Forgiven and Forgiving
In all the Christian vocabulary there is scarcely a word more cherished that the word forgiven. It is basic to all our hope. We stand before God accused, guilty, and owing a debt greater than we could ever pay. But resting our case on Jesus Christ who in the place of sinners paid that debt in full we are released from it, judicially pardoned, and accepted as God’s children.
Jesus’ instruction on forgiveness (Matt. 18:15–20) and parable of the two debtors (Matt. 18:21–35) brims with significance on multiple levels. Here we will highlight only a few. First, we learn something about the nature of forgiveness. This is only implicit in the passage, but it is difficult to miss. The two debtors—one with an insurmountable debt, the other with a perhaps manageable debt—were both forgiven. The king released them from obligation to pay. They were frankly and fully forgiven. What we must not miss is that in so doing, the king absorbed the loss himself. He, in effect, paid the debt for them. Their forgiveness demanded a substitutional payment which, in this case, was paid by the king himself.
So it is with us. God forgives us absolutely; he releases us from our sin-debt. But he does not forgive by divine fiat merely. He forgives on just grounds: the God against whom we have sinned has himself, in the person of his Son, paid the debt for us. This is the very meaning of the cross and the glad announcement of the gospel. Jesus Christ took the curse of our sin to himself, and we are released from it. The lesson is clear: forgiveness demands substitutional payment.
The leading point of the parable, however, concerns us who have been forgiven. Focus lands on the debtor who was forgiven that insurmountable debt, who afterwards exacted full payment of one who owed him a manageable sum and sold him and his family into servitude to even the score. To him the king says, “You wicked servant! I forgave you all that debt because you pleaded with me. And should not you have had mercy on your fellow servant, as I had mercy on you?” (vv. 32–33).
The point here painfully obvious: forgiveness demands forgiveness, and this is what our Lord presses. When a brother sins against us and then repents, we are obliged to forgive—and this without limit, even “seventy times seven” (vv. 21–22). We ourselves have been forgiven an insurmountable debt, and thus we are implicitly obliged to forgive others. It’s the gospel way.
Your brother slanders you, harms your reputation, and then comes in repentance. He may seek to repair the damage as he is able, but damage is done. To forgive him you must absorb the loss. You accept the consequences of his sin against you. We cannot say, “That is the last straw!” or “I’ll never forget this!” Recalling the infinite debt that we have been forgiven we resist the urge to get even or even hold grudge. We forgive because we ourselves have been forgiven a much greater debt.
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Children Forgiven In Light Of The Facts
1 John 3:2-6
“Beloved, now we are children of God, and it has not appeared as yet what we will be.
We know that when He appears, we will be like Him, because we will see Him just as He is. And everyone who has this hope fixed on Him purifies himself, just as He is pure.
Everyone who practices sin also practices lawlessness; and sin is lawlessness.
You know that He appeared in order to take away sins; and in Him there is no sin.
No one who abides in Him sins; no one who sins has seen Him or knows Him.”
John calls those whose sins are forgiven “children of God” (1 Jn. 2:12), yet in these verses he observes that we do not look like the Father who has begotten us: “it has not appeared as yet what we will be.” Furthermore, we are told that everyone hoping in Christ should “purify himself, as He is pure.” But how can we do this since we fall short of our calling? To encourage us in pursuing holiness, John reviews three indisputable facts, regardless of our external appearance:
First, sin is lawlessness (v. 4). When Adam and Eve sinned in the Garden, they transgressed God’s law, rejecting His standard and substituting their own. They, and their posterity with them, became lawless and thereby separated from God. As long as we are sinful, as long as we are lawless, we cannot be reconciled to the law-giving Lord. This fact would drive us to despair, were it the end of the story.
But the second fact answers the need of the first: Christ appeared in order to take away sin (v. 5). As the Godman dwelling with us (Jn. 1:14, 6:38), He lived perfectly because “in Him there is no sin”; He obeyed where we did not. Additionally, in His work on the cross, Christ takes our sin upon Himself, bearing its punishment in our place. His death settles the matter of sin. If Christ took away my sin, and in Him there is no sin, then where is the sin He took away? “As far as the east is from the west, so far does he remove our transgressions from us” (Ps. 103:12).
These two facts, (1) sin is lawlessness and (2) Christ takes away sin, lead to John’s concluding third fact: God in Christ justifies His children: “No one who abides in Him sins” (v.6). While God’s children prescriptively should not practice sin (cf. 1 Jn. 3:9), here they are told that they do not sin. Whereas lawlessness is applied to those “practicing sin” (v. 4), the absence of sin is applied to those “abiding in Christ.” Those forgiven in Christ are not judged by their present shortcomings but according to the effective righteousness of Him in whom “there is no sin.”
These facts should fill us with joy, and hope for our sanctification! In Christ God the Father has forgiven our sins and named us His children. Whether we feel worthy or not, those who abide in Christ are the Father’s children and still will be when Christ returns (1 Jn. 3:1-2).
Thanks be to God for His indescribable gift (2 Cor. 9:15)!
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Abortion and Our Lost Ability to Reason Morally
The inability or unwillingness of Christians to employ rigorous, biblical, moral reasoning to address public attacks on God and Scripture over the last few years has been as stunning as it has been revealing. From the unbiblical assessments of lawless rioting and flagrant theft to descriptions of legalized abortion the United States, many who name the Name of Christ—including those in positions of leadership—have fallen woefully short of speaking with the wisdom we desperately need.
The recent attempt by the US Senate to codify the legal murder of unborn children further highlights how anemic Christian public theology is today. Forty-nine Senators voted to legalize the murder of babies up to the point of their birth. Everyone of them is a Democrat. Yet, Christian deplorables have been lectured by our betters for at least the last seven years on how and why we must make room for voting for Democrat candidates at every level of government. We have been told that we do not understand the complexities of the issues involved; that though Christians might be personally opposed to abortion we must allow that they can, nevertheless, vote for political leaders who are committed to the slaughter of innocent children; and that since the Bible doesn’t tell us “how” to fight against abortion, we mustn’t argue in terms of national righteousness for one political candidate over another or contend that any political party is better or worse than another.
Yet, as I was reminded this morning when I reread it, the Democrat party platform includes five references to making abortion legal, tax-payer-funded, and readily available in the USA.
To know God and to fear Him means that we tremble at His Word, believe His gospel, and love His law.
Many sincere but naive Christians have been led astray by such perverted moral reasoning and have consequently voted for the party of death in the last several political elections. They have done so with reassurances that they honored Christ with their vote. Christians who, like R.C. Sproul, out of moral conviction have argued against voting for any candidate who advocates abortion, have been labeled white supremacists, Christian nationalists, ignorant fundamentalists, and worse.
I and other Christian pastors have been accused of suddenly “becoming political” & making politics more important than theology. We have been slandered as contending that unity is now based on politics rather than devotion to Christ and His Word. We have been charged with having politics drive and shape our doctrinal convictions and of requiring certain political affinities in the churches we serve.
Such accusations are not only erroneous, they are also ignorant. They are a commentary on how poorly many Christians, including many Christian leaders reason morally. Christ is Lord over everything—including politics. His rule does not end at the voting booth. Christians must vote like Christians. Neighbor-love means that I seek the greatest good for my neighbor. My neighbors in the US will be in a far worse position spiritually, morally, and before God with every additional advocate for child-murder that is placed in public office. That is true because “righteousness exalts a nation but sin is a reproach to any people” (Proverbs 14:34).
The more “we the people” give political power to baby-murderers the more we increase our national sin and rebellion against God and the more we provoke Him to His face and “tempt” Him to do to America what He did to Sodom and Gomorrah and has done with nations throughout history.
God’s people in America should repent of our complacency and complicity in the forty-nine-year holocaust we are living through and call for the immediate end of legalized abortion.
To know God and to fear Him means that we tremble at His Word, believe His gospel, and love His law. It requires that we seek His honor by advocating for His ways not only in our private lives but in every area of influence He entrusts to us, including the right to vote.
To vote for anyone who advocates policies of legalized murder is foolish and sinful. Leaders who encourage Christians to do so are doubly culpable and have forfeited their right to be followed. If the innocent blood of Abel cried out to the Lord (Genesis 4:10), what must be the deafening cry in heaven from the more than 63 million innocent babies that have been legally slaughtered in the US since 1973! And yet, we have Christian leaders and ethicists contending that it is allowable for Christians to vote for pro-abortionists. Other, more conservative leaders, have argued that the call for the immediate end of the abortion holocaust is unloving, disingenuous, or impolite. Such leaders, if they refuse to repent, should be ignored and rejected as untrustworthy by those who would be faithful to Jesus Christ and honor His lordship over all the earth.
Praise God for the prospect of having the evil ruling of Roe v Wade overturned by SCOTUS. But whether or not that happens, God’s people in America should repent of our complacency and complicity in the forty-nine-year holocaust we are living through and call for the immediate end of legalized abortion. We must insist on equal protection under the law for the most vulnerable among us. And we must never forget nor let our reasoning lose sight of the fact that abortion is murder.
May God have mercy on this nation.Follow Tom Ascol:
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The Beauty of Duty
Duty is defined as “that which one is morally or legally bound to do.” That defines duty in an absolute sense. Another definition is “action or conduct required by one’s profession or position.” That might, often does, involve absolutes, but the particular actions required are relative to the skill, qualification, interpersonal relations, and professional office of a person. My duties to my children are different from my duties to the children of others but are not on that account less than absolute.
On occasion, public speakers, including preachers of the gospel, will belittle “duty” as if it is an inferior motivation for action or compliance to standards. Delight is seen as a superior motivation while duty is—Well, if I have to do it, OK—synonymous with begrudging action. One brings his wife flowers because it is his delight to do so, for he is delighted with her. If he gives her flowers presenting them to her out of a sense of duty, this is connoted as a lackluster action deserving scorn. But this tendency to diminish the excellence of a sense of duty is misguided. It is a moral error. The husband’s duty is to love his wife as his own body, for he who loves his wife loves himself (Ephesians 5:28; Genesis 2:22, 23). To treat one’s wife tenderly, to look to her desires and happiness, to bring her flowers, to live with her according to knowledge is to love her, to delight in her, and at the same time to do one’s duty.
The bifurcation between duty and delight is one of the sinister results of the fall. That one can feel duty to be a burden is one evidence of how the flesh lusts against the Spirit. In Galatians 5, Paul investigates the relationship of the law to love and the operations of the Spirit. Through love, we serve one another (13). By the flesh, we “bite and devout one another” (15). The whole law, that is, the whole duty of one person to another, is fulfilled in this, “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.” So how does one overcome the antipathy of the flesh to the law of love? “Walk by the Spirit, and you will not carry out the desire of the flesh” (16). The Spirit, law, and love unite in giving expression to human duty. When one walks by the Spirit and bears the fruit that the Spirit produces (5:22, 23), he does nothing contrary to law but walks aligned with the law. God’s law constitutes the duty of man and at the same time is the perfect expression of love.
I will not seek to investigate vigorously the relation between benevolent love and complacent love but only this. God loves sinners out of benevolent love as far as his knowledge of their sin and rebellion is concerned and their consequent worthiness of eternal wrath. There is nothing lovely in us that would give God pleasure in loving us. He does nurture, however, a complacency in his unmerited favor toward sinners, for he does this to the praise of his glorious grace and the demonstration of the “depth of the riches both of the wisdom and knowledge of God” (Ephesians 1:6; Romans 11:33). His benevolence toward us, therefore, finds it foundation in true complacence toward himself. On our part, both benevolent love and complacent love is due to God, first, foremost, and unstinted and then to all other things on his account. He has the most of being and is in fact the only thing that has being in and of himself, the only self-existent entity, and infinitely so, in all of reality—so benevolence is due him above all things. In addition, his being not only is large and indestructible but is beautiful, the sum of all goodness. Jonathan Edwards argues, “For as God is infinitely the greatest Being, so he is allowed to be infinitely the most beautiful and excellent.” Real virtue then, the faithful expression of duty, “must necessarily have a supreme love to God both of benevolence and complacence” at its core. All is derived from him and is absolutely dependent on him and his “being and beauty are, as it were, the sum and comprehension of all existence and excellence” [Works, BOT 1:125]. God’s comprehensive and infinite excellence, therefore, establishes the consuming duty of all intelligent creatures to love him in seamless devotion of all our parts.
Resistance to duty is resistance to moral perfection and resistance to love—both for God and man, neighbor and family. Nurturing selfishness and personal pleasure at the cost of loving service equals lawlessness rather than obedience, flesh-following rather than Spirit-walking, irregularity rather than duty. In the unfallen state of man, obedience to the law written on the heart was the supreme delight of Adam and Eve. To expand their vision of God’s attributes and to be more maturely conformed to his beautiful perfection was the goal that drove their obedience. This moral propensity was used perversely by Satan to entice them to disobedience—“His mercy is greater than his law and this act is the very path to be like him.” Such reasoning deceived Eve to take an independent path to these goals and brought about the fall. As uncorrupted image-bearers, however, their duty was their delight and the prospect of unwavering obedience their true happiness. Andrew Fuller stated in his confession of faith, “I believe if Adam or any holy being had had the making of a law for himself, he would have made just such an one as God’s law is; for it would be the greatest of hardships to a holy being not to be allowed to love God with all his heart.” In the unfallen state, they loved the duty that was theirs; the obligation that was perfectly commensurate with the righteousness set before them was no burden but their holy hope.
Presently, fallen creatures have no regard for God. Instead, they shut off from their contemplation the power and perfection that should be obvious from the witness of every created thing around them. Duty is reprehensible because the concept of divine beauty, power, and prerogative conflicts with the corrupt mind in its self-centered, rather than God-centered, goals. If any sinners are to be converted, each must come to grips with the distance between their affections and their duties.
The new birth involves a reconciliation of affections with duties. The faith that adheres to justifying righteousness approves God’s righteous law, righteous judgment, righteous atonement, and righteous reconciliation. Saving faith admits that our duty toward such righteous expressions of divine goodness infinitely transcends and is radically other than our pursuit. Sanctification progresses in proportion to the affections’ realignment with intrinsic duties. Again, Andrew Fuller presses this truth into a confessional article: “I believe that such is the excellence of this way of salvation, that every one who hears or has opportunity to hear it proclaimed in the gospel is bound [italics mine] to repent of his sin, believe, approve, and embrace it with all his heart; to consider himself, as he really is, a vile lost sinner; to reject all pretensions to life in any other way; and to cast himself upon Christ, that he may be saved in this way of God’s devising. This I think to be true faith, which whoever have, I believe will certainly be saved.” One’s being “bound” to these responses mean that every stage and trait of justifying faith arises from duty. Reconciliation with God necessarily involves reconciliation of our highest desire with our highest duty.
When one grasps accurately the moral loveliness that requires the devotion of all moral beings, it is impossible to dismiss duty as an inferior motivation for action; rather one sees duty as a moral disposition, an aesthetic judgment, a true perception of fitness, a consent to perfect being, and a joyful submission to expressions of order, law, love, moral symmetry, infallible purpose, transcendent wisdom, and divine revelation. Duty permeates the entire calling of the minister of the gospel and the message that he preaches. Again, listen to the confession of Andrew Fuller:
I believe it is the duty of every minister of Christ plainly and faithfully to preach the gospel to all who will hear it; and as I believe the inability of men to spiritual things to be wholly of the moral, and therefore of the criminal kind, and that it is their duty to love the Lord Jesus Christ and trust in him for salvation though they do not; I therefore believe free and solemn addresses, invitations, calls, and warning to them to be not only consistent, but directly adapted, as means, in the hand of the Spirit of God, to bring them to Christ. I consider it as a part of my duty which I could not omit without being guilty of the blood of souls.
Why does Fuller say that it is the sinner’s “duty to love the Lord Jesus Christ and trust in him for salvation.” The first concerns the fullness of the law; before all things and with all the energy of the mind, the will, the understanding, and the affections the Lord Jesus, in whom the fullness of the Godhead dwells, is to be loved. Having fallen short of that in Adam and in personal transgression, sinners need a path to righteousness and thus life. In Jesus that righteousness has been perfected and the merit of eternal life is found in him alone. A complete resting of the soul on his work (trust) as alone worthy unites the soul to him. He is the Lord, and, also, he has loved the Lord his Father with all his heart, mind, soul, and strength. He is the goal of the law and he is the perfect doer of the law. The duty, therefore, to love him absolutely and to trust him for salvation is based on the same moral excellence involved in both.
Duty, in reality, as indicated above is prior to love. The focus of love is determined by the duty implied in the excellence of the object. The greater the excellence, the greater the duty; the greater the duty, the higher and more focused the love. The infinitely perfect being calls forth our devotion and admiration; the law of such a being establishes our duty. That all things exist by his will and serve his purpose gives us varying degrees of duty toward all that he made and sustains. “You are worthy, O Lord, to receive glory and honor and power; for you created all things, and by your will they exist and were created” (Revelation 4:11). Though varied in degree, all duty is absolute. We have a duty to our pets as well as our parents, but the latter is of a higher degree of duty that the former. How the glory of God is manifest in each thing and in each relationship determines the intensity of duty involved. Food and drink are good and are partaken with gratitude and to God’s glory and with a fully-approving conscience, but may be omitted for the sake of the conscience of a brother (1 Corinthians 10:29-33). Fundamental to love, therefore, is the level of duty that defines each relation.
Articles in this edition of The Founders Journal treat those areas of duty that are of the highest order. The first is from the opening chapter of John L. Dagg’s Manual of Theology and explores the duty to love God. On this duty hang the reality and peculiar relevance of all other duties.
Another article by Paul Taylor deals with the duties of church membership. Christ has died for the church, has called and gifted every member and united all these members in one common goal to achieve the “measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ” {Ephesians 4:13). There is a duty, therefore, that each part of this body do its work which “causes growth of the body for the edifying of itself in love” (Ephesians 4:16).
Another article, by Ryan Denton, concerns the ongoing witness of the church, corporately and individually, with a view to the conversion of sinners. This is to occur until the final elect one is called. Benjamin Keach stated that the “task and calling of the minister as an ambassador” is “to persuade sinners to receive and embrace the Lord Jesus.” The truths of Christ’s seeking and finding all of his people should stir up ministers “to do their utmost in order to the conversion of sinners.” They should not be weary, nor faint, nor be discouraged even when reproached by men and Satan for “God has appointed preaching as his great ordinance, for the … conversion of lost sinners.”[i] And though the minister has no power either of virtue or persuasion to change a heart and bring a sinner home, but only Christ alone by his Spirit can do that, nevertheless, ministers “are to do what they can, they are to invite them, press, them, entreat and persuade them to come.”[ii] A faithful ministry “will do what the Lord commands them to do” with the confidence that “in God’s heart is room enough for millions of souls; and in God’s house there is not only bread enough, and to spare, but room enough also.”[iii] A minister of Christ, in order “to accomplish his Ambassy, and to bring the King’s Enemies to accept of Peace,” must pray, entreat, and “beseech Sinners to be reconciled to God.” In fact, like the apostle who cried tears over the lost, “Faithful Ministers art willing to spend their Lives to win Souls to Christ, yea, to die upon the spot to save one poor Sinner.” Ryan Denton reminds us, in Keach-like fashion, that this duty cannot be transcended in demonstrating love to God and man.
Concluding this edition of the Founders Journal is a brief resume of the Nature of True Virtue by Jonathan Edwards. This work is perhaps the most profound discussion on duty—its true beauty and its intrinsic ethical absoluteness—in American evangelical literature. We pray that each of these articles and the impact of the whole will give unction for holiness and faithful service.
[i] Benjamin Keach, Parables., 368-370.
[ii] Keach., 546.
[iii] Keach, 546.