At least, I’m sure it seems gigantic and
unforgivable to you. And since the awareness of the magnitude of sin in our
lives, its toxic effects on others around us and its absolute repulsiveness to
God is a necessary step in turning away from it, I wouldn’t want to downplay it
for you.
Carry on. Be miserable. Have at it.
More than once as a younger man, I made the
mistake of responding to the confessions of friends in spiritual distress over
their own guilt with an argument that boiled down to “God has forgiven worse”. You
know, the Such Were Some of You argument.
Oh, don’t get me wrong: it’s a legitimate
argument. It’s gospel truth. And I find great personal comfort in the
fact that:
“… neither the sexually immoral, nor idolaters, nor adulterers, nor men who practice homosexuality, nor thieves, nor the greedy, nor drunkards, nor revilers, nor swindlers will inherit the kingdom of God. And such were some of you. But you were washed, you were sanctified, you were justified in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and by the Spirit of our God.”
So, yeah, some of those sins were
characteristic of me too. I was there back in the day, and I’m not there now.
Praise the Lord for that.
But that fact that a long list of worse sinners
can be produced at any point does not diminish your specific culpability, or
mine. “Whoever keeps the whole law but fails in one point has become
guilty of all of it.” And further, it doesn’t (or shouldn’t) make us feel any better about our own
sin. It’s a bad argument to throw at a person who has not yet repented.
Misery and Action
You say, “What do you mean, ‘not repented’?
I’m totally miserable here. I’ve never been so unhappy in my life.”
I suppose I could answer that with a word
study on the meaning of biblical repentance, but that’s something you can discover
with a Google search and two minutes at GotQuestions. They’ve totally nailed it, so I won’t reinvent the wheel.
But let me just illustrate the meaning of
true repentance from the Old Testament. Here’s the situation: Israel has sinned
against God over and over again, despite his constant help and deliverance, by
plunging repeatedly into idolatry every time their lives improve. And once
again they cry out to God for deliverance.
Here is God’s response:
“ ‘You have forsaken me and served other gods; therefore I will save you no more. Go and cry out to the gods whom you have chosen; let them save you in the time of your distress.’ And the people of Israel said to the Lord, ‘We have sinned; do to us whatever seems good to you. Only please deliver us this day.’ So they put away the foreign gods from among them and served the Lord, and he became impatient over the misery of Israel.”
Notice that initially God is unresponsive
to the cry of his people. He says, “I will save you no more”. He’s had it with
them, even though they appear to have changed their minds about who the real
God is.
Being miserable is not enough. Changing
your mind is not enough. Even crying out to God is not enough. Why? Because God
is hard-hearted? Not at all.
Put Away the Foreign Gods
The key is in the final sentence of the
story: “So they put away the foreign
gods from among them and served the Lord, and he became impatient over
the misery of Israel.”
When the change of mind became a change
of action, we see that God finally felt compelled to act. He could not leave
the situation alone. As Paul puts his gospel, “I declared … that they
should repent and turn to God, performing deeds in keeping with their repentance.”
Sure, true repentance occurs even before
any deeds are performed, and maybe yours is the real deal. God knows perfectly
well if your repentance is genuine long before you lift a finger.
Moreover, God has no interest in your good
deeds if you think that by doing them you are somehow offsetting the sins of
the past, piling your works on the other side of the scale and saying, “Look,
God, I’m not so bad after all!” You are that bad. So am I.
Good deeds don’t undo bad deeds. They don’t
fix the harm that we’ve done. There is no offset. With some sins, there is
no practical way to make amends to those who have suffered. Maybe they’re dead
now. Maybe they’re unreachable for other reasons. The clock cannot be turned
back. The window cannot be unbroken. To believe that we can somehow undo the wicked
things we’ve done is only to delude ourselves and trivialize the damage we’ve caused.
In Short
Forgiveness doesn’t come because you have
somehow “fixed it”. You can’t. All that good deeds can ever accomplish is to
demonstrate before the world and before heaven that your profession of repentance is not just
worked-up, pointless drama-queenery, and that you have genuinely changed.
Maybe in time they’ll even convince you.
Maybe in time they’ll even convince you.
And maybe, just like he did with Israel,
God will become impatient over your misery and show his hand in your life.
Just a thought.
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