The Problem of Forgiveness

0:00 Morning, folks. Okay, whatever. um, Davey said that you were delighted to have me, uh, speak this morning, so I'm also delighted with how delighted you are. I want to talk a little bit about forgiveness, and obviously forgiveness is a significant part of Christianity. It's a day and daily part of what Christians think and practice and meditate on, but because of that, it can become something expected, something domesticated, a well-worn, something that we think that we are entitled to, when actually, in actual fact, forgiveness is quite problematic. It's problematic for people, it's problematic for God, and as we move to take communion together, I thought it would be worth looking at some of the problems of forgiveness. a couple of years ago, just at the start of the, the pandemic, I guess, you know, because everyone was scared, life was suspended indefinitely, everyone was scared and bored, we saw a, a big uptake in the number of guests who were coming along to our home group at the time. I guess you need to be scared and bored to want to attend a Zoom Tuesday night Bible study.

1:13 But we saw lots of people coming out, and we had, uh, and, you know, there's one guy in particular, call him John, was very interested in, obviously very interested in things of God, asking lots of really good questions. And there was a brother and I in that group who said, listen, why don't we meet together with this guy for a few weeks and we'll read through Tim Keller's Reason for God, try and help him understand a little bit more about Christianity and help clarify some of his issues. So we did that. We'd hoped that we would get some opportunities to clarify the gospel and that God would use it in his life to ultimately bring him to faith in him. It fizzled out after a few weeks, as those things tend to do, but not before we got the opportunity that we'd been hoping and praying for. We were talking one time, I can't remember exactly what the discussion was, but we were basically making the case that Jesus in his life, death, and resurrection was the fulfillment of the Old Testament. That the whole Old Testament was pointing towards this God's self-disclosure ultimately fulfilled in Christ. And, um, he asked this question.

2:16 He said, why did Jesus have to die in order for people to be forgiven? I mean, why this, like, grotesque, inhumane, unjust killing of an innocent man? Why did that have to happen in order for for people to be forgiven? Now, the the apparent subtext of the question was, what is it that I've done that's so bad that requires this gruesome, horrific death of an innocent man, this God man according to the New Testament? What is it that I've done so so wrong? Which is a great question, right? I wonder how you would respond, how you would answer that question if somebody asked you, me, a regular person, not the worst person in the world, what is it that I've done that's so bad that requires the innocent death of God's son? We tried our best to answer him.

3:06 I don't think we did a very good job. He left unconvinced, but it does raise the question, I think it's worth reflecting on, that forgiveness is a problem for people to receive. On the one hand, what is there not to like? A loving, faithful, merciful God grants forgiveness freely to people who accept Christ. What's there not to like? But of course, in order for that to make sense, you have to agree that there's something you need forgiven for, and a lot of people are uncomfortable with that. There's nothing great quite like when somebody says, I forgive you, when you don't think that you've done actually anything that's deserving, that needs forgiveness. They tend to get a different response than they were hoping for.

3:49 One of the ways that we can answer what is it that we're being forgiven for, what is the problem of forgiveness, one ways we can answer that is by looking at the whole issue of forgiveness from God's perspective. What it is that he's forgiving us for, why actually it's so difficult for him to forgive, why the death of Jesus was actually necessary, and then some of the responses that fall away from that. So in the next two hours, I'd like to look at some of those questions. So first, God's perspective on sin. In our culture, I guess we're kind of a post-Christian cultural here. There's almost nobody in our culture who grows up here who wouldn't understand what we generally mean by sin. Sin is the bad things that we say, the bad things that we think, maybe, you know, the bad things that we might do. We do have categories for egregious moral evil, like somebody does something heinous, we are reasonably comfortable as a society saying that's evil.

4:41 We may even call those really bad people the sinners because they've done something that we all agree is terrible and wrong. And of course there's some truth to that, but it tends to obfuscate what the Bible says about sin, God's actual perspective on sin. If you read the New Testament, it's way more nuanced and diverse. The explanation description of sin is, is actually more fitting to the human experience than, than we, than that kind of definition might give. New Testament has five different words, five main different words for describing sin, and it's worth just scanning them quickly. The first speaks to, um, the id- this idea of missing the target or failure to attain a goal, that there is something that is required of human beings that because of whatever's inside them, they are inherently unable to meet. The second speaks to an unrighteousness of heart, that whatever there is good in us, whatever we're meant to do that's good, tends to be perverted towards injustice. It comes out from us, and the good that we're meant to do, we are unable to do and unwilling to do.

5:52 The third speaks to, like, vicious or degenerate evil, this real, like, overt, acute incidence of wrongdoing that that that people in general commit and that sometimes we see terrible examples of. The fourth speaks to a breach of God's law. So God has set a standard. This is what you must do. This is what you must not do. And people intentionally step over that standard and do something else. And carrying on from that is the fifth, which speaks to utter lawlessness.

6:26 So it's not just that we step over once, but we step over multiple times. And in fact, there's a complete disregard for everything that God says. And if you take those five terms together, those five main descriptions of sin, you could say there's a passive side to it. There's like a something that just exists by virtue of being, which is an inward corruption of character. We are, by virtue of being born fallen and away from God, we are corrupted against God. There's something that comes out from what is inside us. The next three, together, they speak to deliberate violations of God's law. God has set a standard.

7:01 God has said what we should and should not do, and we deliberately and intentionally violate that. Those two descriptions then, those two summaries could be, we could say then, are always in violation of what Jesus called the greatest commandment. You remember he was asked, what's the greatest commandment? Love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind, and all your strength. And the second is like it, love your neighbor as yourself. But that first commandment, whenever we, just by virtue of being who we are and then our relationship to God's law, we are always breaking that first commandment. So sin is much broader and wider than individual instances of wrongdoing, although it of course includes those. It speaks to what we do.

7:45 It speaks to our natural bent to displace God. Here's the definition of sin that I find helpful. This comes from a European theologian, and note the year that it was written, the context in which it was written, and what would come afterwards. He says, sin is defiance, arrogance, the desire to be equal with God, the assertion of human independence over against God, the constitution of the autonomous reason, morality, and culture. So sin is not merely an individual instance of wrongdoing, it's a total displacement of God. As creator God, he says, I have this place in your life, I have this right over your life, this is the thing, you're meant to be mine and live in obedience to me. But we displace God, we set God aside, and we set ourselves as gods over our own lives, gods over whatever it is that we believe that we can control. So sin is ultimately a rejection of God's kingship and a rebellion against him as our creator.

8:45 So sin is, the sin problem is much bigger and much wider and much deeper than we tend to think of in our culture. You can see lots of examples of this in the Old Testament here, in the Bible. Here are a couple. If you're familiar with the David and Bathsheba account, the 2 Samuel 11, where David, he's in his sort of middle, middling years, middle age. He's meant to be out with the army fighting and defending Israel. Instead, he stays at home and he sees Bathsheba, a good looking woman, one night, and he likes the look of her and he knows that she's married. He's actually married to multiple women, which is, I guess, also a problem, but set that aside. He says, I want to have Bathsheba.

9:25 He sends down for her. His servants bring them up. He has sex with her. They end up getting pregnant, and in order to try and cover it up, he, he tries to con her husband Uriah and cover it up so it it'll look like he hasn't done anything wrong. Uriah doesn't cooperate, he organizes Uriah's death, and it's all pretty terrible. Some time goes past, David gets called out by the prophet Nathan, and he eventually repents, which is great to see repentance. And you see, you know, you get a description of how he repents and what he's thinking in Psalm 51, which is really interesting if you read it. I remember the first time I read it, I came across this line because I was reading the story at the time, and David says, against you, God, against you only have I sinned and done what is evil in your sight.

10:14 I don't know about you, but whenever I read that the first time, I kind of choked on it a little bit. I'm like, that's a bit much, David, you know, against God you've sinned. Well, you sinned against Bathsheba. You, at the very least, you seduced her, and perhaps worse. You sinned against Uriah. You slept with his wife, and then you killed him. You sinned against the, the army. You organized Joab to, you corrupted your general and sinned against your army.

10:38 When you should be fighting and defending them, you're actually sleeping with their wives and organizing their death. You sinned against the whole nation of Israel. God established you as a king to model what it looks like whenever God is in control, and you completely, you completely forsook that responsibility and corrupted the whole thing. It's hard to think of anybody that you didn't sin against. And so it seems a little bit pretentiously pious that he's trying to cover it up a little bit in his confession. But as you read through the whole psalm, what you see is a genuine, honest repentance of a man who has been humbled by the consequences he's gone through. And when he says, against you alone, God, have I committed sin, have I done evil in your sight, he's not saying I haven't done harm to anybody else. He knows that he has definitely harmed many, many people.

11:27 What he's saying is before he did any of that, he sinned against God. That what he did to Bathsheba, Uriah, Joab, the army, the nation, he did all of that because he first rebelled against God. He first rejected God. That's the first sin that flowed out all of those other sins. That's the first and major sin because God, he created Bathsheba, he created Uriah, he gave him as king over Israel and the army. It's God's, and whenever he does wrong, it is ultimately against God that he's committed sin. So rebellion is the basis of all the other sin that we commit. Here's an example from the Sermon on the Mount where Jesus lifts the issue of sin not just from acts and behavior, instances of wrongdoing, to the heart that prompts the wrongdoing in the first place.

12:17 There are lots of examples here, we'll just look at one. Jesus said, you've heard that it was said to those of old, you shall not murder, and whoever murders will be liable to judgment, quoting the Old Testament. But I say to you that everyone who is angry with his brother will be liable to judgment, everyone who insults his brother will be liable to the council, and whoever says, you fool, will be liable to the hell of fire. What he's doing is saying this is not just about murder, this is about the heart that prompts murder. Hopefully, but I don't think most people don't commit murder, but there are lots of reasons why people are constrained and held back from their worst, the worst versions of themselves. The majority of people will not commit murder, but the majority of people over the course of their lifetime will experience murderous hate and will want the destruction and the downfall of others. So Jesus says that heart that prompts that desire, that speaks it's as if you committed in the first place. He raises the level of sin and his category of it.

13:22 So sin, rebellion is, sin is ultimately rebellion, and rebellion is ultimately a displacement of God that is actually over everybody. So we don't get to say those people over there who do those things. From God's perspective, it's everybody because we are born rebels. So, if that's God's perspective on sin, it begins to answer the question, why this big deal with the cross and Jesus? The next thing we need to understand is God's reaction to that sin in order to see the gravity and the scale of it. Why is it so difficult for God to forgive us? Lots of different ways in which the Bible describes God's reaction to sin. You have in the Exodus account, God is the king that's been rejected.

14:09 In Hosea, he's the cuckolded husband. He's the husband whose wife has gone out on him and had an affair on him. In Luke 15, the prodigal son parable, you see that Jesus or Jesus describes God as the father who's been disowned by his son and so on. All these different pictures. There are five key metaphors that help see the, see the, the cause and the effect of, on God of our sin and rebellion against him. The first is height. The Bible, continually describes God as most high. He's the most high God.

14:44 The heavens are his throne and the earth is his footstool. One of the many things that we can take from that is the sheer scale of the, of the, the distance vertically between us and God. God is way up here and we are way down here. That's not like how it was in the garden. That's not how it was originally. The reason that is the case now is because we have a God who is holy, who cannot be down with people who are unholy. The next is distance. God says to Moses in in Exodus, whenever he's at Mount Sinai, you come up and I will give you the law.

15:19 I'll speak to you, but you tell the people, do not come here. Do not come to the edge of the mountain. If you come to the mountain, you will die. And you see that reflected in the tabernacle and the temple system, where God's saying there's this tension. God wants to dwell with his people. He wants to be close to his people in the tabernacle. He wants to be in the midst of all his people around because he wants his people to come and commune with him. He wants them to be close to him, but they can't be, they can't get too close.

15:45 There's always a barrier and there's always a distance because God is holy and they are rebels who've rejected him. And you see that played out time and time again. The the third and fourth, they go together as a pair. God is light and God is fire. God is, um, lives in unapproachable light. It's like looking, staring into a summer sun after standing in, you know, a, a darkened office block all day. You can tell where I work. it's, it blinds you.

16:14 If you were to look in the face of God, you would be blinded because he is holy and we are not. He's a consuming fire. If you got too close to God, he would burn, he would kill you. He would burn you. It would result, result in the consumption, entire consumption and destruction of a person because God is holy and we are rebels against him. The last is vomiting. I don't know the most recent stomach bug you've ever had, but you know whenever your body is just saying the thing that's inside you can no longer be inside you, it must come out. It's a violent, involuntary reaction to, you know, whatever it was that you ate.

16:52 that's the picture that God places. He wants us to see that violent, graphic rejection of something as the way in which he engages with sinners. So he says to to Israel, whenever he gives them the land, he says, if you do what the Canaanites did, if you sin the way that they did, if you rebel against me the way that they did, the land will vomit you out. It will literally spit you out because it can't contain you. Jesus says in Revelation, you're neither hot, you're neither, you're not cold, you're lukewarm, and so I'll vomit you out. I can't have in me what's like you, your sinfulness and my holiness. They don't mix. So putting all those pictures together, you begin to see not just the sin that's a problem, what people, what God has got an issue with, but his reaction to it and how difficult it makes it.

17:39 Forgiveness is the last thing that we would assume as a result of all those things. It just, it can't be presumed, it can't be expected because it's not a natural outworking of that particular circumstance. So, of course, God resolves this. Anyone familiar with the the gospel will understand this. God resolves this in the cross. But we need to see the scales at play to understand, just like John's question at the start, why why did all this have to happen in order for me to be forgiven? Well, the problem is much worse than you understood. The consequences of the sin are much greater.

18:15 God has got, God cannot just forgive people. What would it mean even just to forgive somebody, to say there are no consequences for this thing, don't worry about it, it doesn't matter. Ultimately, that's not justice. Whenever there is injustice, whenever there is rebellion, whenever there's rejection, there are always consequences. Otherwise, it's not in keeping with God's character and the right order of things. But what we see whenever God puts on Jesus, the things that he puts on Jesus in our place, is he's resolving that problem. He asks the question, well, who's going to scale this height between me and you down there? Jesus does.

18:55 Who's going to bridge the gap between you over there and me here? Jesus bridges that gap. Who's going to look into the light and be blinded? Who's going to step into the fire and be burned? Who's going to be vomited out because of all this corruption and sin and rebellion? And the answer is Jesus does all those things. Jesus is vomited out. He is consumed.

19:16 He is blinded. He experiences the gap and the distance from God so that we don't have to. So Paul says, excuse me, in Romans 3, all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God. It's a universal claim. That's true of everybody. Every person's a rebel. And they're justified by his grace as a gift through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus, to show his righteousness so that he might be just and the justifier of the one who has faith in Jesus. There is justice here.

19:46 There is consequence for all of the rebellion and the rejection of God. It's just that the consequences are placed on Christ, and those who put their faith in Christ, actually, they're the ones who get, who come out from under those consequences. All right. So if we're responding to forgiveness and thinking through what is an appropriate response, I think it's really important, especially, I don't know, I assume there are some people here who are considering whether or not they would become a Christian. They're trying to understand what they think about the gospel and whether or not they'll accept it. And probably this is in there. What is it that you need forgiven for? What is it that you specifically have done?

20:28 And we tend to answer those questions, or at least I did before I came to faith. I tend to ask them in comparison to other people. Like, I mean, I know I'm not perfect. Everybody knows I'm not perfect, but compared to that guy over there, I'm actually, you know, pretty decent. Compared to the worst people that I can think of, you know, I actually stack up pretty good. And yeah, I mean, I get the response is, yeah, maybe, maybe that's true. It could be true, possibly, probably, I don't know, maybe it's not true. It might be true that that's the case, but the question really isn't whether or not you compare to somebody else and come off better or worse.

21:03 The question is really, from God's perspective, how do you stack up against him? The issue isn't have you committed more sins or less sins than than that man or that woman. The issue is, are you a rebel against God? And God says, from my perspective, your innate character, it's it's rebellious. Your actual actions, the things that you do, are deliberate violations of what I've said. So from my perspective, you're a rebel. From my perspective, you've got a real problem that you need forgiven for. And so we need to actually come to a point where we see God's forgiveness as something we require.

21:41 And I think that that, and this is one of the gracious things about the way God works. I think that he works with us to actually, um, show us to, he he's not harsh with us. He's not saying go and work it out on your own, and I think you see this as an example of that type of thing, where God says let's reason together, let's work this out, let's talk this through. Um, your skin, your sins are like scarlet, but I'll make them white as snow. They are like red crimson, but I'll make them like white wool. God is saying, I want to point out your need for forgiveness, not to bully you or to beat you or to make you feel bad about yourself or anything like that. I'm pointing this out because I want to resolve it for you. I want to show you your need for forgiveness so that I can fulfill that need on your behalf so that you don't need to experience the consequences of not having it fulfilled.

22:32 That's, that's why. So I would say if you're someone who's considering coming to faith, if you're, you know, considering the things of God, that would be worth giving serious consideration, and I would urge you to be willing to start that kind of conversation with God. Would you show me what it is that I need forgiven for? And think along these lines. And if and when God answers that question and he shows you what it is that you need forgiven for, then you've got the real important question. What are you going to do with the forgiveness that he freely offers? if you're anything like me, you know, a fairly old Christian at this point, then, you know, you go through waves of radical commitment to the things of God, and then, you know, kind of apathetic and bored and indolent. You know, we have, whenever you experience forgiveness for the first time, it's such a relief of the burden whenever you've been under conviction from God that it just naturally prompts excitement and joy and appreciation and, you know, just like I'm so thankful and appreciative to God.

23:37 Love naturally pours out towards God, towards God's people, enthusiasm and energy for the things of God. It just comes out naturally. But over time, and because of the ways you don't ever maintain that perpetually, it can be replaced with apathy, with standoffishness, with a sense of entitlement that God had to do this thing for me because that's what he's meant to do and I kind of deserved it anyway. and it leads to indifference to the things of God, you know, mediocre superficiality, superficial engagement with the things of God. That's what it results in for a lot of Christians, myself included, we experience that. So the question is, how do you reverse that? How do you get an appropriate response to the forgiveness that God has given us? Well, we could go down the route of self-condemnation, the reinvigorated try hard spirit, let's just do better, and that tends to not work very well because it's kind of missing the point.

24:36 What we need is a re- a renewing of our vision of the forgiveness of God. So Jesus lays out this principle. He says, people who have been forgiven much, they love much. People who have been forgiven little, they don't love very much, they love little. And so we could apply it to in this context and say, believers who have a fresh experience of the forgiveness of God, out of them will come, they will love much. They won't even need to try. It will be a natural wellspring in them to love. Believers who don't have a renewed experience of the forgiveness of God, you can't expect much from them.

25:15 So I guess the issue is then, wherever you are in that respect, we probably all could do, if we're believers, with a renewed vision of God's forgiveness, because it just, it just sorts everything else out. The barriers that we experience, the barriers we put up against God, if we have a vivid and tangible experience of forgiveness, those all tend to go away. And what comes out is a genuine love for God, a cooperation with him, a love for his people, and a love for his kingdom. That's all I have. Let's, uh, pray, and then we'll, we'll sing a bit more. Lord, I'm thankful for the forgiveness that you grant us through Christ and through faith in him. I'm thankful that you put on him in the cross what really was ours, and that you gave to us what was his. I pray that for all of us, whether we're believers or we're not believers yet, that you would give us an experience and a vision of your forgiveness.

26:20 Help us see and understand. Amen.