Word
Gems
What is a
man but the sum of his thoughts?
- Jesus Christ:
-
- R. N. Flew's
- The
Forgiveness of Sins
There is a famous cathedral in France wherein the lofty roof of the
choir is suspended at a height so vast and perilous that the visitor, on his very
entrance, is overwhelmed by the thought of his insignificance, and advances to the altar
in wondering awe.
So it is with the shrine of our redemption, builded for the wonder and
the refuge of our souls by the hands of God Himself. All the saints tell us that the
forgiveness which they take from Christ is so overwhelming that they are lost in the sense
of their unworthiness.
It ought to be impossible for us even to think of that pardon of our sins which we have
found in Christ without a strange warming of the heart. But the warmth of our gratitude
for this great gift will vary according to the depth and maturity of our religious
experience; and
- it does not please God to give us all a profound sense of
sin at the beginning of our Christian life.
It would be wrong to demand a piercing conviction of sin as the
necessary condition of the new life with Christ. 'I hardly felt grateful to Christ as I
ought for His forgiveness of my sins,' said one who had loved Him long, 'until I had
followed Him as best I could for about ten years; and only then I seemed to be given a new
vision of God, and I began to see how much it cost Him to forgive me my sins.'
- Those who have travelled far in the intimate company of
Christ warn us that the sense of personal unworthiness grows keener as they proceed on
their pilgrimage, and so grows in like manner their wonder at His act of pardoning grace.
Remembering this, remembering that we do not know ourselves, that
neither sin nor holiness are what we think they are, we shall at least be saved from
taking forgiveness for granted, as a matter of course. To take forgiveness lightly and
easily--is it not to forget how much it costs that Divine Friend to admit us into the
sacred intimacy with Himself, which is the Christian life?
For the Christian life is a personal communion with Jesus Christ, and it
is the great gift of forgiveness which alone makes possible that holy friendship. This,
and nothing less, is the meaning of that article of our creed, 'I believe in the
forgiveness of sins'; it is admittance into a personal communion with Himself...
The one thing needful for our progress in the Christian life is a greater love for Jesus
Christ; and our Lord Himself teaches us that a sense of the awe and wonder of forgiveness
is an indispensable condition for growth in love (Luke 7: 36-45).
- God's forgiveness is never a mere passing of the word, a
dumb turning of the back, a formal cancelling of a debt. It implies a personal
relationship, violated and now restored.
Those who say of one who has injured them: 'I forgive him, but I will
never have anything to do with him again,' or, 'I forgive him, but I can never feel the
same towards him,' have an utterly false conception of the meaning of the word.
- Forgiveness means 'readmittance into a personal
relationship.'
There are degrees of forgiveness, in so far as there are degrees of
intimacy in personal relationships. If I forgive a grocer who has cheated me, so as to
give him my custom and confidence once again, as if nothing had happened, that would be a
full forgiveness in one particular degree of personal relationship.
A full forgiveness would not mean that I should make the grocer an
intimate friend. But if a dearly loved friend turns traitor, and ruins my business, and
breaks up my home, forgiveness will be an infinitely more costly business for both of us;
because the personal relationship into which he must be readmitted is deeper, more sacred,
more intimate.
So much more costly and difficult indeed that some will say frankly that
it is inconceivable that the former relationship of perfect confidence can ever be
restored. Certainly we should both of us have to go through much before the old friendship
could be re-established on the old footing, as if there had not been anything betwixt him
and me. The forgiveness of my friend goes deeper than the forgiveness of my grocer.
This prepares us to find in God's forgiveness an unfathomable wonder.
The forgiveness which we find in Christ is so solitary and unique because the intimacy
between God and man is more profound and far-reaching than any human intimacy can ever be.
- Because that relationship is so intimate, the hurt on
both sides, when it is violated, is immeasurable; but also the repairing of it must be
real and complete.
God will not be content to give less than utter forgiveness. He does not
receive His sons back to make them hired servants. When He has forgiven, He has forgiven,
and He is as much at peace with us as a mother is at peace with her little child as it
lies asleep.
The divine forgiveness is much more ample, generous, and complete than
any human forgiveness can be, because that personal intimacy with a Divine Friend, into
which forgiveness introduces us, is the one thing that abides with us always, even to the
end of the world, and it is too sacred and sensitive a fellowship to tolerate any degree
of estrangement or mistrust.
- More passionate than a mother's intimacy with her
children, more cleansing than the love of a pure woman for her beloved, more enduring and
exalted than any affection that ever existed between two human hearts, is the fellowship
wherein God communes with His children in Christ, and is loved of them.
It would seem that the act whereby those sinful children might be
admitted into this holy friendship must be stupendous, beyond the power of human thought.
But according to the teaching of our Master, God's forgiveness is not
altogether beyond our comprehension. He Himself points us to human analogies.
The central petition of the Lord's Prayer is 'Forgive us our sins, as we
forgive those who sin against us' (Luke 6. 3).
Our human forgiveness is used as a type and picture of the divine.
Especially does He point us to the home and to human fatherhood if we wish to know how God
forgives. God is no distant potentate or supreme judge or king, whose forgiveness might
mean 'letting us off ' or restoring us to some lost privilege.
The parable of the prodigal son has been called 'the gospel in the
Gospel,' for there we see the spontaneous love of the Father's heart, His desire to seek
and save the worst sinners, His reception of the lost son into intimate fellowship and
newness of life.
- We see a forgiveness which is wider and freer than the
sinner dares to ask, so wide and generous that the narrow heart of man stumbles at it when
it sees it bestowed on another. The divine love is without limit and the divine
forgiveness is complete.
Some have used this parable to support their contention that there is no
real problem in forgiveness. Does not God's perfect love, they say, rule the world? Is it
not an essential property of sovereign love to pardon everywhere and always, without
restrictions of any kind at all? Is not the insistence upon the condition of penitence the
sign of a love that is inferior, timid, incomplete? Is there not in the very nature of
love something spontaneous and overflowing that excludes all conditions? It was in the
spirit of such questions that the Frenchman cried: 'God forgive? Of course He will
forgive. It's His business.'
To such arguments it may be replied, first, that we have only to look to the parable to
see a love which waited through a bitter interval, and was bound to wait till the
opportunity came, without which it could not forgive.
- There was no period in the son's history when he was not
loved; there was a period when he could not be forgiven.
That could not be until he repented and returned.
- There is a common confusion between love and forgiveness.
Love is and ought to be free, spontaneous, overflowing, unconditional
(cf. Matt. 5. 45 - 48); and forgiveness most certainly ought not.
- A son may not be able to prevent his mother from loving
him, but he can certainly, by boasting himself in shameful courses, interpose a barrier
which prevents fellowship, and makes forgiveness either unmeaning or immoral.
Love is indeed always ready to forgive, and longs to forgive. But love
is a personal attitude and, above all, a moral attitude. In true loving, we will the
highest moral and personal good of the person loved. And a forgiveness without repentance
would demoralize the offender and debase the love.
And a further answer to hasty and superficial deductions from a single parable is that our
Lord did not attempt to say everything at once, and was too wise to spoil any parable by
trying to make it teach everything.
- When we listen to all that He said, we are struck with
the place He assigns to Himself in the forgiveness of sins.
In repeated instances in the Gospels we see how He claimed the power to
forgive sins, though this seemed to a pious Jew to be blasphemously usurping the
supernatural prerogative of God.
- 'By coming forward as Incarnate Pardon, He
proclaimed His ability to lead the sinful there and then into the Father's presence. His
person, as they saw it, was the guarantee of God's mercy' (H. R. Mackintosh).
But the most significant connexion of the divine forgiveness with His
own Person occurs in the narrative of the Last Supper. 'In that hour, when the conscience
of every man who is morally alive inexorably sums up his life, this Man could conceive of
His own moral strength and purity as that power which alone could conquer the sinner's
heart, and free him from the deepest need' (Herrmann).
We will not linger on this now. It is the goal of all our thought. There
on that green hill is the place where our minds will find their rest. But for the present,
only reminding ourselves that, if remission of sins meant that, it must be indeed
a great and a sacred thing, we turn to inquire what the real problem of forgiveness is.
We need not seek far. Take, for instance, the following letter from a friend:
'I found B, one of my best friends, in trouble today. Two or three days ago, a little over
midnight, he opened the door to his son, and, as he let him in, found that he was drunk.
You know what sort of a home theirs is, and how far a lad must have travelled before he
could go home like that. B was too stricken to speak. He thinks he bade him good-night,
and while his son went off to bed and to sleep, he sat staring into the fire. Some things
he had not paid attention to at the time assumed a new meaning now, and in a few minutes
he understood that there was much worse than this night's work behind. It seemed to him as
if his home had fallen in ruins about him that night, and I am afraid he has reasons for
thinking so. He has only one care. What can be done to save his boy?
What is such a father to do?
Forgive?
That is just what he wants to do, and just what he cannot do...
He wants to resume the old trust and friendship with his boy, to forget
his wandering and this fall, to be at peace with him as if nothing had ever come between
them, to stand by his boy and share the pain and struggle that will come with a new
beginning.
- But how can that be unless the boy will stand with him in
the condemnation and repudiation of what is past?
What if the son is sullen, defiant, if he offers shallow excuses? What
if, with easy recovery, he behaves as though nothing had happened, and thereby invites his
father to take his own debased view of what is right and good? That is a dishonour to
which his father cannot stoop. If he did, he would dishonour himself, demoralize his son,
and confuse the moral issue for the still younger lad who is watching and wondering.
Again we ask, What is such a father to do?
- It is a thing to make us pause to remember that, in such
a case, often the father can do nothing but wait and pray.
The forgiveness he longs to give is no mere remission of penalty; it is
not any 'letting him off ' the punishment of sin.
- The only forgiveness that is worth talking about means
that somehow father and son must come together in an affectionate and sacred intimacy that
shall be utterly new.
But such a forgiveness demands conditions which affect both the persons,
the person who is forgiven, and the person who forgives.
In the first case [the son], the conditions may be summed up in the one
word 'repentance '; in the second [the father] by the word 'sacrifice.'
Enough has been said to show that repentance is no artificial demand
arising as a necessity of some theological system. What is the repentance which a
right-minded father desires in the case of a son who has done some grave wrong? It is a
very different thing from the confession of those cheery sinners who say 'I'm sorry,' and
then go and commit the same sin again.
It would surely involve two or three things:
(1) He wants the son to recognize his sin for what it
really is, and to be genuinely sorry for it.
(2) He wants to be sure that his son dissociates himself
from his sin, puts it away from him, and utterly relinquishes it.
(3) He wants to be sure that his son recognizes his
responsibility for the evil consequences of his sin; and he will be most glad if his son
is eager to make whatever reparation can be made for the wrong that he has done.
Let us look at the problem of forgiveness in the light of these three
conditions:
(1) The Recognition of Sin. God would have us recognize our sin for what
it really is, and be genuinely sorry for it. If we were to say that God requires us to
think of our sin as He thinks of it, at first sight it might seem a reasonable condition,
for He only thinks what is true. But in the next breath we have to say that it is an
impossible condition. We have to begin with the admission that it is the most difficult
thing in the world for a sinner to see the real sinfulness of his sin, because all sin
has a strangely blinding effect on the spiritual vision. 'Judas went out immediately,
and it was night.'
And whenever any man goes out to sin, he goes into the
dark, and goes alone. It is written of the sin of hatred
that it sends a man blind. 'He that hateth his brother
is in the darkness, and walketh in the darkness, and
knoweth not whither he goeth, because the darkness hath
blinded his eyes'.
- He who will not see soon comes to a point when he cannot
see.
A modern writer has a searching parable of a legendary land where all
the inhabitants are blind, and where the only
man who can see is a visitor, who, because of his very
vision, is persecuted and despised.
- The inhabitants of the 'Country of the Blind' could not
see, and after long centuries of sightlessness they had come to disbelieve that there was
such a thing as sight.
The true country of the blind is the whole 'world ' in which we live;
and the proof of it is that once there came to us a Visitor with perfect vision, and He
was put to death upon a cross.
- The reason for the universal blindness that hangs over
men's souls is repeated and incessant sin.
The hopeless thing about most really selfish people is that they are so
unconscious of their selfishness. The quarrelsome man thinks that every one is
unreasonable but himself. The revengeful man thinks that he is animated only by a proper
self-respect. The discontented man scarcely ever suspects that the trouble is in himself.
All these are instances which tell us how that terrible word is
fulfilled:
- 'Moral evil is the only thing in the creation of which it
is decreed that the more we are familiar with it, the less we know of it.'
Sinners are not fit to judge of sin, because they do not see it. 'The
blindness which is induced by all deliberate injury to our moral nature, and which
thickens its film as the habit grows, is one of the most appalling expressions of the
justice of God.'
Let a man make a departure from strict honesty in his profession or from absolute purity
in his thought. After the first fall, he is shocked at his sin. But the next time the
temptation comes, the sin will not seem so repellent; his moral sense has suffered injury,
and he yields again, for, as Newman says somewhere,
- 'we have lost our best defence against sin when we cease
to be shocked by it.'
Soon it is hardly to be called a sin at all ; and when the forbidden
picture comes, it is hung on the wall of the mind with never a qualm at all, and the man
says,
- 'It is only to be expected; I am made that way,'
or
Men who have misappropriated large sums of money, ruined their friends
and business associates, when they are at last detected and imprisoned, are usually filled
not with remorse, but with self-pity.
- They regard themselves as the hardly used victims of
circumstance, and are loud in their complaints of the faithlessness of friends. It is a
revolting phenomenon, most bewildering to those who encounter it for the first time.
But it is only a striking instance of the law under which we all live
that the wages of sin is death. And if we recoil in amazement when we encounter such
extreme instances of the callousness which follows certain kinds of sin, we ought to
remember that in the pure eyes of God
- we are all in the same case, and the difference, however
great it seems, is a matter of degree.
- How, then, is the sense of sin, the first and most
indispensable element in repentance, to be recovered?
'Trust to conscience,' some one will say, `the voice of God in the
heart.' But conscience is the very organ that has been so far disabled. There are
disconcerting gaps in the testimony of the most enlightened consciences.
- And after a time conscience will not continue to protest.
It is just that silence in the heart that is the problem.
After repeated acts of sin the troublesome voice is hushed.
- If conscience has been called 'the voice of God in the
heart,' it may with equal accuracy be called 'the eye of the soul.' And the eye of the
soul may go blind.
Sin may come to be regarded as a matter of course. There is many a man
who, if he asked his neighbours what sin he himself ought chiefly to confess and strive
against, would find them unanimous about something which he has never seriously regarded
as a sin at all.
- When we ourselves consider the tracts of our inner lives
that have become habitual, and escape the challenge or conscience, the departures from
strict truth of word for the sake of a little gain or pleasure, the falling away from
perfect purity in thought or deed, the irritability in which we acquiesce as inevitable,
the pride that holds aloof from true fellowship, the indolence that keeps us back from
devoted service, our easy tolerance of evils which only oppress others, our swift
resentment when we are hurt ourselves -- when, further, we consider how easily we can
reconcile ourselves to these things, we almost seem to hear our Master say again, 'What is
there in common between Me and thee?'
The problem of forgiveness is becoming immense.
Our side of that problem was repentance, and the very first element in a
full repentance seems to be denied us, because our sins have rendered us, in part, morally
blind. We want something--or Some One to make us really sorry for our sins.
We want not only a God who will accept our penitence, but a God who will
deal with our impenitence. We want Some One who will make us see, in a new and perhaps an
awful light, the reality of our own evil.
(2) God would have us dissociate ourselves from our sin and utterly
relinquish it. Even supposing that the initial difficulty is overcome, that a sense of his
sinfulness is upon a man, and that a cleansing sorrow is sweeping through his heart, the
problem is not ended.
He must give up his sin.
This may seem an easy matter at the time, for in the first moments of
shame for our wrong-doing we sometimes find it hard to imagine how we ever came to do it
at all, and still harder to believe that we shall ever want to do it again. But this is to
ignore what has really happened to us.
- For sin is not an external impurity which can easily be
washed away. Its effects are indelible.
The acts of sin which we commit are not isolated from the rest of our
lives; they are usually links in the chain of a habit, and our problem is how to burst
that chain.
- 'The drunken Rip Van Winkle in Jefferson's play excuses
himself for every dereliction by saying, I won't count this time! Well, he may
not count it, and a kind heaven may not it; but it is being counted none the less. Down
among his nerve-cells and fibres the molecules are counting it, registering, and storing
it up to be used against him when the next temptation comes' (William James).
To be delivered from his sin a man must be delivered from himself.
'When a man has sinned, and knows that he has sinned, when the eyes of
his spirit are opened, even in part, yet really, to see sin as it is, misery is, that the
sin which he so sees has become a very integral part of himself. From an external plague,
a suffering, a load, a debt, he might be delivered. How can he be delivered from that
which he himself is?' (Moberly).
Again, it is clear that, in order to a true penitence, we want something or Some One who
will deliver us from ourselves;
- not only from a sense of guilt, from a burden on the
back, as in Bunyan's immortal story, but from the evil habit of sin that has become part
of our very selves.
(3) A third element in a true repentance is the recognition of our
responsibility for the evil consequences of our sin, and an eagerness, if it be possible,
to make reparation.
One who sees his sin and has broken with it will usually be eager to
make reparation for it.
- There is a kind of repentance which only asks
forgiveness because it is anxious to forget all about it.
If we look closely, we shall see that such a frame of mind repeats the
very sin it confesses.
- For if a man can take forgiveness and be content to leave
others to suffer the consequences of what he has done, there is the same selfish
indifference to others which was part of the very thing he ought to be repenting of.
He repents of the act and cherishes the habit.
How different from all this is a genuine repentance!
- What has often weighed most on the minds of good men is
the thought of the far-spreading consequences of their sin, consequences which they cannot
calculate, cannot overtake, cannot repair.
It is so far a relief to such minds if at any point they can make
reparation and undo the mischief they have wrought.
If it is such a thing as a money debt, repayment may be possible --
fourfold, perhaps, as by one long ago whose conscience was quickened out of slumber by the
Master's voice.
Even then the handsome repayment might be insufficient to compensate for
the poverty and anxiety caused by the original crime. But in most cases any adequate
reparation, even to our fellow men, is impossible: the act is done, and the consequences
are beyond recall; and this is often the source of most acute anguish to a mind that has
come to be sensitive to sin.
In the eighteen-nineties there was a little group of English artists who
prided themselves on their freedom from conventions and moral restraint. For them the old
verities did not exist, and much of their work was utterly pernicious in its tendencies
and effects.
But one of them in his last illness came to know better. He was received
into the Church.
As he lay dying a strange terror laid hold on him. In the lucidity of
his soul he could only see one thing, and he wrote a most poignant letter to one of his
old friends:
'I implore you, by all that is holy, to destroy (naming a work of his)
and all other obscene drawings. Show this to B and conjure him to do the same. By all that
is holy, all obscene drawings.'
This was signed with his name, and he added the words: 'In my death
agony.'
There spoke a soul who was genuinely penitent. But all copies of that
book cannot be destroyed. Once a bad book is sent forth into the world, it does its evil
work, and the writer, if he repents of it, cannot recall it so as to undo all the evil it
has caused.
What is true of an evil book is true of any other evil act. It cannot be recalled. As the
old Greek proverb says:
- 'There is one thing that God Himself cannot do; He cannot
make undone the thing that has been done.'
If there is in the depths of the human heart when it is truly penitent
an ineffaceable longing to make reparation to the one who has been wronged, how can this
longing be satisfied?
- Reparation, even to our fellow man, seems beyond our
power. And if it is God who is wronged, as God is certainly wronged by every sin, how
impossible it is to speak of reparation then?
We can bring nothing but the desire, and even as we bring it it seems
too poor and transient a thing to offer.
Again we are left with an unsolved problem.
Even if we could see all our sin, and even if we could be delivered from
all the evil that has become part of our very selves, we could find no possibility of
overtaking all the evil consequences that have flowed from those sins of the past.
We seem left with little more than the longing to make reparation for
our wrong, and the fear, which is almost a conviction, that otherwise we must carry the
guilt of that wrong for ever.
- Was there any way by which God our Father could take this
problem of sin's consequences, this seemingly impossible task of reparation, upon Himself?
The 'problem' of forgiveness has become more difficult, and apparently
more insoluble, the longer we have looked at its first condition.
Forgiveness on God's part, without repentance on ours, would be
impossible.
- And we find that we do not know how to repent.
So far we have dealt with the conditions of forgiveness as they affect
the person who is to be forgiven. But there are also conditions for the person who
forgives, and these may be expressed by the profound word 'sacrifice'.
- 'There is no such experience in the relations of
human beings as a real forgiveness which is painless, cheap, or easy. There is always
passion in it on both sides -- a passion of penitence on the one side, and the more
profound passion of love on the other, bearing the sin of the guilty to win him, through
reconciliation, to goodness again' (Denney).
If a father forgives a bad son, his forgiveness is immoral unless it
arises out of sympathy and suffering on the father's part.
To win back his son to the fellowship of the home he will think and plan
and act with all the wonderful ingenuity of love.
- There is an easy good nature which forgives because it
does not want to be bothered.
It has too small a hold on moral realities to take the trouble of
asserting them, or to imagine the consequences of ignoring them.
- But a father's love, if it is worthy of the name,
wants the son himself, wants him to be his true self, claims him for a higher
life, for more intimate communion, for purer joys.
To love like this means to suffer; and there are only two ways to end
the suffering--either the sin or the love must cease. And in order that the sin may cease,
the father will be ready to do anything, and sacrifice everything, and pour out his
heart's best blood.
An illustration from the famous novel of Charles Dickens may make the meaning clear. In
David Copperfield, old Peggotty's niece, 'little Em'ly,' has sinned a great sin, and
disappeared from the home of her uncle and guardian. His great, pure love is eager to take
her back, and to forgive. But first she must be found. So he wanders over the land, and in
lands across the sea, searching for her. And the story tells how one day his quest was
rewarded and the lost soul found; how her penitence was won by the power of this wonderful
pursuing love that would not let her go. The forgiveness was achieved, but at a tremendous
cost.
- When any one good loves any one bad, though he may not
travel over land or sea in quest, we know that he must in heart and mind set out on many a
strange and awful voyage.
He is driven by his love to share in thought and feeling the history of
the soul he loves, to take sides with the other in all the secret struggles between the
better and the worse--in a word, to put himself in the other's place.
- The shepherd must go after the sheep until he find
it.
When we encounter this law of suffering love in domestic relations, our
first feeling is often a sense of injustice. It seems intolerable that the life of any man
or woman should be wounded, burdened, crushed under the shame of sins for which another is
alone responsible,
- when all the time they might have relief by washing their
hands of the transgressor and caring no more for him.
On the other hand, it is just this same sight, of love involved in the
suffering and shame of another, which, when all else fails, has redeeming quality in it.
'Yes, I told my father,' said a lad. 'He gave me a look, but he did not speak. I have been
in hell since. I think I broke his heart.'
Such a story does not end there. He saw his own and his father's love in
that look. He came soon to see a look like that on the face of God, and it slew his sin.
- It is the very essence of true love to be redemptive.
Love always means the readiness to bear burdens and to make sacrifices for the person
loved.
But in the world as we know it, where men are constantly sinning and
falling away from God, the highest love means much more than this; it means sacrifice in
the case of the moral failure of the person loved.
If a son leaves his mother and goes to fight in a just cause, the
mother's heart will pray for the safety of his body in the battle -- but in her best
moments she knows that there is something to be feared more than death, and if her love is
true she will be even more eager for the purity of his soul.
If he should fall from her ideal, and if his soul stray into peril and
into sin, what pain would her love not suffer, what voyages of anguish would her heart not
endure, to win him back to God? ...
These may be poor analogies for so great a thing as the divine forgiveness, but they are
all we have; they belong to the most sure and sacred things in human experience, and they
point all the time to something beyond themselves.
Hitherto we have said little of the Living Way of Forgiveness which God
has provided for us in Christ, and yet that Way cannot have been for one moment absent
from our thoughts.
Our method of approach has been through human analogies, and they bring
us at last to the Cross. Wherever in any human situation we are able to see into the
meaning of a great forgiveness, we find it dependent upon these two conditions -- of
repentance on the one part an sacrifice on the other.
- And these conditions are not arbitrary, as though we
could relax them by being a little kinder.
They belong to the situation, and without them forgiveness is not a true
thing but a false, not saving but demoralizing,
- not the end of sin but a compromise with it and a consent
to its continuance.
But the requirement of repentance is, even when it is only an offence
between man and man that is in question, enormously searching and difficult.
- As soon as we carry our inquiry into the relations
between us and God, we see at once that 'repentance toward God,' in any full and true
sense, is a demand that we cannot meet.
We do not judge our own sin truly or feel it adequately;
- we cannot dissociate ourselves from what is now become
part of ourselves;
we cannot measure the consequences of our past sin, and when we see them
at all vividly our hearts fail us utterly at the bare thought of making reparation for
them.
We are left with an unsolved problem. That problem is solved in Christ
and His Cross. Not solved as yet, so far as our understanding goes. We have to be
content, when Christ forgives us, to hear Him say, 'What I do, thou knowest not now, but
thou shalt know hereafter.'
So far as our understanding is concerned, therefore, we should say that the problem of
repentance is not solved in Christ, but left with Christ.
And He is the only One with whom we dare to leave it, and then only when
we leave ourselves with Him, as well as our sins. For He at least who was crucified knows
what our sin is, knows what men are capable of; and if we take from Him a pardon which is
free to us but was costly to Him, if we accept a peace which we feel we do not deserve,
and are admitted into a relationship of which all the time we feel ourselves unworthy,
- yet we are sure that if we take Him at His word He will
know how to bring us to His own mind about our sin and show us how to put it utterly away.
And, indeed, when we trust Christ thus, our faith does immediately begin
to vindicate itself. It proves to be true that there is no power on earth to awaken true
penitence in the human heart like the power of the Cross. Since the day when that Holy One
ascended it and stretched His arms on its cruel branches, and bowed His head and died, men
have found there a power of God which shows them to themselves, and reveals to them the
sinfulness of their sin, which strangely delivers them from themselves and makes them glad
to enter the 'fellowship of His sufferings,' lending their human hands to help His great
task of redeeming the world.
- It is when we 'survey the wondrous Cross' that we 'pour contempt on all
our pride.' It is in the presence of that sacrifice that we discover that
Neither passion nor pride
Thy Cross can abide,
But melt in the fountain that flows from Thy side.
Above all, the death of Jesus Christ on the cross does show us God's heart. In one
decisive act, in the only way in which we could be made to understand, it shows us what
our sin means to God and what is God's mind toward sinners. Pierced, not with nails and
thorns and spears, but rather with hate and scorn and cruelty, He suffered what men listed
to do unto Him, and only answered them from His cross, 'I will never leave you nor forsake
you.'
They did the worst to Him, but with His last breath He spoke, not of
vengeance but of forgiveness. Nothing but love brought Him there. He could have saved
Himself if He had been willing to renounce us. He could not save Himself, because He could
not leave any man to himself, could not leave the worst of us to bear his sin alone.
- In that death we see the Love that will not let us go,
and it is from a cross that the wondrous word of Forgiveness is spoken to us.
Such poor words can only touch the fringe of the mystery of the Cross,
and it is not within the scope of these pages to pursue it farther. We know that there God
spoke to us, and forgave us, and brought us into fellowship with Himself.
- The religion of Jesus Christ is not primarily any
doctrine to be believed: nor any duty to be done. It involves doctrines and implies
duties, but primarily the gospel of Jesus Christ is -- Jesus Christ set forth crucified
between two thieves.
God, we know, has spoken to us in the death of His Son.
He has told us where we are to go if we would see what forgiveness is.
We find there a forgiveness offered which is as perfect as it is free, a reconciliation
which leaves no lingering estrangement, a place where all things are made new. But it is a
forgiveness which is blood-bought; there burns in it a fire of purifying love; there lives
in it always something which is beyond us.
We cannot reach the mystery, The length, the breadth, the height.
The Cross is not offered, primarily, to our understanding, but to our moral need. It is
right that we should try to understand all we can of it, and there is no doubt that the
thinking of the Church is in arrear upon this theme. But it is a test of our sincerity
whether we are more anxious to fathom the Cross or to be saved by it; more eager to search
into it or to fall under its power.
- Those who seek to be intellectually clear about the Cross
while they remain morally at issue with it will find that they are forbidden to know the
truth of it.
- It is the saints who have taught us what we know about the Cross, and it
is always part of their witness that
None of the ransomed ever knew - How deep were the waters crossed,
- Nor how dark was the night
- that the Lord passed through
Ere He found the sheen that was lost.
When we are content to take that forgiveness and be glad in it, we find
it is the beginning and the foundation of a fellowship, the sweetness whereof tongue
cannot tell. That friendship means relief from the strain and blackness of remorse,
freedom from the torturing habits of sin, the sense of victory and mastery over the world
around us.
- It is our escape from all dismal preoccupation with
ourselves.
It answers the last misgivings of conscience, for it assures us that He
is 'faithful and righteous' when He forgives our sins and cleanses us from all
unrighteousness.
- It satisfies the hungry heart with good, for the voice
which assures us of our forgiveness becomes a voice that testifies that we are the
children of God; and we can ask no more.
Having given us so much, how shall He not also with Christ freely give
us all things.
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