Does God Forgive?

How forgiveness is justified and whether forgiveness is granted seems to depend on two entirely different conditions. Even though the atonement justifies any choice of God’s to forgive, the atonement is no guarantee that he will forgive. Remember, there is a hell. Some people aren’t forgiven. The condition, we have to meet, in order to receive forgiveness is just to believe and trust that God will forgive. There’s not much to that condition—just believe and trust and that’s all.

But I don’t think we want to say God grants forgiveness just because he has some quirky penchant to be permissive of unrepentant sin and evil. And we can recognize the problem here without feeling the need to discover some way in which forgiveness is merited. In fact, we can and should hold a firm stance on that point. Belief and trust cannot even be characterized as meritorious thinking. While there is a deontological sense to thinking correctly, (“Deontological” is a fancy word for having the characteristic of a moral imperative or duty), believing what is true rather than false is just as often a case of value neutrally doing what is in one’s own best interest. Unless one is lying and acting facetiously, failing to recognize the sum of an equation really is just stupid. Failing to acknowledge the fact that Caesar crossed the Rubicon would just be ignorant. If neither is necessarily bad, then thinking correctly on these matters is not necessarily good as much as practical. What’s more, people are saved by the cross, not their knowledge and understanding of the cross. The understanding helps people with righteous living but doesn’t supplement the atoning work of the cross. So while we’re not seeking what behavior merits God’s forgiveness, we are seeking the reason why he forgives.

There has to be a reason why. “Love,” as a motivation, doesn’t explain how granting forgiveness happens to be a loving thing to do—especially not if people don’t change. And while “love,” as an act (i.e. acting in a loving way) may be just what God has to do to be consistent with himself, we still don’t want to say that God has to permit sin and evil. I think the reason why our loving God forgives us has to have something to do with what happens to us if and when we accept his forgiveness. The fact that something happens to us is clear. The metaphysics of regeneration and sanctification is not only a clear scriptural fact but can be physically experienced. But if that metaphysical activity entails a moral development, then just saying as much would be sufficient to answer our question: “why?” In short, God forgives because forgiveness helps sinners to become righteous and that makes forgiveness a good thing—not a bad thing.

If we assume a person is damned—not because God refused or withheld forgiveness, but because that person rejected God’s otherwise unconditional gift, then we must think that the Pharisees who do indeed seem to have damned themselves did so by rejecting Christ. And that sounds about right. Working backwards so to speak, we therefore conclude vice versa that the thieves, murderers and prostitutes who seem to have secured salvation did so by accepting Christ. Somehow, because of forgiveness, the law abiding citizens became lawless while the lawless citizens became law abiding. Actually, what forgiveness does is expose the illusion of moral superiority that people falsely assume they have because they abide by laws.

Someone once said to me, “If salvation was just a matter of making a commonsense choice, then everyone would chose to be saved.” This person thought she was making a good argument for why salvation had to be contingent on some meritorious behavior. Listening to this person say such a thing caused me to realize how deep and severe the divide is between good and bad theology. (She was Catholic). While salvation is a matter of making a commonsense choice and everyone should chose to be saved, they don’t because they are sinners who have to be persuaded to repent. The job of the law (an admittedly undefined term here) is to do that persuading--not to stipulate some moral obligations as a pre-condition of salvation. By telling us we need to behave better than we have been behaving, laws teach us of our need of salvation. But people who see laws as God’s list of duties he obligates us to fulfill as a pre-condition to forgiving us are people who completely misunderstand this purpose of the law. Other purposes exist such as to provide justice in society. But the purpose of the law in relation to salvation has to be correctly understood. People might NOT seem to need any persuading of the fact that human beings are sinful, but they clearly misunderstand human beings and sin and the reason Christ died on the cross and even hell if they think that anyone can behave good enough to merit salvation. If they understood the law, (correctly in relation to salvation) they would understand the need of the cross. And insofar as they don’t understand either of these, they won’t understand why Christ accepted thieves, murderers and prostitutes before the Pharisees or why a number of the later, not the former, were destined to hell.

There is only one healthy way to think—i.e. that God is unconditionally forgiving, (hell is only made possible because God won’t force everyone to accept his free gift) but there are many neurotic ways of thinking. Two basic examples will suffice. And I will simplify these examples for clarity’s sake by talking about people who are monotheistic and in fact, view the world in that generally misleading “life is a test” way—life is test leading to either salvation or damnation. Besides people who neurotically doubt their redeemability, there are people who don’t even realize their need to be redeemed. Besides sinners who think God has given up on them, there are the self-righteous who don’t think they are sinners at all. I think, even after atheists and agnostics are taken into account, all people always fall somewhere between these two extremes in their thinking. Some just do this thinking more unconsciously than others because they are in denial about manifestly evident attributes of God by which he is known. Ideally one would reside immutability in the balanced center point that holds that we are in fact sinners AND that we are in fact forgiven. Unfortunately, that position is difficult to consciously maintain. We all always need reminding that we need forgiveness and that we are forgiven. We all always need either the law or the gospel (good news) to correct the neurotic ways we are prone to think in.

The implication is that our sinful state is somehow improved by knowledge and understanding of this good news or conversely, that sin is somehow exacerbated by the mistaken neurotic ways of thinking. This is a revelation of the fact that there is a right and wrong way of thinking which has real serious consequences. The revelation is not of a meritorious way of thinking any more than choosing to believe there is anything meritorious about accepting the sum of 2 + 2 is what that is. Choosing to think as God revealed that one should think is like deciding whether you want to be neurotic or healthy.

Now we might here consider what does “training in righteousness” from the often quoted verse mean? To answer that let’s return to the fact that people do end up in hell. Let’s also keep in mind, that from the standpoint of scripture, the people least likely to enter the kingdom of heaven are the clergy.  So how is a clergyman to think of himself or how should the choir think of themselves?  Once people have studied revelation and chosen to think as God has revealed that they should think, what then?  Once people have begun to feel as they, ideally, should feel, then at what point, if any, can they begin to consider themselves righteous without becoming self-righteous.  When can they consider themselves as having improved morally without jeopardizing that humble state of mind they are supposed to have?

What I call the psychology of sinful behavior would again remind us that when the belief that one is righteous becomes a vice and justification for a careless disregard of God’s will--like God's will that we forgive, then there is not much law-abiding in the most important sense. God surely loves the righteous if indeed they are righteous. But that’s the question—can a person’s “law-abiding” really be based on a sincere love and understanding of God and his will if that person is unwilling to forgive as God forgives? Or is that law-abiding something the person is defiantly trying to throw in God’s face as if to show almighty God that he is deserving of his favor? Isn’t the person who thinks he can oblige God to favor him (Cain) really guilty of a kind of lawless selfishness? Doesn’t Cain’s offering up of vegetables—the work of his own hands rather than that of his brothers, foreshadow the false religious thinking of people who never understood God or his revelations and really don’t want to?

So the premise that God forgives because forgiving is good has to be understood with a qualification. God’s forgiveness is only made good by the fact that forgiven people improve morally and even that is only true if the people forgiven acknowledge their need of that forgiveness.  Scripture requires a lifelong commitment to the need of practicing repentance.  The implication is not that we never improve morally and can't, but rather that, no matter how much we improve, we always remain equally vulnerable to evil and the best we can do is pray that God deliver us from that. Just as grace can touch us and redeem us, evil can touch us, unravel our sense of order and peace of mind--turn us into a knotted ball of string. God is not obligated to deliver us from evil anymore than he is to forgive us.  And when he doesn't even do that, as Job pondered, we begin to feel like victims and then "wanting" to please God becomes very difficult. As I've argued in The Problem With Trying, “trying” to please God is neurotic.  If we can’t “want” to please God then we aren't sufficiently sorry for our sins and may need to be made cognizant of them and this is partly what preaching does.  Again, as already mentioned above, we all always need reminding that we need forgiveness and that we are forgiven. We all always need either the law or the gospel (good news) to correct the neurotic ways we are prone to think in.  (For an account of what God reminded Job of see my blog: Job.)