Forgiving and Reconciling, Part VII: Sin Can’t Just Disappear, Which Is Why Human Forgiveness Is So Very Impotent

Posted on September 16, 2011 by Pastor Foley

How does God define forgiveness?

The original languages of Scripture are rich with meaning in this regard.

The term used most often for forgiveness in the Old Testament is the Hebrew nasa’, which means to bear, to carry, or to be taken away. 

In the New Testament, there are several words in the Greek for forgiveness, including aphesis, which means release from bondage.  This is the term for forgiveness that is used in Luke 3:3 to describe the mission of Jesus:

He went into all the country around the Jordan, preaching a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness [or release from bondage] of sins.

So forgiveness in the Scripture is portrayed as a release from bondage. Through his forgiveness, Christ releases us from the bondage of sin.

But here’s the really amazing part:

The way that he releases us from the bondage of sin is the only way it turns out that humans can be released from their bondage, namely, that that bondage is transferred to Christ himself. That’s the Hebrew nasa’—to bear or carry.

This is why human ways of forgiveness just don’t work. This is why forgiveness can’t be about feeling, forgetting, or willing sin to be forgotten. Sin has to go somewhere. It can’t just evaporate. It doesn’t just disappear. In order for someone to be set free from it, someone else has to bear it.

And that’s what Christ does.

As John the Baptist says in John 1:29, Christ is the lamb of God who bears the sins of the world in himself. And that’s the message throughout the Scripture, like in Isaiah 53:4-5 (NIV):

Surely he took up our infirmities
and carried our sorrows,
yet we considered him stricken by God,
smitten by him, and afflicted.
But he was pierced for our transgressions,
he was crushed for our iniquities;
the punishment that brought us peace was upon him,
and by his wounds we are healed.

Or, as Peter put it in 1 Peter 2:24 (NIV):

He himself bore our sins in his body on the tree so that we might die to sins and live for righteousness (NIV).

You may recall in the Old Testament the idea of the scapegoat, as in Leviticus 16:20-22:

“And when [Aaron] has made an end of atoning for the Holy Place and the tent of meeting and the altar, he shall present the live goat. And Aaron shall lay both his hands on the head of the live goat, and confess over it all the iniquities of the people of Israel, and all their transgressions, all their sins. And he shall put them on the head of the goat and send it away into the wilderness by the hand of a man who is in readiness. The goat shall bear all their iniquities on itself to a remote area, and he shall let the goat go free in the wilderness.”

One of the key insights we get from that passage is that sin can’t just disappear. It has to be borne by somebody, or something that, in this case, wanders around in the desert as it bears the sins of Israel.

This is why all human efforts at forgiveness ultimately fail: because humans (and goats, for that matter) can’t bear sin for very long. Sin crushes human beings—our own sin and the sin of others against us—and we cry out in protest. And we fight back. We can sometimes bear sin for a little while. We can forget about sin that’s been sinned against us for a little while. We can be loving for a while to those who have sinned against us. We can even will ourselves to bear their sin for a while. But then sin always burns through us like acid, and it always pours right back out. Only Christ can bear sin without transferring the bondage from one person (the sinner) to another (the person who the sinner sins against). If sin is not transferred to Christ, it just keeps moving around and burning new holes through new people.

Now, here is the amazing news:

Not only did Christ bear our sin; he sought to do so. It’s a non-negotiable part of his plan to set the world right. But as we’ll talk about in Part VIII, it’s the part that we fail to understand when we refuse to forgive those who sin against us.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , | 1 Comment

Forgiving and Reconciling, Part VI: Why Human Forgiveness Gets In The Way of God’s Forgiveness

Posted on September 14, 2011 by Pastor Foley

Scripture reminds us on nearly every page that it is simply not possible to work from human ways of thinking about forgiveness to God’s way of thinking about forgiveness. The two differ not in degree but in kind. In order to understand God’s way of thinking about forgiveness, we have to do something other than try to be more forgiving. We have to give up completely our human ways of thinking about forgiveness.

That’s what the Lord says in Isaiah 55:7–9:

Let the wicked forsake his way
and the evil man his thoughts.
Let him turn to the LORD, and he will have mercy on him,
and to our God, for he will freely pardon.
For my thoughts are not your thoughts,
neither are your ways my ways,
declares the LORD.
As the heavens are higher than the earth,
so are my ways higher than your ways
and my thoughts than your thoughts.

This is a theme that comes up again and again in Scripture: Human beings struggle to understand God’s forgiveness, not just because they are unforgiving but also because human ways of forgiveness keep getting in the way.

Many Christians think, quite humanly, that forgiveness is a feeling. They have forgiving feelings in their best moments, so they think that God must be calling them to have more of these forgiving moments—more lovely feelings in their hearts toward those who have hurt them. But that concept is not in the Scripture.

Other Christians think that forgiveness means forgetting. They think that God is calling them to edit their memories and, instead of addressing the hurts they’ve received, erase those hurts like Watergate tapes. They sometimes get this idea when they hear that God “remembers our sins no more.” But as we talked about in Part II of our series, when Scripture says God remembers our sins no more, it doesn’t mean that he forgets them. It means that he has dealt with them so completely in the cross that it is not necessary for him to devise another way of dealing with them in the future. So forgetting is not forgiveness.

Still other Christians gird up their loins and resolve to undertake forgiveness as a decision—an act of their own willpower. They think that God is calling them to overcome the hurts they have received by using their willpower to rebuild relationships with people who have wronged them. But this can’t be God’s way, because God more than anybody knows how weak the human will is, and how damaged it is by sin.

So if not as feeling, forgetting, or an act of will, then what is it? How does Scripture portray forgiveness?

We’ll unearth that answer as we dig into the original languages of the Scripture in Part VII of our series on forgiving and reconciling.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , | 1 Comment

Forgiving and Reconciling, Part V: The World Of Difference Between Mercy and Leniency

Posted on September 12, 2011 by Pastor Foley

What makes Christian forgiveness so hard for we human beings to understand is that in our experience condemnation always follows judgment. The only thing we’ve experienced is people exposing our sins in order to humiliate us, hurt us, and make us pay the price. 

So we furrow our brow in puzzlement at Jesus’ practice of judgment coupled with mercy for all those who receive his judgment. But whether we understand it or not, this is how he offers forgiveness. “For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world,” Jesus tells Nicodemus in John 3:17, “but to save the world.” 

Jesus comes as the light of the world. He casts out shadows, exposes sin for sin, darkness for darkness, lies for lies. And he does this even as, moved with compassion, he smothers the world’s evil in himself, bleeding his own blood in mercy. James 5:11 confirms, “The Lord is full of compassion and mercy.” The Lord pours out judgment, with mercy right on top of it for those who receive his judgment with their arms at their sides, accepting his judgment without a fight. Judgment and mercy are the divine coupling that constitute forgiveness.

Leniency, on the other hand, is the counterfeit version of mercy. Leniency is where we say, “Hey, everybody sins. Let’s not be too hard on him.” Leniency precedes judgment and derails it. Leniency happens when we fear judgment. Leniency hopes to shut God’s mouth and the mouth of God’s just ones, hiding the very things that must be named and judged in order to be forgiven and healed in Jesus’ name.

Leniency has become popular in a world that confuses judgment with condemnation. People who mistake leniency for mercy often quote Jesus’ words in Matthew 7:1 (KJV), “Judge not, that ye be not judged.” They say, “How can I criticize or correct someone else when I have problems of my own?” So they exercise leniency towards others and themselves, and in so doing they hinder the work of God in their lives and in the lives of those they have hurt.

But when Jesus says, “Judge not lest ye be judged,” he is not advocating a life devoid of judgment; instead, he is advocating a sober, searing judgment that is never separated from a mercy that sets free those trapped in sin and transforms them and those they have hurt by the power of the Holy Spirit.

Mercy is poured out at great personal cost to the one who offers it. Condemnation and leniency, on the other hand, cost the giver nothing and benefit the recipient not at all. They are thus not from God. No amount of failing to judge wrongdoers will bring oneself or others into the kingdom of God.

In the end, forgiveness is judgment plus mercy. In the eyes of the world, judgment is always bad, and judgment and condemnation go together to hurt people. But for God, it is judgment and mercy—naming the evil in ourselves and others and then smothering it in Jesus’ name and with our own body in order to point to his—that kiss.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , , | Leave a comment