November 3, 2009: God’s Prerequisites For Forgiveness

Suppose you are a sinner and you ask some Christian pastor what you have to do to be forgiven by God. What do you think he would say?

Specific answers would vary from pastor to pastor of course. But probably all of them would talk about confessing your sin and turning from it. I think I would quote 1 John 1:9: “If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins, and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness.” I’d mention the tax collector who cried out, “God be merciful to me, a sinner!” and the crucified criminal who said to Jesus, “Remember me when you come into your kingdom.” Both men received forgiveness from God. The God we worship stands eager to forgive all who despise their sin and confess it to him.

But imagine now a pastor who responds, “Oh, no, no, no, you misunderstand! You don’t have to do anything to be forgiven by God. You don’t have to say anything, confess anything, believe anything, turn from anything, or even think anything. That is because he has already forgiven you! It’s a terrible mistake to think you’ve got to admit fault or be sorry for what you did. And you certainly don’t have to change your behavior, or even intend to change it. In fact, you could even say to God, ‘I don’t want your forgiveness' - and he would still forgive you anyway! That is because God forgives the unrepentant. He just forgives everybody no matter what they do.”

Those of you who love the Bible would recoil in horror, because you know that that is not how God forgives. It really takes very little investigation to discern that the Bible teaches - with vigorous consistency - that the unrepentant wicked are condemned while the humbly penitent are shown grace. This theme shines on practically every page of Scripture in one form or another.

Which is why it continues to amaze me that so many Christian teachers insist that we ourselves must forgive people who sin grievously but who do not repent. A highly respected and nationally syndicated preacher said that in his sermon a couple weeks ago. I wonder if it will occur to him someday that he is unintentionally suggesting to his congregation that the way God forgives us is pretty shabby. We can do better than God! Though God insists on repentance, we should be much more loving than that.

In the March 9, 2005 issue of Christianity Today, Rev. R. T. Kendall actually said yes to the question “Can I forgive those who have betrayed me if they are not repentant?” He wrote, “If we wait for those who have hurt us to repent first, we will almost certainly wait for a long, long time.” Well, yes, we may indeed have to wait a long time – but that is exactly what God does! Sometimes he waits decades for us to come to our senses and bemoan our sin. Jesus compared his Father to the compassionate father in Luke 15 who patiently waited his prodigal son’s return, and who forgave the young man the instant he came back. Kendall, regrettably, finds such waiting inappropriate, because “We...give ourselves a justification to stay bitter the rest of our lives.” No we don’t - that’s the old sleight-of-hand I mentioned last week, the confusion that equates “forgiveness” with “releasing yourself from bitterness” (and therefore understands “not forgiving” as “choosing to remain bitter.”). But that is not what forgiveness means. Forgiveness is the act of canceling an offender’s debt regardless of how you feel about it. Just because you lack bitterness does not mean you have forgiven, and just because you still have angry feelings doesn’t mean you haven’t.

The basic template for forgiveness, divine and human, is laid down in Luke 17:3 where Jesus says, "If your brother sins, rebuke him, and if he repents, forgive him.” The second “if” in that sentence must be allowed to stand as our Lord spoke it and not edited to “whether or not.” That is, Jesus did not say – nor would it have occurred to him to say - “If your brother sins, rebuke him, and whether or not he repents, forgive him.” The proper response to sin is rebuke, just as the proper (and gracious) response to repentance is forgiveness.

That point is nailed down in the next verse, where Jesus says, “If he sins against you seven times in a day, and seven times comes back to you and says, 'I repent,' forgive him." While our forgiveness should be inexhaustible, just like God’s, it should also be conditioned on the offender’s repentance, just like God’s.

Should there be any other strings attached to our grace? Absolutely. That is part of the lesson of the parable that Jesus told about forgiveness in Matthew 18:31-35. There a man owed a king a million dollars and couldn’t pay it. He begged for mercy and patience, and the king kindly forgave the debt completely (but conditionally, as we find out later). Then the same man went out and throttled a servant who only owed him a hundred dollars. The servant likewise pleaded for patience and mercy, but the man didn't give it. He had the servant thrown in debtor‘s prison.

When the king heard of the matter, he rescinded the original pardon that he had given the first man. There had been a string attached to it, a string which, verbalized, would sound like “Because I forgive you when you beg mercy from me, you must now forgive others when they beg mercy from you.”

Biblical forgiveness has conditions and strings which, when ignored, leave us with emotional mush rather than true grace. When you give no-strings-attached forgiveness to unrepentant people, you have not imitated your Father in heaven but rather simply enabled more wickedness and irresponsibility. And you may also have tempted yourself to wonder why God isn’t as nice and as loving as you.

I can imagine all kinds of objections to what I have written above (“But didn’t Jesus forgive unrepentant people from the cross?”), and will be happy to address those points next week.