FORGIVENESS OF SINS
If the conclusions I will express in
this thesis are accurate, then truly, there is even greater reason to
suspect that Christian orthodoxy's claim to being the repository of
doctrinal correctness is emptier than we have thus far suspected. Judge,
if you will, the following summation, in very general terms, of whatever
agreement there is among evangelicals regarding the meaning of
forgiveness of sins and how, particularly, it affects our view of the
nature of God:
Self-proclaimed orthodoxy's view
begins with supposing that in order for forgiveness of sins to occur, a
change within the heart of God had to occur first. Then, and only then,
it is asserted, could absolution become a possibility. It is theorized
that the shedding of the blood of Christ accomplished this necessary
change of heart in God so that He could legally offer to mankind freedom
from guilt before the divine tribunal. One might wonder, according to
this convoluted theology, why Paul's statement regarding reconciliation
does not read thus: "God was in Christ making it possible for Him
to be reconciled to the world."
It becomes quite obvious when one
pauses to really reflect on what the institutional church has to say
about forgiveness, that its mentality, rather than offering a cure for
the mindset that has resulted from eating of the tree of the knowledge
of good and evil, actually reinforces that disease-infected and
infecting consciousness. While declaring that Christ delivered us from
the curse of the law, it presents God as responsible to give the law and
its indictment of us a proper hearing in determining His relationship to
us.
God is presented as a god of petulant
perfection who---being offended by our failures to measure up to his
expectations---confronts us with the standard of the law, as
representative of His holiness, and goes to great lengths to shove our
grievous shortcomings in respect to said law in our face. This god is
seen as being between a rock and a hard place; on one hand desiring to
remit mankind's sins, but on the other hand forced to acknowledge how
offensive we are to him according to the law. Thus legitimacy is granted
to him casting us from his presence forever and, in the name of
righteousness, consigning us to eternal agony.
The God who initially forbade us from
eating (living by) good and evil knowledge (the law), has now become the
god who, himself, is law-obsessed and law-driven; a god who refuses to
consider changing his mind until he is given his pound of flesh via the
sacrifice of his son. But it becomes really complicated at that point
because it is he doing the reconciling work in his son, thus he becomes
a masochistic deity who insists on reckoning our sins against us until
he has sufficiently beat upon himself to answer the claims of the law
against us. It seems to me that this god is a candidate for the
psychiatrist's couch.
Be sure that, the real God did in
fact, in union with His Son, incur great suffering even to death in
order to bring us to a state of unashamedness in His presence, but it
was not a suffering that solved a problem within God; it was not a
reconciling of conflicting divine emotions each demanding to be
heard----the law crying out for the right to inflict pain on the
offenders in retaliation for their infamy, and grace weeping on our
behalf, saying, "Don't do it, find a way to let them off the
hook."
The conciliating work of God in Christ
addresses conflicted humanity - not conflicted Deity. We are, in and of
ourselves, angry, hostile, alienated, antagonistic and adversarial
toward God and ourselves, and ashamed of being so. Though we need, more
than anything else, to be at peace with God, ourselves and others, we
struggle with feelings and thoughts, rooted in the deepest depths of our
subconscious, that God has done us wrong, and not being able to support
such thoughts with a clear conscience, we turn our anger against
ourselves and others to mask our anger toward God.
This is the form that sin takes in our
hearts, becoming a cacophony of maddening internal voices that we deal
with by constructing a hopefully soundproof wall of self-righteousness,
but the wall only muffles the noisome pestilence, and/or by the
self-preserving mechanism of suppression kicking in to keep us from
going insane, and/or giving into insanity rather than enduring the
struggle any longer. And, I'm sure that others, more knowledgeable than
I in regard to the human psyche, could point out still other
subconscious contortions with their various individual nuances that we
suffer before we hear the voice of the Son of God saying, "Your
sins are forgiven you."
To go back to the root meaning of the
Greek words translated, "forgive" or "remit," etc,
we find the idea of sending away or divorcing; to put (send) away. There
is nothing in God that needs to be sent away, nothing from which He
needs to be divorced. Forgiveness is a subjective change in man deriving
from an eternally subjective steady state within God that refuses to
disqualify us from His love and purpose which is communicated to us by
the shed blood of Christ through the Holy Spirit. We need the sprinkling
of the blood of Christ on our hearts. God needs no such sprinkling. We
need to have the satanic accusation sent away as we are confronted by
love that will not retaliate against us even in the face of our
crucifying hatred of God.
I believe I've stumbled across a
marvelous way by which this truth has come down to us from the primitive
roots of our English language. The word, "forgive" with its
several variations, comes to us from the Old English word, "forgifan,"
a simple compound word that combines the intensive prefix,
"for," with the body of the word, "gifan," to convey
the thought of intensified giving; thus theologically, of the particular
intensification of God's givingness in the face of our sin.
The prefix is not used in the sense of
"fore," that is having occurred before hand (as one might
properly conclude from the truth that the Lamb of God was slain before
the foundation of the world), nor is it essentially used in the sense of
being in support of something (as in, "I am for it"), though
that thought is included, but the prefix, "for," in this case,
as an intensive prefix, intensifies the "gifan" heart of the
word, from which we get "give," "giving," etc., or
as I coined above, "givingness."
Here in the roots of our language has
been hidden the truth expressed by Paul, when he wrote that "where
sin abounds, grace does much more abound." Here, we might say,
God sends away from our hearts the notion that He distances Himself from
us according to, and proportionate to our sinfulness. The word conveys
the truth that sin has the effect of intensifying the givingness of God
toward us, so that, in the face of our sin, God, as it were, searches
out and draws forth from Himself a greater, more energized determination
to free us from all that separates us from Him.
Note, I said what separates us from
Him, not what separates Him from us. From us toward Him, we are
separated by the blindness of our hearts in regard to His refusal to
ever be disconnected from us. From Him toward us there is the
unbreakable love-union that we should expect from our perfectly loving
Father. The prophet is very precise when he declares, "But your
iniquities have made a separation between you and your God and your sins
have hidden His face from you, so that He does not hear." (Isa.59:2.
NAS) The separation is from our side, not His. He continues to hold us
in His love, but we are numb to the embrace while we are blind to the
undisturbed-by-sin look of love on the face of our God. He does n ot
hear [He is unresponsive to] us because we are addressing a god that He
is not.
This sending away of sin from man
fully occurred in the conciliating death of Christ and each of us is
made aware of freedom from guilt in our due time, in order that we, in
union with Him, may put (send) away, divorce sins from others. Jesus
declared this to be directly connected to the receiving of the Spirit.
"Receive the Holy Spirit. If you forgive the sins of any, their
sins have been forgiven them; if you retain the sins of any, they have
been retained." (Jn.20:23, NAS). I add Jonathan
Mitchell's translation translation of the passage with its marvelous clarification:
"If you
men should send away (dismiss; allow to depart; forgive; pardon;
divorce) the mistakes (sins; errors; failures) of certain ones, they
have been sent away for them (have been and remain pardoned in them;
have been dismissed or divorced by them). If you should continue holding
fast (keep on seizing and grasping) those of certain ones, they have
been and continue being held fast (seized; grasped)."
Contrary to the commonly accepted interpretation, the remitting of sins
and the retaining of sins, is not to be understood as standing in
contrast, but as being complementary.
To retain sins does not mean to keep
holding men's sins against them, but that we retain under God as a
retaining wall retains. The idea is to seize and hold so as to bring
under control. I believe that the saints shall become more and more
aware of their commission to forgive and also to seize/hold fast sins by
the authority that they share with Christ. This, as in all things, must
be done under the direction and supervision of the Spirit who will cause
us to speak words of forgiveness to those whom He has prepared and, in
certain situations, to stop sins in their track.
We do have the ground upon which to
forgive sins and that ground or basis is not man's correct response to
God, but the shed blood of Christ. Christ has died for all, thus
forgiveness can be declared to be true to and for any and all men.
Accordingly, I believe that man's faith is a response to the already
accomplished reconciliation that has occurred in Christ, rather than
being the prerequisite for forgiveness, whether or not there is a clear
doctrinal understanding, conceptually.
Reconciliation and its accompanying
forgiveness produce faith, and by faith, we are made whole since the
essential fragmentation of the human personality is traceable ultimately
to unresolved guilt. To concisely summarize:
The reconciling action of God in Christ does not change God; it changes
man. It does not deliver God from a conflicting dilemma in His
relationship to us; it frees us from inner conflict as to our
relationship to Him.
Forgiveness is a subjective human
experience granted to us and communicated to us by God, not as a legal
edict, but from His Father-heart. The indwelling Spirit of God throbs
with this truth. In the measure that we become intimate with the
indwelling Spirit, we shall be forgiven and forgiving people.
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