The Freedom Found In Forgiveness (Part 5)

By Pastor Matthew

To forgive, therefore, is not only a personal act; it is also a social and political act, an act loaded with the promise of a new future for our world.  In international relations and in domestic penal policy, it overturns the politics of vengeance.  In social relationships, it overturns the demand for retribution and compensation that the violent would demand to be given what is due them.  In the first century the early Christians interpreted Jesus’ entire ministry as a liberating act of debt-cancellation: in Jesus, the Year of Jubilee had arrived, a time in which all debts were written off, so that the poor could be released from their financial servitude.  This, too, is what forgiveness means today.  This is what we are asking for when we pray: “Forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors!”  The prayer for forgiveness is a revolutionary act, a radical contradiction of the whole economy that underlies the accepted patterns of thought (relativism) and behavior which drive our culture.

God's way is Absolute and Straight Forward!

One of the saddest things about the relativism of our day is that it undermines God’s forgiveness.  Relativism constantly minimizes or denies the absoluteness of God.  It functions implicitly as if God had no clear and unchanging character-as though there were no divine measure for human character.  Relativism does not get along well with biblical statements like, “Be holy for I am holy” (1 Peter 1:16), or, “Be perfect as your Father in heaven is perfect” (Matthew 5:48).  So relativism minimizes the absoluteness of God and His will.

But relativism maximizes the absoluteness of self.  It says that the way to healing and wholeness is to stop measuring yourself by external standards or expectations, even God’s.  Instead, without reference to God or his Word, be yourself.  Make yourself the measure of what is good and acceptable.  Give yourself an unconditional positive self-regard.  The only role that God has to play in this relativism is to be the divine endorsement of your own self-affirmation.  God functions as a kind of booster for the absoluteness of self.  If He presents Himself as one with standards or commandments, then He is part of the problem, not part of the solution.

Another sad thing about this relativism is that it undermines the glory of God’s grace in forgiveness.  It sounds gracious on the surface-to say that God has no law, no standards, no expectations, no commandments, no threats-that he is simply there to affirm me in whatever I happen to be.  That sounds like grace and freedom.  But there is one massive glitch.  It destroys forgiveness.

Where there is no law, no just standard, no legitimate expectation, no normative way of relating to God and man, there can be no forgiveness.  Because forgiveness is the letting go of real offenses, real transgressions, real violations, and real faults.  But if there is no law to transgress, or no standard to offend against, or no expectation to violate, or no commandment to disobey, then there can be no forgiveness.  What looked like grace turns out to be the undermining of grace by the undermining of forgiveness.