Who Is FORGIVING Like Our God?

This week we celebrated the baptism of baby Christian Gall at Faith Community Church. This sacrament marks initiation into the Church and fits well with the Summer Series in which we find ourselves. Our God declares that He is a Forgiving God.

The GLORY of the Forgiving God.

The LORD says He bears our sins. The word used here means He carries off the shame, takes away the punishment and lifts the burden of guilt that resulted from our sins. These consequences of sin are done away with in His forgiveness.

He carries off the shame of our sins. With the first covenant people of God, He instructed them to present two goats to make atonement for their sins. The priest cast lots and one goat was sacrified to pay the death-penalty for sin (...when you do, you will surely die [Genesis 2.17, etc].) The priest laid his hand on the goats head, confessed the sins of the people and then slit its throat. The priest then placed his hand on the head of the second goat -- the scape-goat -- confessed the sins of the people and then that goat was removed from the community and set loose to wander in the wilderness. It carried away the shame of the sinful acts. This ritual was carried out year after year.

Jesus offered Himself as our scape-goat to carry our shame away from us. He was crucified "outside the gates." He died a shameful death to carry away our shame, to remove it from us. this He did once for all time!

He takes away the punishment of our sins. There were many sacrifices prescribed by the LORD for His first covenant people. Each dealt with the cold reality that sins separate people from this Compassionate, Gracious, Slow-to-Anger, Love-and-Faithfulness-Maintaining God. The penalty or punishment for sins is death -- spiritual and physical. So the Gracious God allowed for substitutions to bear the death-penalty. Yearly or even more frequently, sinners placed their hands on the heads of sacrificial animals, confessed their personal sins and watched them die -- in their place. There was a continual death-march leading up to the altar of sacrifice.

Jesus died IN OUR PLACE. He suffered terrible torture and died because He was carrying our sins in His body on the tree. "By oppression and judgment He was taken away...for the transgression of my people was He stricken" (Isaiah 53.8, etc.) Because He died we can go on living in forgiveness!

He lifts the burden of guilt from our sins. When God forgives, He cleans our conscience. We can rest at night knowing our darkest deeds have been brought to light as we confessed them to God (1 John 1.8.) There is now no fear of exposure or condemnation of mind (Romans 8.1.) He sprinkles our conscience clean with the sacrificial blood of Jesus (Hebrews 10.22.)

Rather than oppressed and obsessed about our wrongdoing, we are now free, through God's forgiving work, to live life to the fullest.

What He forgives... a little theological sidenote is in order here. This caviat merits its own sermon someday... In declaring Himself the Forgiving God, the LORD details what it is that He forgives. He forgives wickedness, transgressions and sins.

Sins...are those acts or thoughts that "miss the goal"or "miss the mark." Unintentionally, we do things that fall short of the glory of God. The best we will ever do will not measure up to the standard. We wander from the narrow way. We literally get lost in the wilderness of options placed before us. But God promises and has provided forgiveness for these "misses."
Transgressions...are acts of willful rebellion. While any parent might be quick to forgive the misses of their child[ren], willful disobedience is hard to forgive. We trespass. We see the line, then we choose to step over the line, anyway. Yet our Merciful LORD wants and waits to forgive the times we flip Him off and go it our own way. How forgiving!!
Wickedness...is the twisted depravity that is the root cause of our sins and transgressions. Just as a duck quacks and waddles because it is a duck and these things are in its nature, we sin because we are sinners. Since our first parents rebelled, every human is borne with a nature twisted away from God and in-grown with self-love. The LORD has promised and provided for a cleansing even of this sin-nature. What a radical claim God makes!

The Glow of a Forgiving People

Colossians 3 says we are to "...forgive whatever grievances you may have against one another. Forgive as the Lord forgave you." (verse 13) Jesus in the Our Father teaches we should expect God will "...forgive us our sins as we forgive those who sin agains us..." His later commentary on the prayer is very clear: "For if you forgive men when they sin against you, your heavenly Father will also forgive you. But if you do not forgive men their sins, your Father will not forgive your sins." (Matthew 6.14-15) If we are the people of the Forgiving God, we must be forgiving people. We cut ourselves off from God's forgiveness when we refuse forgiveness to others. But with the forgiveness of our God flowing through us, we can find ourselves forgiving as well.