forgiveness – Page 5 – Authentic Hope for Answers

We human beings find it hard to forgive; it means accepting to suffer whatever it was we had to forgive, giving up any desire to get even, and acting towards the offender as if it hadn’t happened. Our hurt pride finds that hard to stomach!

With God, forgiveness is not easy either – but for different reasons. Let me explain. First of all, God is, by his very holy and righteous nature, the upholder of all justice in the universe that he has created. He cannot be guilty of injustice; he loves righteousness and hates iniquity (Psalm 45.7). His justice rightly reacts with holy anger at the sins of human beings and that means he punishes the guilty “according to their deeds” – a biblical affirmation 9 times repeated, indicating the exact justice of any divine punishment.

This being so, how can God wipe anyone’s slate clean without betraying his justice? That is, as it were, God’s problem. To forgive is essentially an unjust act. When we forgive our enemies, we may yet think that they will have to face Justice. When God forgives, he himself is the guarantor of justice, and he knows full well that Justice must be honoured. He had to find a way to forgive sinners while still upholding the righteous demands of Justice.

The great message of the Bible is God’s willingness to forgive and that he promises forgiveness. How can a just God forgive? Only on the basis of justice somehow being done. God’s absolute wisdom found the way to do that: this is the heart of the good news of the Gospel. Because he has done so, we may be forgiven.

So, what has God done? J.B. Phillips translates 1 John 4.9-10 very well here: “The greatest demonstration of God’s love for us has been his sending his only Son into the world”; that is the first step. The Son of God became like us so as to represent us, as it were, before the Judge. It was “not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son to make personal atonement for our sins”.

This means several vital things: first, that we did not love God as we ought, so we didn’t deserve his mercy. We can’t earn our forgiveness; it comes by his generous grace. Second, there needs to be atonement. What does that mean? It means justice has to be satisfied. It can only be satisfied by the inflicting of the just penalty. But that penalty can be borne by a willing sinless representative. Thirdly, it was Jesus, God’s Son, who made atonement for our sins. How? By standing in our stead and suffering death upon the Cross, out of love for us who deserved judgment. God is immensely kind to hell-deserving humans! He sent his Son who willingly came to seek and save the lost. God thus provided the atoning sacrifice which had to be made. This was the only possible basis that allows him to forgive while fully honouring the obligatory demands of justice. This is no mere theoretical solution; it happened in history.

This was the way that the infinite wisdom and the extraordinary love of God united to find a way to make our forgiveness possible. This is the good news of the Gospel, summed up by the apostle Paul when he wrote “Christ died for our sins” (1 Corinthians 15.3). If you have never seen that before, take time to take it in. It is the most stupendous news mankind could ever hear! Since we all need forgiveness from God, it is a wonder that he found the way – at considerable cost, the Cross – to offer us full and free forgiveness.

Clive Every-Clayton

The philosopher Emmanuel Kant was impressed, he said, by two things: the starry sky at night and the moral law within. The stars tell of the greatness of the Creator; the conscience speaks of his holiness.

When the holy Creator made persons in his likeness, he inscribed into the depths of our inner nature a consciousness of right and wrong. This is one of the outcomes of our species being made “in the image of God”. Indeed, our conscience speaks with a quasi-divine authority, warning us of temptations and reproving our faults.

Did you ever stop to think that everyone without exception knows what it is to have a bad conscience? Our conscience tells us, in spite of ourselves, when we’ve done wrong and it makes us feel bad. It is our inner sense of justice. When we sin, it tells us we are guilty.

It is important to know how to deal with this uncomfortable feeling of guilt. The wise Swiss Doctor Paul Tournier penned a book entitled, “True and False Guilt”, showing that false guilt is that which comes from being criticised by people, and we can feel guilty when we have actually not done wrong.

Our conscience judges our actions by the light of our own “inner law”. The voice of conscience is a universal experience, but the “inner law” by which we judge ourselves varies from person to person, and we can either educate it or relax it, consciously or unconsciously.

Although our conscience is not therefore an infallible moral guide, it does make us aware of the wrongness of temptations, and if we listen, it makes us conscious of our sins. Happy the one who has a good clean conscience!

We are endowed with conscience so that we are constantly reminded that we should do good, not evil. The reason that the experience of a bad conscience is universal is that we are all morally imperfect; we all err, make moral mistakes, fall short of our duty. So through our conscience, God is telling us that we are sinners and we need forgiveness.

Forgiveness is one of our heart’s deep needs; without it, people have been led to despair, to suicide, to hopelessness and even to madness. The problem, and the good news, are expressed in the words of Psalm 130.3-4: “If you, O Lord, kept a record of sins, O Lord, who could stand? But with you there is forgiveness”. Yes, God is in the business of forgiving sinners!

And when God forgives, he does it well! He wipes the slate completely clean! “I will forgive their wickedness and will remember their sins no more”, he says (Hebrews 8.12). “Though your sins are like scarlet they shall be as white as snow” (Isaiah 1.18). Nothing else in all the world can work that miracle of real forgiveness; it is God’s own speciality. If you need forgiveness (and who doesn’t?) you must apply to Him.

And getting forgiveness is the gateway into the harmonious relationship with God that we were made for, that gives true human fulfilment. So how do we get it?

I’ll take a few more blog posts to make it clear, as it is so vital and wonderful. But just realise this first: you can’t buy it, you can’t earn it, you don’t deserve it. It is a gift! God gives it because he is a God of grace.

Clive Every-Clayton

Tag: forgiveness

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A good conscience