'I believe in the forgiveness of sins' hundreds of thousands of
Englishmen have said twice to-day. Most of us, when we pray at all, push
in somewhere or other the petition, 'Forgive us our sins.' And how many
of us understand what we mean when we ask for that? And how many of us
feel that we need the thing which we seem to be requesting? Let me dwell
for a moment or two upon the Scriptural idea of forgiveness. Of course
we may say that when we ask forgiveness from God we are transferring
ideas and images drawn from human relations to the divine. Be it so.
That does not show that there is not a basis of reality and of truth in
the ideas thus transferred. But there are two elements in forgiveness as
we know it, both of which it seems to me to be very important that we
should carry in our minds in interpreting the Scriptural doctrine. There
is the forgiveness known to law and practised by the lawgiver. There is
the forgiveness known to love and practised by the friend, or parent, or
lover. The one consists in the remission of external penalties. A
criminal is forgiven, or, as we say (with an unconscious restriction of
the word _forgiven_ to the deeper thing), _pardoned_, when, the
remainder of his sentence being remitted, he is let out of gaol, and
allowed to go about his business without any legal penalties. But there
is a forgiveness deeper than that legal pardon. A parent and a child
both of them know that parental pardon does not consist in the waiving
of punishment. The averted look, the cold voice, the absence of signs of
love are far harder to bear than so-called punishment. And the
forgiveness, which belongs to love only, comes when the film between the
two is swept away, and both the offended and the offender feel that
there is no barrier to the free, unchecked flow of love from the heart
of the aggrieved to the heart of the aggressor.
We must carry both of these ideas into our thoughts of God's pardon in
order to see the whole fulness of it. And perhaps we may have to add yet
another illustration, drawn from another region, and which is enshrined
in one of the versions of the Lord's Prayer, where we read, 'Forgive us
our _debts_.' When a debt is forgiven it is cancelled, and the payment
of it no longer required. But the two elements that I have pointed out,
the remission of the penalty and the uninterrupted flow of God's love,
are inseparably united in the full Scriptural notion of forgiveness.
Scripture recognises as equally real and valid, in our relations to God,
the judicial and the fatherly side of the relationship. And it declares
as plainly that the wages of sin is death as it declares that God's love
cannot come in its fulness and its sweetness, upon a heart that indulges
in unconfessed and unrepented sin. They are poor friends of men who, for
the sake of smoothing away the terrible side of the Gospel, minimise or
hide the reality of the awful penalties which attach to every
transgression and disobedience, because they thereby maim the notion of
the divine forgiveness, and lull into a fatal slumber the consciences of
many men.
Dear brethren! I have to stand here saying, 'Knowing, therefore, the
terrors of the Lord, we persuade men.' This is sure and certain, that
over and above the forcing back upon itself of the love of God by my
sin, that sin by necessary consequence will work out awful results for
the doer in the present and in the future. I do not wish to dwell upon
that thought, only remember that God is a Judge and God is the Father,
and that the divine forgiveness includes both of these elements, the
sweeping away of the penal consequences of men's sin, wholly in the
future, and to some extent in the present; and the unchecked flow of the
love of God to a man's heart.
There are awful words in Scripture--which are not to be ruled out of it
by any easy-going, optimistic, rose-water system of a mutilated
Christianity--there are awful words in Scripture, concerning what you
and I must come to if we live and die in our sins, and there would be no
message of forgiveness worth the proclaiming to men, if it had nothing
to say about the removal of that which a man's own unsophisticated
conscience tells him is certain, the fatal and the damnable effects of
his departure from God.
But let us not forget that these two aspects do to a large extent
coincide, when we come to remember that the worst of all the penal
consequences of sin is that it separates from God, and exposes to 'the
wrath of God,' a terrible expression by which the Bible means the
necessary disapprobation and aversion of the divine nature, being such
as it is, from man's sin.
Experimentalists will sometimes cut off one or other of the triple rays
of which sunlight is composed by passing the beam through some medium
which intercepts the red, or the violet, or the yellow, as may chance.
And my sin makes an atmosphere which cuts off the gentler rays of that
divine nature, and lets the fiery ones of retribution come through. It
is not that a sinful man, howsoever drenched overhead in the foul pool
of his own unrepented iniquity, is shut out from the love of God, which
lingers about him and woos him, and lavishes upon him all the gifts of
which he is capable, but that he has made himself incapable of receiving
the sweetest of these influences, and that so long as he continues thus,
his life and his character cannot but be odious and hateful in the pure
eyes of perfect love.
But whilst thus there are external consequences which are swept away by
forgiveness, and whilst the real hell of hells and death of deaths is
the separation from God, and the misery that must necessarily ensue
thereupon, there are consequences of man's sin which forgiveness is not
intended to remove, and will not remove, just because God loves us. He
loves us too well to take away the issues in the natural sphere, in the
social sphere, the issues perhaps in bodily health, reputation,
position, and the like, which flow from our transgression. 'Thou wast a
God that forgavest them, and Thou didst inflict retribution for their
inventions.' He does leave much of these outward issues unswept away by
His forgiveness, and the great law stands, 'Whatsoever a man soweth that
shall he also reap.' And yet the pardon that you and I need, and which
we can all have for the asking, flows to us unchecked and full--the
great stream of the love of God, to whom we are reconciled, when we turn
to Him in penitent dependence on the blood and righteousness of Jesus
Christ, our Lord.
This consciousness of sin and cry for pardon lie at the foundation of
vigorous practical religion. It seems to me that the differences between
different types of Christianity, insipid elegance and fiery earnestness,
between coldness and fervour, the difference between a sapless and a
living ministry and between a formal and a real Christianity, are very
largely due to the differences in realising the fact and the gravity of
the fact of transgression. The prominence which we give to that in our
thoughts will largely determine our notions of ourselves, and of
Christ's work, and to a great extent settle what we think Christianity
is for, and what in itself it is. If a man has no deep consciousness of
sin he will be satisfied with a very superficial kind of religion.
'Every man his own redeemer' will be his motto. And not knowing the
necessity for a Saviour, he will not recognise that Christianity is
fundamentally and before anything else, a system of redemption. A moral
agent? Yes! A large revelation of great truth? Yes! A power to make
men's lives, individually and in the community, nobler and loftier? By
all means. But before all these, and all these consequentially on its
being a system by which sinful men, else hopeless and condemned, are
delivered and set free. So, dear brethren! let me press upon you
this,--unless my Christianity gives large prominence to the fact of my
own transgression, and is full of a penitent cry for pardon, it lacks
the one thing needful, I was going to say--it lacks, at all events, that
which will make it a living power blessedly ruling my heart and life.