Forgiving and Reconciling, Part VIII: A Straightforward Explanation Of Why Our Failure To Forgive Others Is So Damaging To Us

Posted on September 19, 2011 by Pastor Foley

Not only did Christ bear our sin; he sought to do so. Because he is setting the world right—remember, that’s what his righteousness means—he sought for the uncontested right to bear all sin. He knew that the only way sin could be eliminated was for him to bear it—for us to yield it to him. So he actively invites us to yield our sin to him. 

But we foolish human beings fail to permit him to do this. We keep believing either that we can bear other people’s sin ourselves (and thus pay the penalty of their sin in ourselves), or that we can get other people to bear their sin themselves (that is, we keep trying to get them to pay the penalty of the sin they sinned against us in hopes that that will make the sin go away).

Foolish.

Equally foolish, some of us try to get Christ to bear our sins against him and others, but we insist that other people bear their own sins against us. This actually angers God particularly, because it shows that we don’t understand the nature of sin or what Christ is doing when he bears our sin.

When we try to get Christ to bear our own sin while we simultaneously insist that others pay for their own sin, it shows God that our motives are all wrong. We’re focused on our own self-preservation. We’re not focused on Christ’s work of setting the world right. If we were, we would know that if we try to put someone’s sin back on them instead of redirecting that sin to Christ to bear, sin will just burn more holes—not only through our enemies, but probably through us again, too, and even more people.

This is the message that Jesus shares with Peter in Matthew 18:21-22. Peter is talking to Jesus about forgiveness, and it’s clear that Peter doesn’t understand how forgiveness—God’s judgment plus God’s mercy, offered by us as Christ’s ambassadors—is God’s means of righteousness, of setting the world right.

So Peter asks, “So Lord, how many times must I forgive someone? Seven times?” You can see that Peter is still thinking about self-protection here, not God’s righteousness. He’s thinking, “I don’t want to be taken advantage of.”

But Jesus says back to Peter, “No, not seven times. Seventy seven times!” Because Jesus’ focus is on setting the world right, not protecting himself. And he knows that forgiveness (God’s judgment plus God’s mercy) is God’s primary tool for accomplishing that purpose. So the goal is to use that tool as many times as possible, not as few times.

And Jesus can tell that Peter and everybody else who is standing around them slack-jawed is confused by this, because they’re thinking about human forgiveness (which has no power to fix anything; it just delays and moves around the acid of sin and burns new holes in people).

So he tells them a shocking and little-told story that’s designed to enable them to see the contrast between God’s forgiveness and human forgiveness.

And that story is the focus of Part IX–the pivot point of our series on forgiving and reconciling.

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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.

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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.

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