My Adventures with God Ch 44 - Season Break

Ch 44 Season Break

Don't you hate it when your favourite TV serials stop for a break between seasons. But of course they can't film them as fast as they are shown, so breaks are necessary. So too with this story, there has been a 'season break' but for a quite different reason.

In order to make sure I have my facts straight for the next part of the story I have to delve back into the documents I have kept filed away all these years. I have simply found this prospect too painful to face up till now. But it must be done, so I expect posts to resume shortly.

In the meantime I want to say some things I believe are really important about forgiveness.

First: in this world bad things do happen to good people.

This was famously summarised in the motto : “shit happens”. Nevertheless we want to blame someone when it does. If we fail to find an obvious culprit we often fall to blaming ourselves or God. Hence there is a common line in good fiction where someone is urged to forgive themselves. This is excellent advice. It also illustrates one of the (many) tremendous kindnesses of God. The guilt the person is racked by is generally misplaced – that is to say if we knew all the facts we would not judge them “guilty”. Yet self-forgiveness here brings healing. I look on this as God rewarding the act of forgiving even when there was actually nothing to forgive.

Of course sometimes it is not ourselves but some other person we mistakenly blame. Here too God seems to me to reward the act of forgiveness of that person with healing even though there was in his eyes either little or nothing to forgive.

Blaming God? Getting angry with God is, I believe, often a healthy sign. All parents know occasions when a child turns hurt or frustration into an angry attack on a parent. The normal human response is to see through the anger to the pain and take our child in our arms to comfort them. How much more will our Heavenly Father understand us, his children! However maintaining that anger and letting it become a settled accusation we level against God is of course quite another matter and a sin that may destroy us.

Secondly in this world there is human evil.

This is a more difficult, but I believe still soluble problem.

On one hand we are all sinners.

From thoughtless or simply inconsiderate unkindnesses to calculated mean or spiteful words and deeds we are all sinners. For us Christians, we have entered a new world – a realm of the grace and favour of God. We humbly accept that “while we were yet sinners Christ died for us”. We have the dawning of a bitter-sweet realisation of God's implacable hatred of sin but love for us sinners. We have the Holy Spirit living in our innermost being. Under the Spirit's tutelage we are learning to fight sin in ourselves and to long for heaven where there will be no sin or any kind of evil.

But we are a work in progress. We understand only too well how our continued relationship with God depends on His continual forgiveness of our continual sins, failings and deliberate disobediences. On the flip side we know our continued relationship with God depends on our continual repentance of these thoughts words and deeds and our turning back to him and his ways. But we also know that even this repentance is a response to the firmness and discipline of God and when we look back at times when we have stubbornly disobeyed God we see so plainly how it was his amazing kindness patience and perseverance that drew us back.

Once we have experienced this new realm we can see two things: First in any human relationships this side of heaven there are going to be both real and imagined slights, hurts grievances and so on which will poison that relationship unless they can be dealt with. Secondly we not only know how God restored us to relationship with himself by dealing with our sins, but we have experienced the liberation of his forgiveness and the power of his love.

So in our human relationships we have both the knowledge and more importantly the power to deal with the things that would poison them. We can have relationships where there is forgiveness and redemption.

This theme runs like a flouro thread through the scriptures and every time we say the Lord's Prayer we pray “Forgive us our sins as we forgive those who sin against us”.

It remains a big problem that there are so many people who say they are Christians and yet have their lives dominated, and often what should be close relationships destroyed by their refusal to forgive. It is also a problem that preachers do not give this anything like the stress Jesus gave it. Jesus went so far as to say that such people would not get into heaven! This makes it a very pressing problem.

But on the other hand there is a deep end to the pool of human sin.

We all know only too well that there is no depth of “unimaginable evil” that somewhere sometime someone has not only imagined but done.

As I wrote in my posts on morals, to react with anger against evil is not only right but essential if one is not to be evil oneself. Aristotle said it in in the fourth century BC. The Bible said it many centuries before that. The Bible is also really strong on the punishing of evil doers. Even to injunctions like “Do not let your eye pity nor your hand spare (the evildoer)” to the ancient Israelites and in Romans the observation “It is not for nothing the one in authority bears the sword, he is God's agent in punishing evil.”

God has moral character. He has revealed enough of this character in the Bible that we can be certain about many aspects of it. “I the Lord love Justice, I hate robbery and wrong” and “But those who do violence the Lord hates with a passion.” are not even the tip of the iceberg. My point is just the we do know plenty about God's moral character and his hatred of evil. We can say for certain that there exist some occasions where humans are required to exemplify God's hatred of evil by punishing evil doers.

There is a simple solution to this apparent paradox of Forgiveness Vs Punishment

Individual humans have to forgive as Christ forgave them: but God is free to pardon or condemn. Human authorities should see themselves as God's agents and administer justice, punishing evil and rewarding good.

So for individuals forgiveness in the face of evil means nothing like denying or minimising the evil of what was done to them. It is handing over their “right” to vengeance to the proper authority.

God is the ultimate authority:

Revelation says “Vengeance is mine says the Lord: I will repay”. As Christians “ransomed, healed , restored, forgiven” we above all must willingly hand over to God every sin against us which cries out for vengeance. At the judgement, with our own sins paid for, we should feel equally vindicated whether the evil done us is forgiven by the blood of Jesus, or by the evil doer being cast into hell.

Here are also human authorities:

We benefit greatly from living in a society under the rule of law. The law does allow individuals to sue others for recompense in some instances (“civil” cases). But in a society under the rule of law, for everything we call “criminal” individuals must hand over their “rights” of vengeance to the proper authorities. We don't allow people “to take the law into their own hands”. In this instance “forgiveness” is simply accepting that this is as it should be and emotionally giving over the punishment of the wrongdoer to the authorities.

As to the authorities, one theme exploited by writers is the innate sense of betrayal when the authorities fail to punish evil. Think about the plot lines in popular TV cop shows! The Bible also comes down really hard on judges who do not punish evil: “Punishing the innocent and acquitting the guilty: the Lord hates them both” So “forgiveness” does not apply to judges, juries, prosecutors and police in their civic duties! They are there to administer justice and punish crime – so help them God!