Apostle John is here saying about sin is that it is in direct contrast and opposition to God’s very nature. Sin is, by definition, that which is contrary to God’s Holy character. It also tells us God’s stance on our sinfulness; that the darkness that is our sin cannot dwell with God. God detests sin and will not tolerate it. This, we will later see, is why sin is such the grave problem it is for us. John continues in 1 John 1:8-10:
If we say that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us. If we confess our sins, He is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness. If we say that we have not sinned, we make Him a liar, and His word is not in us.
Here, John articulates not only the problem, but describes the essence of human nature - all men are sinners. John echoes the numerous powerfully convicting statements about what we call Original Sin that his fellow Apostle, Paul, makes in his Epistle to the Romans.
We have already made the charge that Jews and Gentiles alike are all under sin. As it is written: “There is no one righteous, not even one; there is no one who understands, no one who seeks God. All have turned away, they have together become worthless; there is no one who does good, not even one." (Ro 3:9-12)
It matters not where you are from or what your religion is, Paul baldly proclaims that “there is no difference [between Jew or Gentile], for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God” (Ro 3:22-23). With repeated and systematic statements like this in all his epistles, Paul strikes fatal blows to any notion of what we now call, Pelagianism. This theological and hamartiological belief (which I explained in greater detail in my blog, “The Good, The Bad & The Vine”) basically held that men were born inherently good. Paul consistently and constantly counters this heretical view by explaining, “I know that nothing good lives in me, that is, in my sinful nature” (Ro 7:18).
It is not simply that we as humans do sinful actions every now and then; it is that we are totally sinful in nature. This is not to say that we are as bad as we could be, but we are certainly nowhere near as good as we should be. But even our supposed ‘good’ deeds are tainted by our sinfulness. As Isaiah says in 64:6, “All of us have become like one who is unclean, and all our righteous acts are like filthy rags; we all shrivel up like a leaf, and like the wind our sins sweep us away.” None of us are exempt from the stain of sin in our lives, no matter how ‘good’ others (or even ourselves) may think we are. As theological professor Michael Horton so vividly expressed this in his book, “Christless Christianity”:
“The biblical message is far deeper and richer, however, both in its bad news and its good news. The bad news is far worse than making mistakes or failing to live up to the legalistic standards of fundamentalism. It is that the best efforts of the best Christians, on the best days, in the best frame of heart and mind, with the best motives fall short of that true righteousness and holiness that God requires. Our best efforts cannot satisfy God’s justice.” (p.91)
This anthropological truth that man, no matter how hard he tries, is sinful by nature and deed; that he is “abominable and filthy”, ‘drinking iniquity like water’ (Job 15:16); poses a problem because it means that, as Paul articulates in Romans 6:23, “the wages of sin is death.” Not only can we not dwell with God, but we must face punishment for our sin, both in the physical now, and the eternal after; we must die both physically here, and suffer eternal death in Hell. Someone has to pay the price for our disobedience and rebellion against our Holy God, and that someone is us…or is it?
2) UNDERSTANDING WHAT FORGIVENESS IS
Before we move onto the Good News in answer to that last cliffhanger question, we must first briefly address another ‘assumed’ and ‘basic’ question – what does forgiveness mean?
“I, even I, am He who blots out your transgressions for My own sake; and I will not remember your sins.” (Isa 43:25)
God’s forgiveness of His people’s sins features as one of the major themes in Isaiah’s writings. As God succinctly explains in the above verse, forgiveness is Him not remembering our sins, legally acquitting us of our guilt and concealing our sins (Joel 3:21). ‘What does He conceal our sins with?’ you may ask. Well, we will see in its glorious truth in the next section.
“I will pardon all their iniquities by which they have sinned and by which they have transgressed against Me.” (Jer 33:8)
Isaiah’s fellow Prophet, Jeremiah, also records God’s great words about His promise to forgive His people’s sins. Here, God also expresses another truth about sin – sin is first and foremost an offence against Him. Far from being a distant and impassive observer in our sinful affairs, God is directly involved and affected by our transgressions because ultimately, they are crimes hostile to Him.
The most commonly used word for forgiveness in Hebrew is the word, ‘calach’, which basically means to pardon or to spare from death. This gives us a clear definition of what forgiveness involves – God sparing us from the death we justly deserve, absolving us of our guilt. However, it is also interesting to note that in the Greek, it is the word ‘aphiemi’ which is commonly used to signify forgiveness. This Greek word can have a much wider usage and amongst other things, can mean ‘to suffer’. As we will later see, this connection between God suffering and God forgiving us our sins is central to the Good News.
For as the heavens are high above the earth, so great is His mercy toward those who fear Him; as far as the east is from the west, so far has He removed our transgressions from us. As a father pities his children, so the Lord pities those who fear Him. For He knows our frame; He remembers that we are dust. (Ps 103:11-14)
God’s forgiveness is a reflection and manifestation of God’s mercy. God is not just a just and wrathful God, but He is also a loving and merciful God who pities us like children, casting our sinfulness as far away as possible. These great and beautiful theological truths should spur us to exclaim in wonder with the Prophet Micah:
Who is a God like You, pardoning iniquity and passing over the transgression of the remnant of His heritage? He does not retain His anger forever, because He delights in mercy. He will again have compassion on us, and will subdue our iniquities. You will cast all our sins into the depths of the sea. (Mic 7:18-19)
But, now that I have described what forgiveness means, let us turn to the most important question to answer – how is it that God forgives us?
3) UNDERSTANDING THE GOOD NEWS - HOW ARE WE FORGIVEN?
To fully answer this question, R.C. Sproul Jr. explains that there are two parts to God’s promise of forgiveness in 1 John 1:9. The first is that He is “faithful” to forgive us our sins.
“When we fail to believe His promises, we fail to believe that He is faithful. We think that His promises are much like ours, idle words designed to get what we want. But our Father is not like us. He has promised. And He alone cannot break His promise. It is His fidelity, not our worthiness, that guarantees the forgiveness. We slip once again into the folly of Pelagianism when we think that He forgives us because we are worthy, and so when we slip below some standard of worthiness, we think He won’t forgive us. We are sinners, but He is faithful, and it is by His faithfulness that He forgives. In what ways is God faithful in forgiveness? First, He is faithful to His promises, that if we call on the name of His Son we will be saved. This is His offer to us, free and certain. He is faithful to His Word. Second,…and most important of all, He is faithful to His Son. He keeps His promise to Him. It was for the promised bride that Christ went through His humiliation.” (pp.27-28)
The second part is that He is “just” to forgive us our sins. Herein is the real substance to the promise and the Good News, for if we fail to understand this aspect of our forgiveness we can diminish it, or as Sproul Jr. recapitulates it:
“Sometimes I’m afraid we are so eager to praise God for His mercy to us that we misunderstand it, and in a backward sort of way, denigrate it. That is, too often we make the mistake of thinking that we are forgiven for our sins just because God decided to be nice and to look the other way, that He winked at our sins. God is indeed merciful. And He does not remember our sins. They are as far from us as the east is from the west. But it is just that such should be so. Our debt is no more not because He whom we owe forgave it, but because it was paid. He is just to forgive us because He poured out the just punishment for our sins on His Son. And He is just to vindicate us. He raised His Son from the dead to demonstrate that He did not die for His sins, but for ours. In union with Him, raised with Him, we too are vindicated. The Judge of all the earth does judge rightly when He says that sinners like us are not guilty. Jesus paid our debt, and we owe no more. In fact, it would be unjust for God to demand retribution for sins covered on Calvary. In short, it is just that He should forgive us our sins, not because we are worthy, but because worthy is the Lamb.” (p.28)
To explore this justice of God, let us look once again to the rest of the contextual passage in 1 John:
But if we walk in the light as He is in the light, we have fellowship with one another, and the blood of Jesus Christ His Son cleanses us from all sin…My little children, these things I write to you, so that you may not sin. And if anyone sins, we have an Advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous. And He Himself is the propitiation for our sins, and not for ours only but also for the whole world. (1:7-2:2)
Here, John enlightens us as to how we are forgiven – through the sacrificial death of Jesus Christ. As I previously stated in the above sections, sin must be atoned for with the shedding of blood. In the Old Testament, the Israelites would sacrifice animals for their sins, but there was a problem, “for it is not possible that the blood of bulls and goats could take away sins” (Heb 10:4). This was just a band-aid solution to their sinful states. What they (and we) needed was, as opposed to these animal sacrifices which were given regularly and frequently due to their imperfection and inadequacy, a definitive sacrifice for ALL our sins – past, present and future. This atoning sacrifice for our sins was foretold and promised by God through the Prophets, particularly Isaiah.
Surely He has borne our griefs and carried our sorrows; yet we esteemed Him stricken, smitten by God, and afflicted. But He was wounded for our transgressions, He was bruised for our iniquities; the chastisement for our peace was upon Him, and by His stripes we are healed. All we like sheep have gone astray; we have turned, every one, to his own way; and the Lord has laid on Him the iniquity of us all…For the transgressions of My people He was stricken…Yet it pleased the Lord to…make His soul an offering for sin…By His knowledge My righteous Servant shall justify many, for He shall bear their iniquities…And He bore the sin of many, And made intercession for the transgressors. (Isa 53:4-12)
This Messianic promise of self-sacrifice and what we call, ‘Substitutionary Atonement’, was ultimately fulfilled in the person of Jesus Christ who Paul and John described as the “propitiation for our sins”. This essential doctrine basically means that Jesus took the punishment that we justly deserved on Himself.
For when we were still without strength, in due time Christ died for the ungodly. For scarcely for a righteous man will one die; yet perhaps for a good man someone would even dare to die. But God demonstrates His own love toward us, in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us. Much more then, having now been justified by His blood, we shall be saved from wrath through Him. For if when we were enemies we were reconciled to God through the death of His Son, much more, having been reconciled, we shall be saved by His life. And not only that, but we also rejoice in God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom we have now received reconciliation. (Ro 5:6-11)
Because He knew that we could never satisfy His wrath ourselves, God condescended to us in the person of His Son and died in our place on the Cross. Demonstrating His glorious love, He took the death sentence that we as God-hating rebels deserved so that we might be with Him for eternity.
He has delivered us from the power of darkness and conveyed us into the kingdom of the Son of His love, in whom we have redemption through His blood, the forgiveness of sins…For it pleased the Father that in Him all the fullness should dwell, and by Him to reconcile all things to Himself, by Him, whether things on earth or things in heaven, having made peace through the blood of His cross. And you, who once were alienated and enemies in your mind by wicked works, yet now He has reconciled in the body of His flesh through death, to present you holy, and blameless, and above reproach in His sight. (Col 1:13-23)
So, what is the answer to the question, ‘how are we forgiven?’ Well if it hasn’t been made obvious yet, I will clarify it further. We are forgiven through the blood of Christ. As Hebrews 9:22 explains, “without shedding of blood there is no remission.” In order for us to be justly forgiven by God, someone’s blood had to be shed for our sins as a just punishment. God could have justly let this blood be ours, but instead in His eternal and incomprehensible love, He took the initiative and sacrificed His only begotten Son in our place. Our forgiveness may be a free gift of Grace on our part, but it is forgiveness which has come at a cost for God – the blood of His Son. Let us glory in this truth forever and never forget this!
When Jesus saw their faith, He said to the paralytic, “Son, your sins are forgiven you.” And some of the scribes were sitting there and reasoning in their hearts, “Why does this Man speak blasphemies like this? Who can forgive sins but God alone?” But immediately, when Jesus perceived in His spirit that they reasoned thus within themselves, He said to them, “Why do you reason about these things in your hearts?...The Son of Man has power on earth to forgive sins.” (Mk 2:5-10)
It is through Jesus that we are forgiven and ONLY through Jesus that we can be forgiven. He alone, as He said in the above passage, has the authority to forgive us our sins. As God Incarnate, He was the only person to walk this earth who has been perfectly righteous, and as such, His sacrifice was perfect and able to be accepted by the Father. There has only ever been, and there will only ever be, ONE perfect sacrifice for our sins and that has been the Lamb of God, Jesus Christ our Lord. Either you can place your hands on this glorious and worthy Lamb and transfer the heavy burden of your sins onto Him now through Faith, or you can leave this burden on your shoulders and be crushed by its great weight later in Hell. As Martin Luther said, the choice is yours! I, for one, know which one I would rather.
To encapsulate this Good News, Michael Horton continues from the quote in the above sections:
“The biblical message is far deeper and richer, however, both in its bad news and its good news. The bad news is far worse than making mistakes or failing to live up to the legalistic standards of fundamentalism. It is that…our best efforts cannot satisfy God’s justice. Yet the good news is that God has satisfied his own justice and reconciled us to himself through the life, death, and resurrection of his Son. God’s holy law can no longer condemn us because we are in Christ.” (p.91)
4) HOW DO WE RECEIVE GOD’S FORGIVENESS? – CONFESSION AND REPENTANCE
So now that we know how it is that forgiveness by God has been made possible, here comes the application question – how do we receive this forgiveness? Before I answer this, Sproul Jr. has another quite touching story to demonstrate this answer anecdotally:
“In our family of seven children, we have a great deal of routine. We have schedules that we keep, patterns that we follow to keep our household from descending into chaos. Those habits extend even to the ways in which we discipline our children. We have a liturgy that begins with judgment but ends with gospel. Suppose my oldest son has decided to play Picasso with his peanut butter sandwich. Suppose he has smeared peanut butter all over the kitchen wall. He has never done such a thing, mind you, but he has, from time to time, sinned. Our pattern is this. First, I take my son to someplace private. I ask him, ‘Did you smear your peanut butter sandwich on the wall?’ ‘Yes, Daddy’ he replies. ‘Are you allowed to do this?’ ‘No, Daddy.’ At this point, I administer a brief but painful corrective to my son, at which point he hugs me and I hug him back. Then he tells me, ‘I’m sorry, Daddy,’ and I tell him, ‘Daddy forgives you, son, and Daddy loves you, all the time.’ Next my son says this three-part prayer: ‘Dear Lord, please forgive me for disobeying and smearing my peanut butter sandwich on the wall. Thank you that Jesus died for my sins so that I can be forgiven. Please help me to be more obedient.’ By this point, my son’s tears have usually dried up. But if they haven’t yet, if he is struggling to accept my forgiveness, I look my son in the eye and ask him this: ‘Son, what has God promised?’ He replies, ‘If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness.’ In all likelihood, at this point I have tears in my eyes as I embrace my son once more and we rejoice in the glory of the gospel. Understand that when I punish my children, I do so not to even the scales of justice. My action isn’t retributive. The just punishment due to my children (and to my wife and me for that matter) was given two thousand years ago on Calvary. All my children’s sins, past, present, and future, are forgiven. But we are still called to repent.” (pp.26-27)
The answer to this question is the command that John the Baptist loudly proclaimed, “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand!” (Mt 3:2). It is the same command that Jesus Himself proclaimed, “Repent, and believe in the gospel” (Mk 1:15). It is the command that Jesus’ Apostles proclaimed to the ends of the earth, “Repent therefore and be converted, that your sins may be blotted out, so that times of refreshing may come from the presence of the Lord” (Ac 3:19). And it is the same answer to this very day. In order to receive this forgiveness, we must repent and put our faith in Christ (Jn 3:16).
But what is repentance? And what is its relationship to confession? Well, basically repentance is one part of a twofold response to the Gospel of Jesus Christ. And repentance itself has two parts to it. The first part, is acknowledging your sinfulness (this is where confession comes in). In order to receive God’s forgiveness, we must first recognise what it is we are being forgiven of. We must confess that smearing peanut butter on our parents’ walls is a sin, so to speak. The second part of repentance is renouncing this sin and turning from it. This does not mean that we become completely sinless as we will still struggle with indwelling sin for the rest of our lives here on earth (see my previous post called “The Inner Canaanites”). But it does mean that when we do sin, we utterly detest it and strive to fight it. This is why repentance is not a once off vaccination shot in order to be saved. As Paul Washer rightly says, repentance is something which you do for the rest of your life.
“Repent, and let every one of you be baptised in the name of Jesus Christ for the remission of sins; and you shall receive the gift of the Holy Spirit. For the promise is to you and to your children, and to all who are afar off, as many as the Lord our God will call.” (Ac 2:38-39)
Once you have repented, the second aspect to our saving response is to believe the Gospel. Not only must we turn from our sin, but we must now turn to God. Not only do we confess our sins, as though we were confessing in a vacuum to relieve our own guilty consciences and seek a moral catharsis, but we must confess our sins to God. If we turn to Him in Faith, this is only when the promise comes into effect. As Sproul Jr.’s son turns to the loving, yet firm, arms of his father, so too must we turn to the loving and forgiving, yet firm, arms of our Father. To show this repenting and believing response put effectively in practice, Jesus tells a parable in Luke 18:9-14:
To some who were confident of their own righteousness and looked down on everybody else, Jesus told this parable: “Two men went up to the temple to pray, one a Pharisee and the other a tax collector. The Pharisee stood up and prayed about himself: ‘God, I thank you that I am not like other men -robbers, evildoers, adulterers - or even like this tax collector. I fast twice a week and give a tenth of all I get.’ But the tax collector stood at a distance. He would not even look up to heaven, but beat his breast and said, ‘God, have mercy on me, a sinner.’ I tell you that this man, rather than the other, went home justified before God. For everyone who exalts himself will be humbled, and he who humbles himself will be exalted.”
A powerful demonstration of the right response to the Gospel, Jesus shows us here the direct and important correlation between humility and repentance. Rather than coming before God puffed up with pride and deluded with self-righteousness, we must come before our Saviour, lowly in heart and despondent in our sinfulness, turning towards the comfort that only the Justification that He has already accomplished for us on the Cross can bring. As Mark Driscoll often says, sinners are called to repent of their sins, and likewise, religious people are called to repent of their religion. Both must regularly come before their Holy God in humility and gratitude.
Sproul Jr., in warning of a remote and infrequent view of confession, explains the joy that regular confession and repentance can bring:
“Here we walk a thin line. We do not want to view our verbal confession as magic words that lose their power over time. That is, heaven is not populated merely by those who managed to squeeze in a confession just before they died, with no time for another sin to slip through. On the other hand, we cannot adopt a cavalier attitude: ‘Hey, I confessed when I walked down the aisle. Why do I need to confess again?’ As is so often the case, the answer is balance. Our sins are forgiven, now and forever, if we are in Christ. But we remember the very joy of our salvation each time we confess our sins.” (p.27)
5) WHAT IS CLEANSING?
Though I have talked a great deal about God’s forgiveness thus far, there is a dual promise made in John’s First Epistle that we can easily pass over – God will cleanse us of all unrighteousness.
“Come now, and let us reason together,” says the Lord. “Though your sins are like scarlet, they shall be as white as snow; though they are red as crimson, they shall be as wool.” (Isa 1:18)
More than God’s wrath simply passing over us, He goes one step further and declares us to be righteous in His presence, imputing to us a righteousness that we have not earned by works (Ro 4:5); this is what we call ‘Positional Sanctification’. It is where God covers our sins with the cloak of Christ’s perfect Righteousness. God does not just turn a blind eye to our sin, but He promises that one day (when Christ returns at the Day of Judgment), He will remove all our sin from our persons. In the meantime, He is removing and cleansing our sins bit by bit. This is what we call ‘Progressional Sanctification’. However, as much as I would like to delve into explaining this interesting topic, it really deserves its own blog (plus, this blog is already running pretty long and I don’t want to bore you any more than I have to). Before we get back to the topic of forgiveness though, I will let Sproul Jr. summarise what the significance of cleansing is:
“When we stop with the promise of forgiveness, as grand and as shocking as it is, we still miss out on the fullness of the promise. For we long not merely to have God’s judgment pass over us, but to be made white as snow. The promise of the gospel isn’t just that we won’t be judged, but that, in the end, we will be good. Thus, John tells us that not only does He forgive us for our sins, He cleanses us from all unrighteousness. Now that’s a grand promise. Indeed, one of the greatest mysteries for me about the afterlife is found right here. How, I wonder, can I continue to be me, to have a consciousness that is connected to and continues from what I have now, that will have no sin? I wouldn’t recognise me, and I doubt anyone else would either. I’m afraid I’m so puzzled by this because I don’t spend enough time thinking about this promise and the promise of my sanctification. I’m afraid that in my tradition, we think of sanctification as a process at best and as a doctrine at worst. But we almost never see it as John shows it to us here, as a promise. This is His promise. As we despair in our sin, not only are we promised forgiveness, we are promised cleansing. The sorrow that follows in the wake of our sins is crushed now by gospel forgiveness. It is also crushed then, that is, in the future, by gospel cleansing. We need to believe His promises and crush the despair.” (pp.28-29)
6) HOW DO WE LIVE OUT GOD’S FORGIVENESS?
Now that we have dealt with the understanding and receiving aspects of God’s forgiveness, let us move on to the practical based section on how we live out God’s forgiveness in our interaction with people. In other words, what should our response be to this extravagant love that God has lavished on us in forgiving us all our sins?
And behold, a woman in the city who was a sinner, when she knew that Jesus sat at the table in the Pharisee’s house, brought an alabaster flask of fragrant oil, and stood at His feet behind Him weeping; and she began to wash His feet with her tears, and wiped them with the hair of her head; and she kissed His feet and anointed them with the fragrant oil. Now when the Pharisee who had invited Him saw this, he spoke to himself, saying, “This Man, if He were a prophet, would know who and what manner of woman this is who is touching Him, for she is a sinner.” And Jesus answered and said to him,…“There was a certain creditor who had two debtors. One owed five hundred denarii, and the other fifty. And when they had nothing with which to repay, he freely forgave them both. Tell Me, therefore, which of them will love him more?” Simon answered and said, “I suppose the one whom he forgave more.” And He said to him, “You have rightly judged.” Then He turned to the woman and said to Simon, “Do you see this woman? I entered your house;…you gave Me no kiss, but this woman has not ceased to kiss My feet since the time I came in…Therefore I say to you, her sins, which are many, are forgiven, for she loved much. But to whom little is forgiven, the same loves little.” Then He said to her, “Your sins are forgiven.” And those who sat at the table with Him began to say to themselves, “Who is this who even forgives sins?” (Lk 7:37-49)
The first way, is to respond to our glorious Triune God with praise and thanksgiving. Because He in His Grace has forgiven us, we should naturally respond by “singing and making melody in [our] heart to the Lord, giving thanks always for all things to God the Father in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ” (Eph 5:19-20). Put simply, the right response to God forgiving rebels is for them to worship Him, anointing His feet with expensive fragrant oil – their praises. As Jesus so aptly states in the above passage, unless we can begin to appreciate the extent and severity of the sin of which we have been forgiven, we will respond to God’s forgiveness with indifference and trivial love.
Then Peter came to Him and said, “Lord, how often shall my brother sin against me, and I forgive him? Up to seven times?” Jesus said to him, “I do not say to you, up to seven times, but up to seventy times seven. Therefore the kingdom of heaven is like a certain king who wanted to settle accounts with his servants. And when he had begun to settle accounts, one was brought to him who owed ten thousand talents. But as he was not able to pay, his master commanded that he be sold, with his wife and children and all that he had, and that payment be made. The servant therefore fell down before him, saying, ‘Master, have patience with me, and I will pay you all.’ Then the master of that servant was moved with compassion, released him, and forgave him the debt. But that servant went out and found one of his fellow servants who owed him a hundred denarii; and he laid hands on him and took him by the throat, saying, ‘Pay me what you owe!’ So his fellow servant fell down at his feet and begged him, saying, ‘Have patience with me, and I will pay you all.’ And he would not, but went and threw him into prison till he should pay the debt. So when his fellow servants saw what had been done, they were very grieved, and came and told their master all that had been done. Then his master, after he had called him, said to him, ‘You wicked servant! I forgave you all that debt because you begged me. Should you not also have had compassion on your fellow servant, just as I had pity on you?’ And his master was angry, and delivered him to the torturers until he should pay all that was due to him. So My heavenly Father also will do to you if each of you, from his heart, does not forgive his brother his trespasses.” (Mt 18:21-35)
The second way we should respond to God’s forgiveness is for us to, likewise, forgive our neighbours. As we so often pray in the Lord’s Prayer, “forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors” (Mt 6:12). Part of the reason we should repent and confess our sins regularly is that it reminds us of the Gospel of God’s forgiveness. This Gospel of forgiveness, far from being something we learn then move on from, should be proclaimed frequently to the Church so that, like the wind which picks up a boat’s sails and moves it along in the ocean, this Gospel moves us to love our fellow man in a similar way, not out of obligation or seeking merit, but out of gratitude for what God has done for us. As that famous saying of English poet Alexander Pope goes, “to err is human; to forgive is divine.”
What then? Shall we sin because we are not under law but under grace?…Do we then make void the law through faith? Certainly not! On the contrary, we establish the law. (Ro 6:15; 3:31)
The final way we should respond to God’s forgiveness, is to our remaining indwelling sin. D.A. Carson recounts a story from his past in his book, “The Difficult Doctrine of the Love of God”, which demonstrates not only the incorrect response to our sin, but sadly, also the most common response to our sin:
“Many think it is easy for God to forgive. I recall meeting a young and articulate French West African when I was studying in Germany more than twenty years ago. We were both working diligently to improve our German, but once a week or so we had had enough, so we went out for a meal together and retreated to French, a language we both know well. In the course of those meals we got to know each other. I learned that his wife was in London training to be a medical doctor…Pretty soon I discovered that once or twice a week he disappeared into the red light district of town. Obviously he went to pay his money and have his woman. Eventually I got to know him well enough to ask him what he would do if he discovered that his wife were doing something similar in London. ‘Oh,’ he said, ‘I’d kill her.’ ‘That’s a bit of a double standard, isn’t it?’ I replied. ‘You don’t understand. Where I come from in Africa, the husband has the right to sleep with many women, but if a wife does it, she must be killed.’ ‘But you told me that you were raised in a mission school. You know that the God of the Bible does not have double standards like that.’ He gave me a bright smile and replied, ‘Ah, le bon Dieu; il doit nous pardonner; c’est son métier [Ah, God is good; he’s bound to forgive us; that’s his job].’ It is a common view, is it not?…Even when people do not put things quite so bluntly, the idea is popular, not least because, as we have seen, some ill-defined notions of the love of God run abroad in the land – but these notions have been sadly sentimentalised and horribly stripped of all the complementary things the Bible has to say.” (pp.75-76)
Far from giving us a blasé attitude to our sin, causing us to be indifferent to our sin since we will be forgiven anyway, God’s forgiveness should, as the Apostle Paul afore stated, establish the Law. God’s forgiveness should spur us on to do good deeds, not to earn salvation, but out of freedom and gratitude. Rather than taking God’s forgiveness of our sins for granted, this forgiveness should rouse us to the same indignation that God has for our sin, turning to Him to wage war on it.
“My father tells a story from his days as a college professor. Like most professors, he spent several hours a week in his office meeting with students. A young lady came to see him, deeply troubled. It seems she had been behaving inappropriately with her boyfriend. She explained that her hardship was less about what she had done and more about her current condition – though she had repented frequently and with great vigour, she didn’t feel forgiven for her sin. She poured out her story and her heart to my father, who responded with great pastoral wisdom. ‘I think I know what you need to do,’ he said. ‘I’d suggest that you go back to your dorm room, get on your knees, and plead with God to forgive you of your sin.’ The poor girl was even more heartbroken after that. ‘Dr. Sproul,’ she said, ‘I’m afraid you haven’t been listening. Repenting is all I’ve been doing, and it hasn’t done any good.’ ‘I have heard you just fine,’ my father replied. ‘This time when you repent, I don’t want you to repent for what happened with your boyfriend. I want you to beg God to forgive you for not believing His promises. He said, “If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness” (1 John 1:9). God is utterly unimpressed with our efforts to beat ourselves psychologically for our sins. What He wants is a true humility that will manifest itself as faith, as believing God.’” (p.13)
So, here lies the stimulus Bible verse and promise for this topic, that “if we confess our sins, He is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness” (1Jn 1:9). O and what a glorious promise it is! And how we take it for granted! Philip Yancey in his book, “What’s So Amazing About Grace?”, quotes a counselor called David Seamands who summarises the spiritual condition that many Christians are in as a result of failing to believe this most important of Biblical promises:
“Many years ago I was driven to the conclusion that the two major causes of most emotional problems among evangelical Christians are these: the failure to understand, receive, and live out God’s unconditional grace and forgiveness; and the failure to give out that unconditional love, forgiveness, and grace to other people…We read, we hear, we believe a good theology of grace. But that’s not the way we live. The good news of the Gospel of grace has not penetrated the level of our emotions.” (p.15)
Notice that Mr Seamands puts the problem down to a “failure to understand, receive, and live out” God’s unconditional forgiveness? Well, as such, I have divided this message into these three sections; understanding it, receiving it, and living it out; and aim to tackle these three parts of the problem. However, as always, “unless the Lord builds the house, they labour in vain who build it” (Ps 127:1). In other words, I will do my best to address these parts of God’s forgiveness faithfully, but ultimately, whether this affects you or not is dependent on the working and illumination of the Holy Spirit. Therefore, I pray that He will open your eyes to the glorious truths discussed below!
1) UNDERSTANDING THE BAD NEWS - WHY DO WE NEED TO BE FORGIVEN?
Before we delve into what forgiveness means, we must first establish the reason forgiveness is even a topic in the Christian walk to begin with. What is it that we need to be forgiven of? Whilst some of you may yawn at such a ‘basic’ question, it is one which we often either do not fully understand, or one which we exhibit great indifference towards. I am, of course, talking about the problem of sin. Far from simply consisting of a few bad but ‘normal’ mistakes we have made in life, the Bible presents sin as the very serious and critical problem that mankind faces. It is not Global Warming, world poverty or alcoholism that is the major threat that we as humans face, but rather it is the source of all these horrors and more – our own filthy sinfulness.
To demonstrate and explore this and other necessary truths, let us observe the contextual passage which our stimulus Bible verse comes from, 1 John 1:5-6:
God is light and in Him is no darkness at all. If we say that we have fellowship with Him, and walk in darkness, we lie and do not practice the truth.
What the Apostle John is here saying about sin is that it is in direct contrast and opposition to God’s very nature. Sin is, by definition, that which is contrary to God’s Holy character. It also tells us God’s stance on our sinfulness; that the darkness that is our sin cannot dwell with God. God detests sin and will not tolerate it. This, we will later see, is why sin is such the grave problem it is for us. John continues in 1 John 1:8-10:
If we say that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us. If we confess our sins, He is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness. If we say that we have not sinned, we make Him a liar, and His word is not in us.
Here, John articulates not only the problem, but describes the essence of human nature - all men are sinners. John echoes the numerous powerfully convicting statements about what we call Original Sin that his fellow Apostle, Paul, makes in his Epistle to the Romans.
We have already made the charge that Jews and Gentiles alike are all under sin. As it is written: “There is no one righteous, not even one; there is no one who understands, no one who seeks God. All have turned away, they have together become worthless; there is no one who does good, not even one." (Ro 3:9-12)
It matters not where you are from or what your religion is, Paul baldly proclaims that “there is no difference [between Jew or Gentile], for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God” (Ro 3:22-23). With repeated and systematic statements like this in all his epistles, Paul strikes fatal blows to any notion of what we now call, Pelagianism. This theological and hamartiological belief (which I explained in greater detail in my blog, “The Good, The Bad & The Vine”) basically held that men were born inherently good. Paul consistently and constantly counters this heretical view by explaining, “I know that nothing good lives in me, that is, in my sinful nature” (Ro 7:18).
It is not simply that we as humans do sinful actions every now and then; it is that we are totally sinful in nature. This is not to say that we are as bad as we could be, but we are certainly nowhere near as good as we should be. But even our supposed ‘good’ deeds are tainted by our sinfulness. As Isaiah says in 64:6, “All of us have become like one who is unclean, and all our righteous acts are like filthy rags; we all shrivel up like a leaf, and like the wind our sins sweep us away.” None of us are exempt from the stain of sin in our lives, no matter how ‘good’ others (or even ourselves) may think we are. As theological professor Michael Horton so vividly expressed this in his book, “Christless Christianity”:
“The biblical message is far deeper and richer, however, both in its bad news and its good news. The bad news is far worse than making mistakes or failing to live up to the legalistic standards of fundamentalism. It is that the best efforts of the best Christians, on the best days, in the best frame of heart and mind, with the best motives fall short of that true righteousness and holiness that God requires. Our best efforts cannot satisfy God’s justice.” (p.91)
This anthropological truth that man, no matter how hard he tries, is sinful by nature and deed; that he is “abominable and filthy”, ‘drinking iniquity like water’ (Job 15:16); poses a problem because it means that, as Paul articulates in Romans 6:23, “the wages of sin is death.” Not only can we not dwell with God, but we must face punishment for our sin, both in the physical now, and the eternal after; we must die both physically here, and suffer eternal death in Hell. Someone has to pay the price for our disobedience and rebellion against our Holy God, and that someone is us…or is it?
2) UNDERSTANDING WHAT FORGIVENESS IS
Before we move onto the Good News in answer to that last cliffhanger question, we must first briefly address another ‘assumed’ and ‘basic’ question – what does forgiveness mean?
“I, even I, am He who blots out your transgressions for My own sake; and I will not remember your sins.” (Isa 43:25)
God’s forgiveness of His people’s sins features as one of the major themes in Isaiah’s writings. As God succinctly explains in the above verse, forgiveness is Him not remembering our sins, legally acquitting us of our guilt and concealing our sins (Joel 3:21). ‘What does He conceal our sins with?’ you may ask. Well, we will see in its glorious truth in the next section.
“I will pardon all their iniquities by which they have sinned and by which they have transgressed against Me.” (Jer 33:8)
Isaiah’s fellow Prophet, Jeremiah, also records God’s great words about His promise to forgive His people’s sins. Here, God also expresses another truth about sin – sin is first and foremost an offence against Him. Far from being a distant and impassive observer in our sinful affairs, God is directly involved and affected by our transgressions because ultimately, they are crimes hostile to Him.
The most commonly used word for forgiveness in Hebrew is the word, ‘calach’, which basically means to pardon or to spare from death. This gives us a clear definition of what forgiveness involves – God sparing us from the death we justly deserve, absolving us of our guilt. However, it is also interesting to note that in the Greek, it is the word ‘aphiemi’ which is commonly used to signify forgiveness. This Greek word can have a much wider usage and amongst other things, can mean ‘to suffer’. As we will later see, this connection between God suffering and God forgiving us our sins is central to the Good News.
For as the heavens are high above the earth, so great is His mercy toward those who fear Him; as far as the east is from the west, so far has He removed our transgressions from us. As a father pities his children, so the Lord pities those who fear Him. For He knows our frame; He remembers that we are dust. (Ps 103:11-14)
God’s forgiveness is a reflection and manifestation of God’s mercy. God is not just a just and wrathful God, but He is also a loving and merciful God who pities us like children, casting our sinfulness as far away as possible. These great and beautiful theological truths should spur us to exclaim in wonder with the Prophet Micah:
Who is a God like You, pardoning iniquity and passing over the transgression of the remnant of His heritage? He does not retain His anger forever, because He delights in mercy. He will again have compassion on us, and will subdue our iniquities. You will cast all our sins into the depths of the sea. (Mic 7:18-19)
But, now that I have described what forgiveness means, let us turn to the most important question to answer – how is it that God forgives us?
3) UNDERSTANDING THE GOOD NEWS - HOW ARE WE FORGIVEN?
To fully answer this question, R.C. Sproul Jr. explains that there are two parts to God’s promise of forgiveness in 1 John 1:9. The first is that He is “faithful” to forgive us our sins.
“When we fail to believe His promises, we fail to believe that He is faithful. We think that His promises are much like ours, idle words designed to get what we want. But our Father is not like us. He has promised. And He alone cannot break His promise. It is His fidelity, not our worthiness, that guarantees the forgiveness. We slip once again into the folly of Pelagianism when we think that He forgives us because we are worthy, and so when we slip below some standard of worthiness, we think He won’t forgive us. We are sinners, but He is faithful, and it is by His faithfulness that He forgives. In what ways is God faithful in forgiveness? First, He is faithful to His promises, that if we call on the name of His Son we will be saved. This is His offer to us, free and certain. He is faithful to His Word. Second,…and most important of all, He is faithful to His Son. He keeps His promise to Him. It was for the promised bride that Christ went through His humiliation.” (pp.27-28)
The second part is that He is “just” to forgive us our sins. Herein is the real substance to the promise and the Good News, for if we fail to understand this aspect of our forgiveness we can diminish it, or as Sproul Jr. recapitulates it:
“Sometimes I’m afraid we are so eager to praise God for His mercy to us that we misunderstand it, and in a backward sort of way, denigrate it. That is, too often we make the mistake of thinking that we are forgiven for our sins just because God decided to be nice and to look the other way, that He winked at our sins. God is indeed merciful. And He does not remember our sins. They are as far from us as the east is from the west. But it is just that such should be so. Our debt is no more not because He whom we owe forgave it, but because it was paid. He is just to forgive us because He poured out the just punishment for our sins on His Son. And He is just to vindicate us. He raised His Son from the dead to demonstrate that He did not die for His sins, but for ours. In union with Him, raised with Him, we too are vindicated. The Judge of all the earth does judge rightly when He says that sinners like us are not guilty. Jesus paid our debt, and we owe no more. In fact, it would be unjust for God to demand retribution for sins covered on Calvary. In short, it is just that He should forgive us our sins, not because we are worthy, but because worthy is the Lamb.” (p.28)
To explore this justice of God, let us look once again to the rest of the contextual passage in 1 John:
But if we walk in the light as He is in the light, we have fellowship with one another, and the blood of Jesus Christ His Son cleanses us from all sin…My little children, these things I write to you, so that you may not sin. And if anyone sins, we have an Advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous. And He Himself is the propitiation for our sins, and not for ours only but also for the whole world. (1:7-2:2)
Here, John enlightens us as to how we are forgiven – through the sacrificial death of Jesus Christ. As I previously stated in the above sections, sin must be atoned for with the shedding of blood. In the Old Testament, the Israelites would sacrifice animals for their sins, but there was a problem, “for it is not possible that the blood of bulls and goats could take away sins” (Heb 10:4). This was just a band-aid solution to their sinful states. What they (and we) needed was, as opposed to these animal sacrifices which were given regularly and frequently due to their imperfection and inadequacy, a definitive sacrifice for ALL our sins – past, present and future. This atoning sacrifice for our sins was foretold and promised by God through the Prophets, particularly Isaiah.
Surely He has borne our griefs and carried our sorrows; yet we esteemed Him stricken, smitten by God, and afflicted. But He was wounded for our transgressions, He was bruised for our iniquities; the chastisement for our peace was upon Him, and by His stripes we are healed. All we like sheep have gone astray; we have turned, every one, to his own way; and the Lord has laid on Him the iniquity of us all…For the transgressions of My people He was stricken…Yet it pleased the Lord to…make His soul an offering for sin…By His knowledge My righteous Servant shall justify many, for He shall bear their iniquities…And He bore the sin of many, And made intercession for the transgressors. (Isa 53:4-12)
This Messianic promise of self-sacrifice and what we call, ‘Substitutionary Atonement’, was ultimately fulfilled in the person of Jesus Christ who Paul and John described as the “propitiation for our sins”. This essential doctrine basically means that Jesus took the punishment that we justly deserved on Himself.
For when we were still without strength, in due time Christ died for the ungodly. For scarcely for a righteous man will one die; yet perhaps for a good man someone would even dare to die. But God demonstrates His own love toward us, in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us. Much more then, having now been justified by His blood, we shall be saved from wrath through Him. For if when we were enemies we were reconciled to God through the death of His Son, much more, having been reconciled, we shall be saved by His life. And not only that, but we also rejoice in God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom we have now received reconciliation. (Ro 5:6-11)
Because He knew that we could never satisfy His wrath ourselves, God condescended to us in the person of His Son and died in our place on the Cross. Demonstrating His glorious love, He took the death sentence that we as God-hating rebels deserved so that we might be with Him for eternity.
He has delivered us from the power of darkness and conveyed us into the kingdom of the Son of His love, in whom we have redemption through His blood, the forgiveness of sins…For it pleased the Father that in Him all the fullness should dwell, and by Him to reconcile all things to Himself, by Him, whether things on earth or things in heaven, having made peace through the blood of His cross. And you, who once were alienated and enemies in your mind by wicked works, yet now He has reconciled in the body of His flesh through death, to present you holy, and blameless, and above reproach in His sight. (Col 1:13-23)
So, what is the answer to the question, ‘how are we forgiven?’ Well if it hasn’t been made obvious yet, I will clarify it further. We are forgiven through the blood of Christ. As Hebrews 9:22 explains, “without shedding of blood there is no remission.” In order for us to be justly forgiven by God, someone’s blood had to be shed for our sins as a just punishment. God could have justly let this blood be ours, but instead in His eternal and incomprehensible love, He took the initiative and sacrificed His only begotten Son in our place. Our forgiveness may be a free gift of Grace on our part, but it is forgiveness which has come at a cost for God – the blood of His Son. Let us glory in this truth forever and never forget this!
When Jesus saw their faith, He said to the paralytic, “Son, your sins are forgiven you.” And some of the scribes were sitting there and reasoning in their hearts, “Why does this Man speak blasphemies like this? Who can forgive sins but God alone?” But immediately, when Jesus perceived in His spirit that they reasoned thus within themselves, He said to them, “Why do you reason about these things in your hearts?...The Son of Man has power on earth to forgive sins.” (Mk 2:5-10)
It is through Jesus that we are forgiven and ONLY through Jesus that we can be forgiven. He alone, as He said in the above passage, has the authority to forgive us our sins. As God Incarnate, He was the only person to walk this earth who has been perfectly righteous, and as such, His sacrifice was perfect and able to be accepted by the Father. There has only ever been, and there will only ever be, ONE perfect sacrifice for our sins and that has been the Lamb of God, Jesus Christ our Lord. Either you can place your hands on this glorious and worthy Lamb and transfer the heavy burden of your sins onto Him now through Faith, or you can leave this burden on your shoulders and be crushed by its great weight later in Hell. As Martin Luther said, the choice is yours! I, for one, know which one I would rather.
To encapsulate this Good News, Michael Horton continues from the quote in the above sections:
“The biblical message is far deeper and richer, however, both in its bad news and its good news. The bad news is far worse than making mistakes or failing to live up to the legalistic standards of fundamentalism. It is that…our best efforts cannot satisfy God’s justice. Yet the good news is that God has satisfied his own justice and reconciled us to himself through the life, death, and resurrection of his Son. God’s holy law can no longer condemn us because we are in Christ.” (p.91)
4) HOW DO WE RECEIVE GOD’S FORGIVENESS? – CONFESSION AND REPENTANCE
So now that we know how it is that forgiveness by God has been made possible, here comes the application question – how do we receive this forgiveness? Before I answer this, Sproul Jr. has another quite touching story to demonstrate this answer anecdotally:
“In our family of seven children, we have a great deal of routine. We have schedules that we keep, patterns that we follow to keep our household from descending into chaos. Those habits extend even to the ways in which we discipline our children. We have a liturgy that begins with judgment but ends with gospel. Suppose my oldest son has decided to play Picasso with his peanut butter sandwich. Suppose he has smeared peanut butter all over the kitchen wall. He has never done such a thing, mind you, but he has, from time to time, sinned. Our pattern is this. First, I take my son to someplace private. I ask him, ‘Did you smear your peanut butter sandwich on the wall?’ ‘Yes, Daddy’ he replies. ‘Are you allowed to do this?’ ‘No, Daddy.’ At this point, I administer a brief but painful corrective to my son, at which point he hugs me and I hug him back. Then he tells me, ‘I’m sorry, Daddy,’ and I tell him, ‘Daddy forgives you, son, and Daddy loves you, all the time.’ Next my son says this three-part prayer: ‘Dear Lord, please forgive me for disobeying and smearing my peanut butter sandwich on the wall. Thank you that Jesus died for my sins so that I can be forgiven. Please help me to be more obedient.’ By this point, my son’s tears have usually dried up. But if they haven’t yet, if he is struggling to accept my forgiveness, I look my son in the eye and ask him this: ‘Son, what has God promised?’ He replies, ‘If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness.’ In all likelihood, at this point I have tears in my eyes as I embrace my son once more and we rejoice in the glory of the gospel. Understand that when I punish my children, I do so not to even the scales of justice. My action isn’t retributive. The just punishment due to my children (and to my wife and me for that matter) was given two thousand years ago on Calvary. All my children’s sins, past, present, and future, are forgiven. But we are still called to repent.” (pp.26-27)
The answer to this question is the command that John the Baptist loudly proclaimed, “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand!” (Mt 3:2). It is the same command that Jesus Himself proclaimed, “Repent, and believe in the gospel” (Mk 1:15). It is the command that Jesus’ Apostles proclaimed to the ends of the earth, “Repent therefore and be converted, that your sins may be blotted out, so that times of refreshing may come from the presence of the Lord” (Ac 3:19). And it is the same answer to this very day. In order to receive this forgiveness, we must repent and put our faith in Christ (Jn 3:16).
But what is repentance? And what is its relationship to confession? Well, basically repentance is one part of a twofold response to the Gospel of Jesus Christ. And repentance itself has two parts to it. The first part, is acknowledging your sinfulness (this is where confession comes in). In order to receive God’s forgiveness, we must first recognise what it is we are being forgiven of. We must confess that smearing peanut butter on our parents’ walls is a sin, so to speak. The second part of repentance is renouncing this sin and turning from it. This does not mean that we become completely sinless as we will still struggle with indwelling sin for the rest of our lives here on earth (see my previous post called “The Inner Canaanites”). But it does mean that when we do sin, we utterly detest it and strive to fight it. This is why repentance is not a once off vaccination shot in order to be saved. As Paul Washer rightly says, repentance is something which you do for the rest of your life.
“Repent, and let every one of you be baptised in the name of Jesus Christ for the remission of sins; and you shall receive the gift of the Holy Spirit. For the promise is to you and to your children, and to all who are afar off, as many as the Lord our God will call.” (Ac 2:38-39)
Once you have repented, the second aspect to our saving response is to believe the Gospel. Not only must we turn from our sin, but we must now turn to God. Not only do we confess our sins, as though we were confessing in a vacuum to relieve our own guilty consciences and seek a moral catharsis, but we must confess our sins to God. If we turn to Him in Faith, this is only when the promise comes into effect. As Sproul Jr.’s son turns to the loving, yet firm, arms of his father, so too must we turn to the loving and forgiving, yet firm, arms of our Father. To show this repenting and believing response put effectively in practice, Jesus tells a parable in Luke 18:9-14:
To some who were confident of their own righteousness and looked down on everybody else, Jesus told this parable: “Two men went up to the temple to pray, one a Pharisee and the other a tax collector. The Pharisee stood up and prayed about himself: ‘God, I thank you that I am not like other men -robbers, evildoers, adulterers - or even like this tax collector. I fast twice a week and give a tenth of all I get.’ But the tax collector stood at a distance. He would not even look up to heaven, but beat his breast and said, ‘God, have mercy on me, a sinner.’ I tell you that this man, rather than the other, went home justified before God. For everyone who exalts himself will be humbled, and he who humbles himself will be exalted.”
A powerful demonstration of the right response to the Gospel, Jesus shows us here the direct and important correlation between humility and repentance. Rather than coming before God puffed up with pride and deluded with self-righteousness, we must come before our Saviour, lowly in heart and despondent in our sinfulness, turning towards the comfort that only the Justification that He has already accomplished for us on the Cross can bring. As Mark Driscoll often says, sinners are called to repent of their sins, and likewise, religious people are called to repent of their religion. Both must regularly come before their Holy God in humility and gratitude.
Sproul Jr., in warning of a remote and infrequent view of confession, explains the joy that regular confession and repentance can bring:
“Here we walk a thin line. We do not want to view our verbal confession as magic words that lose their power over time. That is, heaven is not populated merely by those who managed to squeeze in a confession just before they died, with no time for another sin to slip through. On the other hand, we cannot adopt a cavalier attitude: ‘Hey, I confessed when I walked down the aisle. Why do I need to confess again?’ As is so often the case, the answer is balance. Our sins are forgiven, now and forever, if we are in Christ. But we remember the very joy of our salvation each time we confess our sins.” (p.27)
5) WHAT IS CLEANSING?
Though I have talked a great deal about God’s forgiveness thus far, there is a dual promise made in John’s First Epistle that we can easily pass over – God will cleanse us of all unrighteousness.
“Come now, and let us reason together,” says the Lord. “Though your sins are like scarlet, they shall be as white as snow; though they are red as crimson, they shall be as wool.” (Isa 1:18)
More than God’s wrath simply passing over us, He goes one step further and declares us to be righteous in His presence, imputing to us a righteousness that we have not earned by works (Ro 4:5); this is what we call ‘Positional Sanctification’. It is where God covers our sins with the cloak of Christ’s perfect Righteousness. God does not just turn a blind eye to our sin, but He promises that one day (when Christ returns at the Day of Judgment), He will remove all our sin from our persons. In the meantime, He is removing and cleansing our sins bit by bit. This is what we call ‘Progressional Sanctification’. However, as much as I would like to delve into explaining this interesting topic, it really deserves its own blog (plus, this blog is already running pretty long and I don’t want to bore you any more than I have to). Before we get back to the topic of forgiveness though, I will let Sproul Jr. summarise what the significance of cleansing is:
“When we stop with the promise of forgiveness, as grand and as shocking as it is, we still miss out on the fullness of the promise. For we long not merely to have God’s judgment pass over us, but to be made white as snow. The promise of the gospel isn’t just that we won’t be judged, but that, in the end, we will be good. Thus, John tells us that not only does He forgive us for our sins, He cleanses us from all unrighteousness. Now that’s a grand promise. Indeed, one of the greatest mysteries for me about the afterlife is found right here. How, I wonder, can I continue to be me, to have a consciousness that is connected to and continues from what I have now, that will have no sin? I wouldn’t recognise me, and I doubt anyone else would either. I’m afraid I’m so puzzled by this because I don’t spend enough time thinking about this promise and the promise of my sanctification. I’m afraid that in my tradition, we think of sanctification as a process at best and as a doctrine at worst. But we almost never see it as John shows it to us here, as a promise. This is His promise. As we despair in our sin, not only are we promised forgiveness, we are promised cleansing. The sorrow that follows in the wake of our sins is crushed now by gospel forgiveness. It is also crushed then, that is, in the future, by gospel cleansing. We need to believe His promises and crush the despair.” (pp.28-29)
6) HOW DO WE LIVE OUT GOD’S FORGIVENESS?
Now that we have dealt with the understanding and receiving aspects of God’s forgiveness, let us move on to the practical based section on how we live out God’s forgiveness in our interaction with people. In other words, what should our response be to this extravagant love that God has lavished on us in forgiving us all our sins?
And behold, a woman in the city who was a sinner, when she knew that Jesus sat at the table in the Pharisee’s house, brought an alabaster flask of fragrant oil, and stood at His feet behind Him weeping; and she began to wash His feet with her tears, and wiped them with the hair of her head; and she kissed His feet and anointed them with the fragrant oil. Now when the Pharisee who had invited Him saw this, he spoke to himself, saying, “This Man, if He were a prophet, would know who and what manner of woman this is who is touching Him, for she is a sinner.” And Jesus answered and said to him,…“There was a certain creditor who had two debtors. One owed five hundred denarii, and the other fifty. And when they had nothing with which to repay, he freely forgave them both. Tell Me, therefore, which of them will love him more?” Simon answered and said, “I suppose the one whom he forgave more.” And He said to him, “You have rightly judged.” Then He turned to the woman and said to Simon, “Do you see this woman? I entered your house;…you gave Me no kiss, but this woman has not ceased to kiss My feet since the time I came in…Therefore I say to you, her sins, which are many, are forgiven, for she loved much. But to whom little is forgiven, the same loves little.” Then He said to her, “Your sins are forgiven.” And those who sat at the table with Him began to say to themselves, “Who is this who even forgives sins?” (Lk 7:37-49)
The first way, is to respond to our glorious Triune God with praise and thanksgiving. Because He in His Grace has forgiven us, we should naturally respond by “singing and making melody in [our] heart to the Lord, giving thanks always for all things to God the Father in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ” (Eph 5:19-20). Put simply, the right response to God forgiving rebels is for them to worship Him, anointing His feet with expensive fragrant oil – their praises. As Jesus so aptly states in the above passage, unless we can begin to appreciate the extent and severity of the sin of which we have been forgiven, we will respond to God’s forgiveness with indifference and trivial love.
Then Peter came to Him and said, “Lord, how often shall my brother sin against me, and I forgive him? Up to seven times?” Jesus said to him, “I do not say to you, up to seven times, but up to seventy times seven. Therefore the kingdom of heaven is like a certain king who wanted to settle accounts with his servants. And when he had begun to settle accounts, one was brought to him who owed ten thousand talents. But as he was not able to pay, his master commanded that he be sold, with his wife and children and all that he had, and that payment be made. The servant therefore fell down before him, saying, ‘Master, have patience with me, and I will pay you all.’ Then the master of that servant was moved with compassion, released him, and forgave him the debt. But that servant went out and found one of his fellow servants who owed him a hundred denarii; and he laid hands on him and took him by the throat, saying, ‘Pay me what you owe!’ So his fellow servant fell down at his feet and begged him, saying, ‘Have patience with me, and I will pay you all.’ And he would not, but went and threw him into prison till he should pay the debt. So when his fellow servants saw what had been done, they were very grieved, and came and told their master all that had been done. Then his master, after he had called him, said to him, ‘You wicked servant! I forgave you all that debt because you begged me. Should you not also have had compassion on your fellow servant, just as I had pity on you?’ And his master was angry, and delivered him to the torturers until he should pay all that was due to him. So My heavenly Father also will do to you if each of you, from his heart, does not forgive his brother his trespasses.” (Mt 18:21-35)
The second way we should respond to God’s forgiveness is for us to, likewise, forgive our neighbours. As we so often pray in the Lord’s Prayer, “forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors” (Mt 6:12). Part of the reason we should repent and confess our sins regularly is that it reminds us of the Gospel of God’s forgiveness. This Gospel of forgiveness, far from being something we learn then move on from, should be proclaimed frequently to the Church so that, like the wind which picks up a boat’s sails and moves it along in the ocean, this Gospel moves us to love our fellow man in a similar way, not out of obligation or seeking merit, but out of gratitude for what God has done for us. As that famous saying of English poet Alexander Pope goes, “to err is human; to forgive is divine.”
What then? Shall we sin because we are not under law but under grace?…Do we then make void the law through faith? Certainly not! On the contrary, we establish the law. (Ro 6:15; 3:31)
The final way we should respond to God’s forgiveness, is to our remaining indwelling sin. D.A. Carson recounts a story from his past in his book, “The Difficult Doctrine of the Love of God”, which demonstrates not only the incorrect response to our sin, but sadly, also the most common response to our sin:
“Many think it is easy for God to forgive. I recall meeting a young and articulate French West African when I was studying in Germany more than twenty years ago. We were both working diligently to improve our German, but once a week or so we had had enough, so we went out for a meal together and retreated to French, a language we both know well. In the course of those meals we got to know each other. I learned that his wife was in London training to be a medical doctor…Pretty soon I discovered that once or twice a week he disappeared into the red light district of town. Obviously he went to pay his money and have his woman. Eventually I got to know him well enough to ask him what he would do if he discovered that his wife were doing something similar in London. ‘Oh,’ he said, ‘I’d kill her.’ ‘That’s a bit of a double standard, isn’t it?’ I replied. ‘You don’t understand. Where I come from in Africa, the husband has the right to sleep with many women, but if a wife does it, she must be killed.’ ‘But you told me that you were raised in a mission school. You know that the God of the Bible does not have double standards like that.’ He gave me a bright smile and replied, ‘Ah, le bon Dieu; il doit nous pardonner; c’est son métier [Ah, God is good; he’s bound to forgive us; that’s his job].’ It is a common view, is it not?…Even when people do not put things quite so bluntly, the idea is popular, not least because, as we have seen, some ill-defined notions of the love of God run abroad in the land – but these notions have been sadly sentimentalised and horribly stripped of all the complementary things the Bible has to say.” (pp.75-76)
Far from giving us a blasé attitude to our sin, causing us to be indifferent to our sin since we will be forgiven anyway, God’s forgiveness should, as the Apostle Paul afore stated, establish the Law. God’s forgiveness should spur us on to do good deeds, not to earn salvation, but out of freedom and gratitude. Rather than taking God’s forgiveness of our sins for granted, this forgiveness should rouse us to the same indignation that God has for our sin, turning to Him to wage war on it.
Waves
And with that, we finish another blog. I pray that if you have never heard any of this truly Good News of forgiveness through Christ, that the Holy Spirit will apply these truths to you, changing your naturally hardened heart into a heart of flesh unto your Salvation (Eze 11:19). And for those who have heard this Good News before, I also pray that the Holy Spirit will apply these things unto you so that you are filled with a new sense of God’s forgiveness and shaken from Gospel apathy, reawakening a zeal for Christ to please Him and reminding you of your first love (Rev 2:4-5). So until next time, put that in your cloud and rain it (Jude 12).
Christus Regnat,
MAXi
Christus Regnat,
MAXi
