Forgive and Forget?

Some thoughts on "Forgive and Forget...but when you can't forget?"

God can't expect us to have amnesia. But there is a freedom in complete release of the debt that the one who wronged us can never ever ever pay anyway. Waiting around for the debt to be paid is the textbook definition of...bitterness. Hanging on and on and on until they somehow "make it right". Which they can't. They are poor and miserable and helpless and incompetent to do it. And they are...yes...GUILTY for what they did. Thus the only possible, SAVING way out ("saving" for the one who's been hurt, I mean) is the audacious, nervy, some might even say "arrogant" path of unapologetic forgiveness: "You did it, you wronged me, you owe me, you're guilty, you haven't even a shred of the capital required to make it right, so...I release you: you owe me nothing, you're free, I swallow the debt myself and...eliminate it (yes, there is a digestive analogy here, if that's not putting it too crudely), and now... I AM FREE."  When Christ died on the cross, God became free. "Forgive one another JUST God in Christ has forgiven you." He absorbed, digested, eliminated ALL the sin of the world in His death, DIED to it since we couldn't possibly make it right, and ROSE...FREE. No one can ever point a finger at God, neither now nor in eternity, and say, "The reason I'm in such a fix is...You never forgave...even though YOU try to tell US we should always forgive, so that's hypocrisy!" No. never. Forgive? He DIED. That's what forgiveness IS. And after death comes...resurrection.:) And with resurrection comes a new world--"the old has passed away, the NEW has come...."

Perhaps it helps to forgive when we squarely and ruthlessly admit just what it is "the other" owes us. What is it, really? Why, it's nothing less than to turn back the clock and make it so what they did to us never happened. That is truly their debt. And...who can do that? Ah, there's the shattering, killing question, the brutal answer to which we know too well. The answer is no one. Thus the despair of bitterness, the eternal waiting for what can never be. Only forgiveness can save us from that.

I am not preaching "universal salvation", yet I am convinced theologically that there is a very real sense in which ALL sin is already forgiven. WE are, after all, called to forgive, not some, not sometimes, but all and always. For anything and everything done against us. Yet we hold on, perhaps unconsciously, to this notion that God Himself isn't quite capable of doing what He demands that we do. (That makes sense...how?) It slips out in subtle ways, e.g., in the invitation to "accept Jesus and He will forgive all your sins", which conjures up the image of a God unable to bring Himself to forgive--"in his heart", as it were--unless and until you make it right by 'fessing up. But in human terms we understand that as bitterness; yes, in human terms and CHRISTIAN terms we expect ourselves to have already "done" the forgiveness in our hearts even before, if ever, the other person asks forgiveness. But, paradoxically, we don't hold God Himself to the same high standard. He "will forgive" (He hasn't yet) when you "accept Jesus". Something is terribly, terribly off in that theology. I understand why we think this way, of course. It's because we are afraid of falling into the heresy of universal salvation. And we equate "forgiveness" unconditionally with "salvation". Therefore to say "all is forgiven" is to say "all are saved." But if that is a false equivalence, then the whole problem falls away. I am convinced there is a real, eternal (meaning "in God"), divine and full way in which God, in Christ, has "acquitted Himself" of the burden of forgiveness. In the Son God Himself has perfectly "died to" the wrong, ALL the wrong, done to Him. We "come to Jesus" not SO THAT He will,at that moment, decide to forgive us ("Well...okay then....") but because the deed is done and fully offered, resplendent and perfect, in his nail-pierced, RISEN hand. So why then is this not a doctrine of universal salvation? The answer is simple: people falsely equate forgiveness with reconcilation. Forgiveness takes one. Reconciliation takes two. It is telling that Paul, when summing up the whole essence of his ministry, doesn't say "God has committed to us the ministry of salvation" or "God has committed to us the ministry of forgiveness"; rather, it's "God has committed to us the ministry of reconcilation...." God's heart, God's "attitude", God's "posture", God's "state", vis-a-vis forgiveness and our sin, is a glory and miracle of redemptive perfection--He has gone through the mill Himself to make it BE--but salvation requires our entry, in the brokenness of our incompetence ever to "make it right", into that perfection, in the embrace of His bursting, flowing, obstacle-free love and forgiveness.
This is why I cannot possibly admit or entertain the Calvinist teaching of Limited Atonement. I see that Calvinism reaches this conclusion by, first, correctly sensing (and all our theology, much as we like to think it's a kind of hard science, starts with our "sense" of something)--as I was saying, Calvinism's "Limited Atonement" launches from a correct perception that the holy and precious death of Christ has to have been perfectly "efficient", i.e., it had to have accomplished what God set out to do through it. But that correct intuition is improperly married to the defective premise that the ONLY thing Christ's death was for was...to save (atone for) people. So if "atonement"="forgiveness"="salvation", then ipso facto Christ only 'died for' those who, God knew, would be saved. The death of Christ cannot conceivably have been "a waste of time" in any sense, i.e., wasted on those who would never reap its blessing. You see how this sort of theology is man-centered? Our response determines the scope of His work. I reject that. Quite to the contrary, I would say that it is ONLY the full and perfect scope of His atonement that, in a manner of speaking, "makes Him the God He is", i.e., the God who (just like He tells us to do...think about that) has perfectly settled the matter of forgiveness in his OWN heart vis-a-vis us; it is ONLY God's own dying to all sin ever done to Him that even CREATES a forgiveness into which any of us can hope to enter, in reconciliation. (You see, I believe the critical issue is not the "extent" of atonement but its quality, and I cannot admit the notion "limited" into that quality, or God Himself becomes intolerably...less.) "Limited Atonement" is not, finally, the perfection of divine forgiveness that makes eternal reconcilation possible for any of us. It DOES matter, indeed, "who" God is, in this matter. He is either the God who forgives before we have asked forgiveness, Who "settles the matter" in Himself while we "are yet His enemies", Who in fact epitomizes in absolute divine perfection everything that, apparently, He demands of us, or...He is not. Well, I believe He is.