Jesus commands us to pray in the Lord's Prayer in a particular way. Part of this prayer includes the request for forgiveness. Jesus even includes the reason for the way we ask for forgiveness from God:
"forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors . . . For if you forgive people their sins, your heavenly Father will also forgive you, but if you do not forgive people, your Father will not forgive your sins." (Matt. 6:12, 14-15).
Let us bear in the back of our minds that our soteriology (doctrine of salvation) is not complete in this statement alone--far from it!--but there is a serious warning, and one that we neglect to our own detriment: If we claim Christ as our Lord, we need to be characterized as a forgiving kind of people. But what does it mean to forgive?
Two preliminary concerns: First, there seems to be a direct correlation between my forgiveness of others and God's forgiveness of me. More specifically, we might say that forgiveness seems to include both the person and the debt. There is, in other words, something "owed" by the offender to the offended party. Second, if I am to forgive as God forgives, then--and this is the $64,000 question--how does God forgive? The former issue is a matter of definition and the latter a matter of practice.
This presents us with some interesting insights. God has forgiven us, and this forgiveness is complete. Forgiveness, however, is not an emotion. If it were, then God could forgive our sins without the Cross. God in His sovereign plan could have just decided to overlook our sins. He could just have said, "I forgive you your sins" and been done with it.
But this is precisely not what happened.
In point of fact, God can forgive us precisely because Jesus stood in our place and bore the full weight of God's wrath Himself (Rom. 3:25). God's forgiveness, then, consists not in a removal of wrath, but a redirection of it. That is why Jesus' death on the Cross was and is so necessary. Without it, we have no forgiveness (Matt. 26:28; Heb. 9:22).
What, then, can we say forgiveness consists of? In God's forgiveness of our sins, it consists of our no longer owing the Judge of the earth. As Judge, God must "call it as He sees it," so our sin is sin and cannot be otherwise. We owed the Judge (we were guilty as charged). Therefore, forgiveness in this sense is a reckoning: our debts are paid in full because Jesus Christ paid the debt. We are reconciled to God because we are forgiven (Rom. 5:1), but let's not confuse categories.
Forgiveness is not an emotion. Forgiveness is the clearing of a debt owed.
A distinction needs to be made: we are not judges in our personal relationships. God, as Judge, must be the perfect Judge, and He cannot be otherwise. We, however, are not judges in the sense that someone who sins against us must pay the debt in full. We can say that something is "owed" between the offended and the offender, but we cannot say that the offended is acting as judge. Because God has graciously freed us from our debt, so we graciously free others from debts they owe us. In this sense, we can say that we forgive others (that is, freely reckon their debt as paid in full) just as God has forgiven us.
Christian forgiveness, therefore, is a personal choice. If we are the offended party in any relationship, it means that (1) we need to be ready to reckon another's personal debt (sin) against us as "paid in full"; (2) once this is accomplished, we no longer hold the bill--we gave up our right to the check!; (3) This will, of course, lead to reconciliation, mended relationships, and ease hard emotions, but let us not confuse the act of forgiveness with an emotion, as if we should wait for our emotions to catch up with our theology!
No comments:
Post a Comment