Rob Bell On Justice
June 23rd, 2011 § 5 Comments
by Matthew Raley
Rob Bell starts to make an excellent case for the justice of hell in Love Wins. But he doesn’t finish it. Bell’s inadequate concept of justice is the next feature of this book I think evangelicals should watch. (First two features here and here.)
Hell is hard to defend if the people who populate it are the ignorant, needy, and wounded who weren’t able to check the right theological boxes. But the charge depends on sympathy. Switch perspectives on the population, and hell starts to look like the only appropriate punishment.
That’s what Bell does in the middle of his chapter on hell (pp 70-73). There are kids all over Kigali, Rwanda with missing limbs, he says. “Do I believe in a literal hell? Of course. Those aren’t metaphorical missing arms and legs.” A rape victim, a 5-year-old boy whose father committed suicide, the surviving relatives of a man whose cruelty extended beyond the grave: all of these show the ongoing cost of sin.
Bell is aggressive in making this case.
So when people say they don’t believe in hell and they don’t like the word “sin,” my first response is to ask, “Have you ever sat and talked with a family who just found out that their child has been molested? Repeatedly? Over a number of years? By a relative?” (p 72)
I found myself cheering him on as I read this passage. I am a pastor, like Bell. Few have the daily, ongoing experience of evil quite like those on life’s clean-up crew — law enforcement, social workers, doctors and nurses, and pastors. The cost of sin is born day after day in family after family. And the cost mounts. True love demands payment for the sake of those who bear that cost.
But, having adjusted our perspective in this way, having raised the issue of sin’s cost, and having asserted our need for this horrible word hell, Bell switches back to the perspective of the ignorant, needy, and wounded who failed to check the right boxes. Isn’t it monstrous to punish them eternally? Bell asks (p 102), “Have billions of people been created only to spend eternity in conscious punishment and torment, suffering infinitely for the finite sins they committed in the few years they spent on earth?”
Suffering infinitely for finite sins, committed in the few years of life. Our sins, Bell assumes repeatedly in this book, are limited in scope.
Really?
Our sins are finite?
They are?
We have confirmation of this?
Somebody knows this?
Without a doubt?
I am nowhere near granting that assumption, and I have three reasons.
1. The Bible reiterates that our sins are primarily against God, secondarily against one another (e.g. Genesis 39.7-10; Romans 1.18-32). How does Bell propose to limit the cost of sins committed against an infinite being?
2. Human beings live in community. At what point does the impact of a single sin come to rest? A slanderous tweet, let’s say? It’s true that I can lose sight of a sin’s impact, but that doesn’t mean I really know where the impact stops.
3. Human beings are linked generationally. A sin committed at one time can live on. That’s a key part of the problem of racism in the United States. How can we say that Thomas Jefferson’s attitude toward his slaves had a finite impact because it was committed in the few years of his own life?
Bell doesn’t follow his own correct reasoning about the cost of sin to its conclusion: The cost goes on to such an extent that no human being knows the full impact of his own actions. And the real problem of justice, as the Bible lays it out, is that all have sinned.
Bell’s Redeeming Deity
June 16th, 2011 § 1 Comment
by Matthew Raley
I am surveying features of Rob Bell’s book Love Wins that evangelicals should watch over the coming years. A second feature is Bell’s description of the nature of God.
According to Bell, the evangelical God is impossible for people to trust. This God has put a time-limit on repentance: death is the end of people’s opportunity to have a relationship with him, and hell awaits people who do not believe. Bell says that this sort of God is “violent” and “destructive.” If this account of God were true, he says,
A loving heavenly father who will go to extraordinary lengths to have a relationship with [people] would, in the blink of an eye, become a cruel, mean, vicious tormenter who would ensure that they had no escape from an endless future of agony.
If there was an earthly father who was like that, we would call the authorities. If there was an actual human dad who was that volatile, we would contact child protection services immediately. (pp 173-174)
He goes on, calling this God “devastating,” “psychologically crushing,” “terrifying and traumatizing and unbearable.”
Bell counters that God is love, and that God’s invitation into his love never ends. Hell is not God tormenting people, but people choosing to reject God’s love and creating their own torment. Even when they reject God, he always brings them back because redemption is part of his very nature.
Yet Bell’s story about how God redemptive nature displays the same divine volatility Bell finds in the doctrine of eternal hell.
For example, Bell uses the story of Sodom and Gomorrah to make the argument that hell is temporary. He calls them “the poster cities for deviant sinfulness run amok,” recounting how God rained sulfur on the cities, destroying everything. “But this isn’t the last we read of Sodom and Gomorrah.”
Bell cites Ezekiel 16, where God says he will return the cities to what they were before, then asks rhetorically, “What appeared to be a final, forever, smoldering, smoking verdict regarding their destiny … wasn’t? What appeared to be over, isn’t. Ezekiel says that where there was destruction there will be restoration.” (p 83, emphasis original)
So God sometimes destroys people to make a point. Then he restores. Bell calls this a “movement from judgment to restoration, from punishment to new life.” (p 85)
Using Bell’s standard of a loving God, his account of what he calls God’s redeeming nature shows the same violence he condemns when discussing eternal torment in hell. The God who destroyed Sodom is the child abuser about whom Bell would call the authorities. The people of Sodom did not choose sulfurous rain; God inflicted it upon them.
The only difference Bell shows between the God who destroyed Sodom and the God who punishes souls eternally is the amount of time involved.
So let’s imagine Rob Bell preaching love and hope to Sodom: “This fire isn’t forever. Your father loves you! He’s inviting you to participate in his love! Just wait: you’ll have another opportunity to love God!”
Or we could ask this question: Would it matter to the people destroyed in the fire of Sodom that their punishment was only temporary? Would they trust God any more, or hate God any less because they have another opportunity later?
Or we could make up a scenario about pain. Suppose I promised you that the Soviet guard in the gulag would only beat you every day for 10 years. Would the temporary nature of the torment make it tolerable? What if he only beats you daily for a week? Okay, okay: your beating will only last 5 minutes.
Bell’s proposal that hell is temporary in no way makes his account of God’s nature coherent.
Celebrity status will not exempt Bell’s arguments from the precision of, say, Richard Dawkins. Evangelicals should watch what happens when Bell’s distinctions without differences fail to make God any more loveable.
Love Wins accepts generalized standards of love and justice — standards that are, to be sure, accepted by most people without examination. But the received wisdom of generalizations about “a loving God” or “a just God” fall apart once we delve into specific cases. “Loving” toward whom? “Just” in whose cause?
I think Bell will have to discard every biblical account of God’s punishing a sinner in order to preserve his view of redemption. That is where I think his “better story” about God will lead. Bell has failed to put human pain in the context of any serious look at the requirements of justice.
Interacting With “Love Wins”
June 8th, 2011 § 3 Comments
by Matthew Raley
The publication of Rob Bell’s Love Wins marks the acceptance of emergent Christianity by the American mainstream. Bell has been featured in a Time cover story, and is now a reference point for all sorts of popular spiritual writing. The pantheon of the American empire now includes Bell’s Jesus.
Over several posts, I’ll discuss some features of this book that I think will be most important for evangelicals in the coming years.
The first feature: Bell denies that biblical doctrine has significance in human salvation. The Bible contains teachings, sure. But knowing them is problematic, both interpretively, in finding what they mean, and morally, in maintaining humility.
Bell’s denial that doctrinal belief is essential to salvation is explicit, coming in his discussion of Jesus’ claim in John 14.6: “I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.” Bell does not deny the exclusivity inherent in that statement. But Bell argues,
What [Jesus] doesn’t say is how, or when, or in what manner the mechanism functions that gets people to God through him. He doesn’t even state that those coming to the Father through him will even know that they are coming exclusively through him. He simply claims that whatever God is doing in the world to know and redeem and love and restore the world is happening through him. (p 154)
Love wins, Bells argues (pp 144-157), because Jesus is the sustaining power of all creation, and he saves people no matter what they do or believe, wooing them through recurring opportunities to embrace him.
The denial of doctrine’s significance is also implicit, a denial through method. Bell is a deconstructionist.
Bell’s claim that Jesus never specifies how people are saved illustrates neatly. It is exegetically preposterous on its face. In the very document Bell discusses, Jesus repeatedly links salvation with belief, as in John 12.44-50, where Jesus makes “the word I have spoken” a person’s judge on the last day, and where he declares that the Father has given him “a commandment — what to say and what to speak. And I know that his commandment is eternal life.”
(Indeed, Bell quotes a fragment of that paragraph [p 159], in which Jesus says he came to save the world, not to judge. But Jesus said that in order to set up his word as judge, and belief in his word as the “mechanism” that saves.)
Such bits of trivia don’t matter to Bell. The Bible for him is not a revelation of God’s truth. Rather, it is full of the raw materials for God’s story: poems, riddles, metaphors, hints, dribs and drabs of ancient cultural perspectives. We are supposed to find God’s story in those materials. Bell complains that historic Christianity has told a story that’s bad, having hardened all the raw material into absolutes. There’s “a better story” (pp 110-111).
This view of the Bible creates a new role for exegesis.
We expound the Bible not so much to learn what is true, as to deconstruct our own preconceptions. So, Bell offers long passages studying such words as hades, gehenna, aeon, et al., not to build up our understanding of what these words mean, but to tear it down. By the time Bell is done with text after text, we no longer know what the words mean. And with traditional concepts safely deconstructed, Bell is free to pick from those materials and tell his better story.
Many conservative theologians are saying that Bell is a theological liberal. To be sure, many of his conclusions are indistinguishable from the old liberalism. But I want to register one qualification that puts Bell and many emergents in a different category.
Modernist liberals 150 years ago believed that the Bible’s teachings were knowable, and that our reasoning about texts added to our knowledge. It is not clear to me at all that Bell believes this. Bell seems to believe that knowledge itself is a kind of arrogance, and that doctrinal knowledge, in terms of the fate of every person who ever lived, is of no significance.
Evangelicals should watch this feature of Love Wins to see whether Bell is merely being fashionable, or whether he is flirting with nihilism.
Chico News & Review Reports on Churches and Gays
May 10th, 2011 § 1 Comment
by Matthew Raley
Jerry Olenyn did a service for Chico in his story for CN&R on how local churches view homosexuality. Writing such a piece is a thankless task, the only guarantee being that some on all sides will see Olenyn as biased. Conservative evangelicals should notice that Olenyn’s language is even-handed, that his use of quotations presents a well-rounded picture of what conservative pastors believe and feel, and that his objective in the piece is right: to deepen our civic culture on this issue.
The article is solid reporting, an essential tool for keeping leaders honest and their discourse civil.
Olenyn only made one characterization in the story: “There’s a definite evasiveness that seeps through this discussion. Conservative churches fear being labeled homophobic and intolerant, while gay-affirming churches worry that their pro-gay stance could cost them members.” The characterization is fair.
Olenyn identifies the roots of this evasiveness. He responds to one pastor’s assertion that “there are bigger issues” than homosexuality, “such as reaching out to the lost, feeding the hungry, and fulfilling Christ’s mission.” Olenyn asks, “But does part of fulfilling Christ’s mission include defining sin? And what exactly is sin?”
Perceptive. A pastor cannot speak clearly about whether homosexuality is a sin until he defines what sin is.
Throughout the article, as in the debate nationally, the word sin is used without definition. Today sin connotes a “really bad” thing, something that makes you feel guilty. With the term apparently used this way, we seem to be debating whether churches have a right to shame people.
To understand the Bible’s definition of sin, we should start with the more basic issue of what it means to be human.
According to the Bible, human beings can only understand themselves fully in relation to God (e.g. Psalm 139). We are creatures. We do not govern our own lives. Rather, we serve something larger than ourselves — either God or the things we put in place of God.
Sin, in this worldview, is primarily an identity of servitude to false gods, whatever form they take, and only secondarily a specific action or choice (Romans 1.18-32). Paul’s teaching in Romans 6.15-23 is that human beings are sin’s slaves. Jesus himself teaches (John 8.34), “Truly, truly I say to you, everyone who commits sin is a slave to sin.”
The implication is clear: to be human is to be the property either of sin or of God. All specific acts of sin express the same identity of sin-slavery in different ways. The issue in reconciling with God is not the individual acts, but the identity that those acts express.
The contrast between the biblical view and that of Western modernity is stark. The modern individual assumes — more precisely, he believes as a matter of doctrine — that he owns himself. He is the property of no one, having the autonomy to construct his life as he chooses. His dignity as a human being consists in asserting himself.
Conservative evangelicals know that a genuinely biblical definition of sin calls people to reject their most basic beliefs about who they are. For many decades now, evangelicals have been trying to finesse this point. They have cast sin in terms of “choices,” “addictions,” “values,” or “lifestyles,” as if behavior were the primary issue. Jesus, in this cautious gospel, is less Savior than Coach. He helps you make better choices about your life.
But in addressing homosexuals — without a social consensus on sexual morality — evangelicals are trapped by their evasiveness about sin. They can’t confront homosexuality without asserting God’s right to determine human identity. At the same time, they can’t assert God’s right over our identity without offending many of their own converts. The evangelical pew holds many who believe that their lives remain their own property, and who’ve been assured that God would never be so Godlike as to require their very selves.
Several conservative pastors quoted in Olenyn’s article showed a wise mix of clarity about the Bible’s teaching on homosexuality and humility as forgiven sinners. I’m grateful that Olenyn showed this.
But I am also grateful that he identified the core question, which humbles everyone equally: What exactly is sin?
Blood-Thirsty Thoughts On Bin Laden and Justice
May 2nd, 2011 § 2 Comments
by Matthew Raley
The killing of Osama bin Laden is being hailed as a thrilling feat of heroism. We are witnessing a rare outburst of vindictive jubilation that has swept young and old, rich and poor, Republican and Democrat — that, indeed, has revived talk of national unity. Justice, we feel, has concretely been done.
This is a good moment to consider the pressure of God’s justice.
To see why so many are jubilant, it might be helpful to peruse this piece from New York Magazine, “September 11 by Numbers.” It makes jarring reading even 10 years after bin Laden’s crime.
The total number of people killed in the twin towers was 2,819. I vividly remember an admonition from Walter Cronkite the next day, that journalists should cite the exact number and not use round figures. “Those are people.”
The estimated number of children who lost a parent in the attack was 3,051. Fully one-fifth of all Americans knew someone hurt or killed.
This magnitude of loss on a single morning, graphically recorded second by second, painstakingly studied by government commissions, and endured day after day ever since by the bereaved, cries out for recompense. No one should expect detached objectivity about justice from one of those 3,051 people who spent the last decade grieving a parent. We shouldn’t expect them to feel mercy toward bin Laden because the expectation is, among other things, inhumane.
Payback is their due.
But the fury of 3,051 children cannot actually be appeased by bin Laden’s death, much less the fury of an entire nation.
The man who took 2,819 lives at the World Trade Center only had one life to yield up in payment. And he took many more lives besides, including that of the wife he used as a shield in his last moments. His instant experience in death cannot balance the experiences in grief over lifetimes. Most tragically, his death does not restore life to those he killed.
So the imbalance remains. Even after all bin Laden had is taken from him, the losses his caused are still on the books.
Let’s add another complication.
Is there any basis upon which bin Laden could have repented? What could he have done to gain enough mercy to keep his life?
Perhaps a public apology, combined with a life of social work. Maybe a religious conversion. Or he might have liquidated his wealth to fund the education of all 3,051 children through graduate school.
Nauseated yet?
Assuming you could get 1,512 of those children the sign off on bin Laden’s repentance, you still wouldn’t be able to look the other 1,539 in the eyes.
The simple reason is that repentance without payment is worthless. That’s clear enough when the enormity of the crime is too ugly to whitewash.
Bottom line: one man’s payment is never enough to compensate for his sins, and no repentance will restore him if he cannot pay.
The pressure of divine justice is that the tabulation our sins is ongoing at God’s throne. If we admit today that justice demanded satisfaction in bin Laden’s case, will we also admit that it demands satisfaction in our own?
Such are the problems that lead to the cross.
God’s Redemptive Justice
April 26th, 2011 § 2 Comments
by Matthew Raley
Ross Douthat made a trenchant observation in his New York Times column on Easter Sunday. “The doctrine of hell . . . assumes that our choices are real, and, indeed, that we are the choices that we make. The miser can become his greed, the murder can lose himself inside his violence, and their freedom to turn and be forgiven is inseparable from their freedom not to do so.”
The idea of divine justice, that God renders a verdict on our choices and that a guilty verdict demands punishment, is being revised.
Many evangelicals are now saying that we must discard such old notions. They argue that God’s every action is redemptive. Because the doctrine of eternal, conscious punishment in hell assumes a punitive wrath in God that has no redemptive motivation, the doctrine is inconsistent with God’s nature.
Gregory Boyd (discussing annihilationism) says, “Consider that in the traditional view, the wicked are not being punished to learn something. There’s nothing remedial about their torment. Rather, God keeps them in existence for the sole purpose of having them experience pain.”
Modernists made similar arguments more than a century ago. Old notions of justice as payback are barbaric, and Western civilization has outgrown such primitive ideas. Hell thus belongs to the lower rungs of humanity’s evolution.
Is it the case that redemptive mercy is central to God’s character, and does this characteristic invalidate the idea of hell?
Let’s probe the word redemption. The Greek word is lutron, which refers to the ransom price for slaves or captives. There will be no release until the price is paid. Jesus, speaking about the key to his Lordship, says that he came to serve by giving his life as the redemption price for many (Mark 10.35-45).
Another word that expresses a similar idea is propitiation. Paul teaches that God made Christ’s blood to be the “propitiation,” the appeasement of God’s justice, that sinners receive by faith (Romans 3.21-26). Paul also states the reason God made this appeasement in blood: “It was to show his righteousness at the present time, so that he might be just and the justifier of the one who has faith in Jesus.” That is, God’s justice is demonstrated by his paying the price incurred by sin.
Redemptive mercy is indeed central to God’s nature. But to call God’s nature redemptive without reference to the purchase price is to talk nonsense. God does not do “remedial” sentences as a way to satisfy his justice. When he shows mercy to a sinner, he purchases the individual out of death into life.
In other words, Christ’s death on the cross was redemptive because the death was entirely punitive. In God’s plan the cross was not a sympathy-generating symbol or an attention-getting drama. It was the final propitiation of God’s wrath. It paid the ransom.
No payment, no mercy. Full payment, full pardon.
The argument from God’s mercy that many evangelicals are now using against the traditional doctrine of hell can also be used — indeed, has been used — to attack Christ’s atonement for sin. Modernist theological liberals have long preached that the cross couldn’t have been about something so primitive as payment. The cross is tragic blood-poetry to them.
I have never been impressed with modernism’s treasured fantasy of cultural progress. Today’s notion of remedial justice is founded on the lie that sin is not truly destructive of human life. Believing lies like this is not a sign of evolutionary refinement, but of degradation. Sin is destructive, and its deadly consequences cry out for recompense. The fact that we are all under sentence only makes the urgency of the cross more intense.
Douthat cites a contemporary story of sin, the fictional life of Tony Soprano, who rejects one opportunity after another to turn from his life of violence. “‘The Sopranos’ never suggested that Tony was beyond forgiveness. But, by the end, it suggested that he was beyond ever genuinely asking for it.”
Rob Bell’s notorious question about whether Gandhi is in hell is fair enough, says Douthat. “But there’s a question that should be asked in turn: Is Tony Soprano really in heaven?”
Audio: What Is Marriage In the Bible?
January 27th, 2011 § Leave a Comment
by Matthew Raley
"Submerged Lamppost," Richard Misrach, 1985, Art Institute of Chicago
We evangelicals tend to blame others for the sexual immorality flooding our culture. But as we await the ruling of the 9th Circuit on Proposition 8, we need both to recover the biblical vision of marriage and to repent of our part in the institution’s decline. In this sermon, we examine both responsibilities.
The Cosmic Vending Machine
January 14th, 2011 § Leave a Comment
by Matthew Raley
Americans, pragmatic as they are about everything, tend to evaluate God the same way they evaluate their congressman: What have you done for me lately?
There shouldn’t be any question on God’s part about whether to keep our blessings coming: the financial windfall, the narrow escape from an accident, robust health, and above all, fun. He knows we’re not perfect. He knows we try — at least when we feel like it. And he ought to know that, despite our limitations, we’re doing a pretty darn good job with life.
So, when we put a prayer in the heavenly slot, we have a right to hear some clicking, a whir, and a final clop as the item we requested appears. Fair is fair.
The biblical word holy intrudes on this fantasy.
When Isaiah sees God enthroned in the temple (Isaiah 6), some of the more threatening aspects of the vision are the seraphim. These creatures have six wings apiece: two pairs to pay deference to the Lord by covering face and feet, and one pair to fly. The verb stem of fly is intensive, meaning not merely that they hover, but that they dart around the high throne.
All the while, they call warnings to each other: “Holy, holy, holy is the Lord of hosts; the whole earth is full of his glory!” These calls are loud and deep enough to shake the foundations of the temple.
The root idea of holy is separate, or unmixed. To say that God is holy is to call him Other.
But that is not all the seraphim are saying. The Hebrew language is built on repetition; to repeat a word is to compound its force. “Holy, holy” would be the maximum imaginable Otherness. The seraphim are calling, “Holy, holy, holy”: the Otherness beyond your ability to imagine.
No wonder Isaiah says, “I’m dead!” He and his people are unclean — that is, mixed and corrupt, unable to survive the presence of utter holiness.
America pragmatism doesn’t work well. We resent that the cosmic vending machine won’t deliver on demand, and that heaven is silent when we pound it. If Isaiah’s vision is true, then we are operating on a theory of God that is disastrously wrong.
Pragmatists have no category for holiness. This omission means that we not only can’t understand God’s judgment but, even worse, we can’t understand his grace. The Lord says the same thing to us that he said to Isaiah: “I will make you clean.”
God’s holiness means that every single blessing we receive has crossed the infinite chasm between us and the purity of his being. It means that his extension of cleansing to us is life itself.
“Fear of the Lord” Means “Fear”
January 6th, 2011 § Leave a Comment
by Matthew Raley
For many American evangelicals, “fearing God” has come to mean respecting Him a bunch. God is a coach. He knows what he’s doing, and you should keep that in mind if he makes a decision you don’t like. You should also keep in mind that Coach’s blustering is just drama to keep you on your toes.
So when Solomon says (Proverbs 1.7) that “the fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge,” he’s not talking about fear-fear; he’s just saying, “Show some respect! You might learn a thing or two.”
The problem is that, both in the Old and New Testaments, human behavior in the presence of God is consistently desperate. When Isaiah saw the Lord (Isaiah 6.5), he exclaimed literally, “I am annihilated!” Ezekiel’s vision of God’s glory put him in a stupor for a week (Ezekiel 3.15). John saw the resurrected Jesus (Revelation 1.17), on whose bosom he had once reclined, and “fell at [Jesus'] feet as though dead.”
Respect isn’t a believable reaction to the awesome nature of God’s presence. Fear is.
Solomon is saying that fear — real fear — is the beginning of knowledge because it’s the right emotional response to the power and holiness of God. It’s the starting-point for measuring life, the foundation of safety and health.
But how can you relate to God without being paralyzed?
When my dad taught me to use a lawn mower, the first thing he did was start it, turn it on its side, and show me the blade. He wanted me to be afraid of it, and I was. Then he showed me how to be safe: never pull the mower toward my feet, etc. Once I knew how to use the mower, I pushed it confidently — even though my fear of the blade remained vivid.
Think of this kind of fear more personally.
When a man is abusive, you fear him because you never know what he’s going to do. You try to judge what mood he’s in, to discover early warnings that he’s about to go off, because his anger could flare instantly.
The fear of God is not like that.
I feared my dad, and still do, not because he was unpredictable and abusive, but because he had integrity and consistency. His reaction toward wrong was nothing to trifle with.
We fear God not because he is abusive — because we never know what he’ll do — but because we know exactly what he will do. The scriptures reveal his nature for just that reason. So for me, there is no contradiction between fearing God and having an intimate confidence in him. In fact, the right kind of fear is the foundation of confidence.
Forgiveness and Repentance
December 8th, 2010 § 6 Comments
by Matthew Raley
I got a question over Twitter following my recent post on forgiveness. How do you forgive someone who won’t acknowledge doing wrong, or who never repents?
Three issues here.
1. We have a duty to forgive even those who will not acknowledge doing wrong. Jesus forgave those who crucified him while they were in the act of doing so (Luke 23.34). His death for sinners occurred when we were ungodly, not in response to our repentance (Romans 5.6-11). Jesus commands us to forgive as we have been forgiven (Matthew 6.14-15), extending the same release to others that we’ve gained ourselves.
2. Forgiveness is not a free pass for a sin without payment. Remember the transaction of release: upon payment, the debt no longer adheres to the debtor. The Scriptures tell us to release people from their sins on the strongest possible basis, Christ’s payment for sin. Because of his death on the cross, Jesus Christ is now the judge (John 5.22-29).
So when I forgive someone who has wronged me, I am saying that Christ bought me out of my debts. Therefore I have no right to hold debts over another person (Matthew 18.23-35).
In this sense, my release of someone who has wronged me is a change of custody. “Whatever claim I have against this person I surrender to Christ. He is judge; I am not. He may do as He will.”
3. Forgiveness is different from trust. Jesus forgives Peter for his betrayals, along with the other disciples (John 20.19-23). But he still goes through a process with Peter to reestablish the relationship (John 21.1-19).
There are times when we are called to forgive without the possibility of restoration. Those who will not turn from the sins that have harmed us may never be restored to the relationships we once had. In particular, this is true of those who have died without acknowledging their wrongs. In such cases, the matter is a transaction between my soul and Christ. “Lord, it is your right to deal with this person. For my part, I renounce whatever rights I may have because of your mercy to me.”
