Forgiving and Reconciling, Part IV: Only Judge The Evil You Are Willing To Absorb Personally Over Time With Christ

Posted on September 9, 2011 by Pastor Foley

What sets us free from retribution, revenge, and bitterness toward our enemies?

The realization that no one other than God can make anything right, and God pledges to make everything right, in Christ, by the power of his Holy Spirit.

That’s why on earth here we willingly absorb our enemy’s sin against us in Jesus’ name as a reminder to our enemy—and to ourselves—that God in Christ is the one who is actually absorbing all sin.

As Christine Scheller notes in her fantastic post How Far Should Forgiveness Go?, Miroslav Volf, a professor at Yale, says:

I don’t demand that the one who has taken my eye lose his eye or that the one who has killed my child by his negligence be killed. In fact, I don’t demand that he lose anything. I forgo all retribution. In forgiving, I absorb the injury—the way I may absorb, say, the financial impact of a bad business transaction.

I absorb the sin not in myself, but in Christ, who lives in me. It’s no longer I who live, after all; it’s he who lives in me. And this is what I point out to my enemy in the midst of our battle against his sin.

Now let me hasten to note, for those in abusive marriage situations, for example, that absorbing the blow can only come on the other side of sharing with our enemies God’s sober judgment about their sin toward us. In the case of an abusive marriage, that judgment is “It is wrong to let you continue to use me as a punching bag; therefore we must separate and find help for you.”

But to abusers and all of our enemies, we do this as we share with them God’s sober judgment of us—our own stories of how he set us free from the penalty of canceled sin, and how he is even now setting us—and those whom we have harmed—free from sin’s power. Which is how we know they can be set free, too. And we need to announcing this to them even while proclaiming God’s sober judgment of their sins.

This is what prevents us from condemning others—because we of all people ought to know (and mirror) judgment with mercy and without condemnation, because that’s the Work of Mercy Christ performs daily on us who love him and trust him with our lives.

Remember: In God’s character, the offer of mercy follows judgment like day follows night. Condemnation doesn’t follow judgment in the kingdom of God; mercy follows judgment. The one to whom mercy is extended can reject that mercy, and that unrepentant spirit leads to condemnation. But never forget the order, no matter how grave the sin: Judgment/mercy/condemnation, not judgment/condemnation.

Mercy is the desired end of judgment. Meaning, we judge people in Jesus’ name in order that they might see how very badly they need the mercy of Christ, which we extend to them at no cost other than their willingness to accept it and enter into the lifelong process of letting that judgment and mercy work in their lives. This doesn’t preclude restitution in any sense–far from it (that’s what “lifelong process of etc etc” means in the previous sentence). But it sure does preclude condemnation and haughtiness on our part.

And just as it cost God everything to offer mercy to us, it costs us everything to mirror that mercy to those who sin against us. That’s how God expects us to use our lives—as Christ did, as a re-presentation of his offering for their sin. Our offering for sin does not save. But it is the most effective way to point to the only offering that has ever saved. M. Scott Peck, the therapist, writes:

I cannot be any more specific about the methodology of love than to quote these words of an old priest who spent many years in the battle: “There are dozens of ways to deal with evil and several ways to conquer it. All of them are facets of the truth that the only ultimate way to conquer evil is to let it be smothered within a willing, living human being. When it is absorbed there like blood in a sponge or a spear into one’s heart, it loses its power and goes no further.”

Peck is partly right. Evil loses its power and goes no further…to the degree that we human sponges mirror and testify to the judgment of the living sponge—Christ Jesus. The merciful God absorbs the sin of mankind not like a bad business deal but like blood in a sponge that, curiously, tells the truth as he is being stabbed—or, more accurately, speared in his side, nailed in his wrists, and crowned with thorns on his head.

And he calls us to judge in this same way. We should judge only the evil we are willing to personally absorb with him over time. This makes judgment costly and personally inconvenient, which ensures that it will only be entered into for the sake of the one being judged and not for the emotional and moral satisfaction of the judge.

For the abused, that doesn’t mean receiving further abuse. As we’ll talk about in our next post, that’s not mercy; that’s leniency. And becoming a human punching bag isn’t judgment; it’s insanity. But it does mean deep (unwarranted) care for the offender, which looks like staying with them but away from them until they refuse to acknowledge, accept, and fundamentally repent and change. Which is a lot harder than either staying with them and getting punched or walking away from them and finding someone else who’s not so obviously broken.

Judgment that’s not motivated by mercy always looks for someone other than us to cover the cost. Typically human judges look to pin the price tag on the offender. Judgment that’s motivated by mercy, though, draws others to receive God’s offer of mercy, because the one who is judged can see the judge bearing the cost of that mercy.

And that’s why the only people God trusts to judge are those who were once his enemies–those who now daily enjoy his endless patience and mercy. They judge mercifully in the natural course of pouring out to others the mercy that is daily being poured into them.

We need to learn how to judge the evil in others and in the world unapologetically and specifically and courageously while smothering that evil mercifully in ourselves, in the name of Christ Jesus. That’s how God in Christ performs the Work of Mercy of forgiving and reconciling in the world.

Typically the hardest part of this is being able to imagine judgment without condemnation, of which only God (and God extending his mercy through us) is capable. As we’ll talk about in Part V, that’s why we human beings fall back into leniency instead of letting God pour his mercy through us.

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Forgiving and Reconciling, Part III: Wherein We Admit That We Of All People Have No Right To Be Bitter Towards Anybody

Posted on September 7, 2011 by Pastor Foley

God sets us believers free from the power of sin but not from the sin-stained story of our redemption. We’re not set free from that story because God wants us and others to see Christ Jesus continually displaying his gloriously unlimited patience toward us in real time, in actual human history.

Our sin-stained history, when it is ever before us and others, ensures humility. When we have amnesia about our misdeeds, it makes for bad theology and no sanctification and it leads to a hypocritical contempt of our fellow sin-strugglers. 

As Pastor Brian Tubbs says, “Flawed, sinful human beings do not have the moral right to hold grudges or bitterness toward others.”

What he’s saying is that we’re often bitter toward those who sin against us because we judge them outside of the context of our own sin-stained story of redemption. Reinhold Niebuhr, the Christian ethicist, says, “There is no deeper pathos in the spiritual life than the cruelty of righteous people.… Their pride is the basis of their lack of mercy.”

Robust memory of our sins is the antidote to pride.

So when it comes to rendering a verdict on our guilt, God does not remember our sin.

But when it comes to telling and bringing to completion the story of our redemption, God remembers every detail of our sin, transforms it through his grace, and enters the whole story into the public record. Christian marriage and family therapist Larry Barber puts it like this:

God does not forgive us by forgetting our sin. In fact, the Old Testament is a record of the history of God’s dealings with the nation of Israel, and a significant portion of that history involved the sin of the nation and its rebellion against God. Certainly one of the reasons God inspired the biblical authors to record the history of Israel was so that later generations would remember what had happened in the past.

The Bible tells us that God is the sovereign, transcendent creator of all that exists. Nothing happens to us that He has not ordained. But He does not author the events and experiences of our lives and then forget that they ever happened. God’s purpose is that we learn from the experiences that He has willed.

So God remembers sin forever, but only for our sake, and for the sake of those crushed by our sin. His mercy takes away not only the sting of death (like Paul says in 1 Corinthians 15:55, “Death, where is thy sting?”), but it also takes away the sting of a history that is not saturated in his grace—a history stuck in sin.

When our sinful history is saturated in his grace, it makes it possible for us to bear our sin-stained past and present, because it turns that sin-stained past and present into a field of future hope. 

So forgiveness demands memory. And it demands God’s ongoing judgment as well—not merely a sinner’s one-time passage through a terrifying turnstile of judgment, but a redeemed believer’s lifestyle of accepting God’s ongoing retelling of our stories, the parts that make us look good and the parts that reveal us to be really quite bad after all.

God insists that we, his redeemed ones, remember our past quite openly and publicly, with full admission of and contrition for sins past and present. But part of what he calls us to do is to remember our sins without condemnation of ourselves or anyone else. That’s how his glory shows through. That’s how people come to realize how merciful he really is. And God calls us to tell our stories as “in process”—that is, with full faith that God is redeeming us.

In his mercy, God does not cut the cord between us and his judgment at the moment he forgives us. Instead, he cinches the cord permanently. God’s ongoing judgment of us is the anchor that prevents us from falling back into the waves of pride, amnesia, and condemnation which we had fallen into and from which he is saving us. It is only when we are permanently secured by the ongoing judgment of God that sin can be addressed by anyone—God, the offender, and the offended—with something other than pain and regret and anger.

And that–as we’ll talk about in Part IV of our series–gives us a whole different way to react to the sin of others.

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Forgiving and Reconciling, Part II: Wherein We Hear The Good News That God Who Does Not Remember Our Sins Does Not Forget Them Either

Posted on September 2, 2011 by Pastor Foley

Paul says in Romans that there is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus. But we should never misunderstand this and say that there is no judgment.

To the contrary: If we want to be forgiven and healed—if we and those we hurt are to be set free from our sin—then the evil in us needs to be named and judged by God, not hidden or downplayed or forgotten.

The doorway to hope in Christ is willingly naming with God and before others the evil in ourselves. And we do this honestly and humbly, not reluctantly or with exaggeration. And we know that he is judging—that is, setting right—the mess in us by the finished work of his son, Christ Jesus and by the present power of the Holy Spirit.

This is why from the beginning of the salvation process to its culmination (when we become fully mature in Christ), we stand before God—and before our fellow human beings—with our arms at our sides. We make no effort to justify ourselves or explain ourselves or defend ourselves or even humiliate ourselves. We don’t fear God’s judgment. We seek it and welcome it! And we don’t fear people’s disdain. Instead, we trust Christ and the Scriptures that when we willingly receive God’s judgment in Jesus’ name, we enter the narrow path to the wideness of God’s mercy.

This is very different than how most of contemporary Christianity typically regards God’s judgment. It’s often seen as a jagged metal turnstile which we pass through one single terrifying time on the way into Salvation Acres. Then after we pass through, God regards us as justified—or, as some folks like to say, “just-as-if-I’d-never-sinned.”

And that’s a glorious truth so far as it goes. Like Peter says in Acts 10:43, “All the prophets testify about him that everyone who believes in him receives forgiveness of sins through his name.”

But here’s where error creeps in: This idea of “just-as-if-I-had-never-sinned” becomes for many Christians not only an assurance of forgiveness (which it’s intended to be) but also justification for an end to ongoing repentance (which is the opposite of what God intends).

If you think about it like a courtroom, many Christians get so excited that God overturns their guilty verdict that they move for a dismissal of the evidence. We’d rather our fellow human beings not know how bad we’ve been. So God’s forgiveness becomes a gateway into a field of spiritualized denial as Larry Barber, a Christian marriage and family therapist, puts it.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer calls this cheap grace—the idea that “my only duty as a Christian is to leave the world for an hour or so on a Sunday morning and go to church to be assured that my sins are all forgiven.” Bonhoeffer was the pastor who stood against the Nazis during World War II when most German Christians didn’t. And he said that cheap grace was a major reason why most German Christians joined in lockstep with the Nazis.

And we Christians today are not that different from the German Christians under Hitler. Methodist Bishop Gregory Jones says that we Christians today often forget that Christ justifies the sinner, not the sin. Or, put a little differently, we forget that Christ saves us from our sins, not in our sins. Jones says:

A Christian account of forgiveness ought not to simply or even primarily be focused on the absolution of guilt; rather, it ought to be focused on the reconciliation of brokenness, the restoration of communion—with God, with one another, and with the whole Creation. Indeed, because of the pervasiveness of sin and evil, Christian forgiveness must be at once an expression of commitment to… “unlearn” sin and learn the ways of God (from Embodying Forgiveness: A Theological Analysis).

So when Scripture says that God remembers our sins no more (like in Isaiah 43:25, Jeremiah 31:34, Hebrews 8:12, and Hebrews 10:17), this doesn’t mean that he forgets our sins. It means that he has dealt with them conclusively—in the cross of Christ, he’s solved the problem. He’s setting everything right. He overturns the guilty verdict, but don’t miss this part:

He orders the evidence of our sin preserved.

That is, he doesn’t forget. He doesn’t just overlook. And he doesn’t want you or others to forget or just overlook either. That would take away from his glory and our growth in the image of Christ.

Like Paul said in 1 Timothy 1:16, his patience in saving us glorifies him! He doesn’t use your sin against you in the future—that’s what it means to say he remembers it no more—but once he forgives you he calls you to remember where you came from and where you really are presently at. And he calls you to submit yourself to him as he goes about his business of healing every one of your broken relationships, drying every tear that you have cried or caused others to cry, and bringing every glory to his name.

Some of that work isn’t completed on this side of glory. But he’s not waiting to begin. The kingdom of God is at hand. The king is already judging—setting things right that sin and death and evil have corrupted in you and through you.

And one thing that all of this ought to do for us is to cause us not to look down our noses at those who have sinned against us but rather, empathetically, across the aisle, as we’ll talk about in Part III of our series on Forgiving and Reconciling.

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