“Forgiveness is a Many Splendored (and Complicated) Thing” (3)

The forgiveness of God!  A many splendored thing!

Forgetting

But complications happen.  The forgiven hear the simple, straightforward gospel message declaring that we have “redemption through (Christ’s) blood, the forgiveness of our trespasses, according to the riches of his grace (Ephesians 1:7).  And then the forgiven forget.  They remember everything else, good or bad that they have.  But with regard to the divine forgiveness…they have spiritual amnesia.  The fog of forgetfulness covers the multitude and the splendor even of the divine forgivenesses.  The forgiveness that is, the forgiveness that comes to the sinner is so forgotten that it might well have stayed in heaven where God himself is.  On earth forgiveness is heard, maybe even once acknowledged and received, but the forgiven themselves are oblivious of it.  Things push out the spiritual blessedness of forgiveness, schedules and appointments to keep crowd it out, sunshine and basking in it is the good thing of the day, bad health and other bad news are the bads belying and banning biblical truth of the splendid forgiveness with God and of God and into my consciousness.

Protesting

The complication continues.  Folks, even forgiven ones protest the divine forgiveness.  And in this protesting there is an active attempt to prevent divine forgiveness from being known and bearing fruit in our little worlds or vast vineyards and or even in our religious church lives.   It really is quite something this petty cheeks puffed out pontificating resistance of us little men and little women.  Against God stand men as at the birth of the Savior ready to resist the divine forgiveness from entering our lives.  Like Herod and Jerusalem of old, upset, even convulsed at the announcement of the birth of the King, so we stand shaken at the thought of the divine forgiveness–sinful men whose minds whose feelings whose wills are like shoals and reefs and bulwarks will only have forgiveness from afar, or let it come so far or not at all to the shores where we live.  At the meeting of forgiveness and men there is a resistance, then complication, a twisting, a mangling and a tangling and a roiling and a turning of something inside out so that only then will we have anything of it: a divine thing men would take and complicate and sophisticate, and civilize, and tame and otherwise put limits upon to make a thing once divine into a thing altogether human and only human.  So the God becomes an idol.  The incarnate Savior loses his divinity.  A divine Savior-mediated forgiveness becomes our plaything.  On our leash. 

The reasons for the protest, for the attempt to twist, mangle, and tangle the truth of forgiveness are many.  In the first place, it is because we are hard-pressed by an old man, ours, to admit we need forgiveness.  Killers, rapists, thieves and cheaters—they need forgiveness.  But I am not like them, we say.  And like the Pharisee of old we thank God that we are not like those sinners.  But then, secondly, and at the other extreme, we think we are too sinful for even the divine forgiveness to reach us, the blood of Jesus to cover us.  Though the Bible says that the blood of Jesus is the propitiation for the sins of a world (I John 2:2), we do not believe there could be anything, anywhere, even something done on a cross of someone named Jesus, that could atone for my world of iniquitous thoughts, dastardly desires and being bored again and again and again with Christianity.   

Then there are these two extreme sorts of protest and complications. 

On the one hand we imagine a conditional forgiveness.  From the same proud heart that would deny the need for forgiveness, the (religious) sinner would affirm that something so free as being justified absolutely freely by God’s grace is a mistake.  Justified by faith we affirm.  But justification by works we mean.  Ours must be a faith working by love and deeds of love on which our salvation depends.  We ought not have Luther’s faith alone justifying sinners either now or in the end, or we turn Christianity into an excuse for a week-long, life-long wild party of the pious.  The grace of forgiveness is just not enough.   

On another hand sinners, even those professing the gospel of forgiveness, further complicate and confuse forgiveness by living as if the grace forgiveness is an excuse to sin, a license to live loose from the law of God.  We go to the right place to renew our license to drive.  In our warping of religion and of the forgiveness of God we think we have gone to just the right mercy seat of God to be forgiven, and are forgiven freely by him, now to sin.  We sin with the first and best of the antinomians, that grace may abound (Romans 6:1); we turn the grace of God into an excuse for lasciviousness, for a life of lust (Jude 4). 

All the Way up to the Flag

The gospel of the forgiving God is this: though forgiveness be forgotten God does not forget to forgive, to forgive even the sin of our forgetting the divine forgiveness.

And the gospel of the forgiveness of God is this: though forgiveness will be complicated by sinners and mangled and tangled into something it is not, God will be God and will shine forth splendidly and crash forth almightily, if gracefully against all the bulwarks of our protests and contortions, denials, confusions, complications.

For God is GOD.  He will not be forgotten or denied.  His grace and the grace and truth of his forgiveness will find a way onto our shore, into our hearts, our homes, our societies, and into our consciousness.  The divine forgiveness will give us to taste and see that which wells up from the deep, from the depth of the heart of God, and that gospel truth which will shine and have its beautiful, fruitful way among men to the glory of the Son of the cross and the Son of the Right Hand of the Most High…

But what is this?  There is a flag.  I see it.  Do you?  From what I see I cannot say that the divine forgiveness will reach it, will take it. 

For it is the flag which is planted by man on the highest hill of his existence.

It is the flag at the very citadel, the very pinnacle of the citadel of his existence.

And it is there in all of its inglory defying forgiveness at this strategic point: its power, its demand, its insistence that the forgiven forgive others.

God we say may forgive.  And he does.  And I am glad to know that in my life.  Let forgiveness come, have its way, lighten my burden, free me from guilt.  Praise God!

But not so far as this: to compel me to forgive my childhood bully, to free me to forgive the rapist of my child, the gestapo who gassed my grandparents, my cheating spouse.

Forgiveness is fine, but only so far.  Here I stand.  For God to forgive is one thing.  For me to forgive is another.  Forgiveness is divine.  Not to forgive is human.  And understandable.  Let us keep it that way…