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The crucial question we should ask, therefore, is a different one. It is not why God finds it difficult to forgive, but how he finds it possible to do so at all. As Emil Brunner put it, “Forgiveness is the very opposite of anything which can be taken for granted. Nothing is less obvious than forgiveness.” Or, in the words of Carnegie Simpson, “forgiveness is to man the plainest of duties; to God it is the profoundest of problems.” The problem of forgiveness is constituted by the inevitable collision between divine perfection and human rebellion, between God as he is and us as we are. The obstacle to forgiveness is neither our sin alone nor our guilt alone, but the divine reaction in love and wrath toward guilty sinners. For, although indeed “God is love,” yet we have to remember that his love is “holy love,” love which yearns over sinners while at the same time refusing to condone their sin. How, then, could God express his holy love—his love in forgiving sinners without compromising his holiness, and his holiness in judging sinners without frustrating his love? Confronted by human evil, how could God be true to himself as holy love? In Isaiah’s words, how could he be simultaneously “a righteous God and a Savior” (Is 45:21)? For despite the truth that God demonstrated his righteousness by taking action to save his people, the words righteousness and salvation cannot be regarded as simple synonyms. Rather his saving initiative was compatible with, and expressive of, his righteousness. At the cross in holy love God through Christ paid the full penalty of our disobedience himself. He bore the judgment we deserve in order to bring us the forgiveness we do not deserve. On the cross divine mercy and justice were equally expressed and eternally reconciled. God’s holy love was “satisfied.” The Cross of Christ. Pg 95

How is it possible to become holy? We have seen how Paul describes the Christian’s inner conflict between ‘the flesh’ and ‘the Spirit’ and the way of victory through the ascendancy of the Spirit over the flesh. Those who belong to Christ, he says, ‘have crucified the flesh’, totally rejecting its evil ‘passions and desires’ (5:24). This is part of our repentance. It took place at our conversion, but we need to remember and renew it daily. Christ’s people also seek to be ‘led by the Spirit’ (5:18), to follow His ‘line’ (5:25) and sow in His ‘field’ (6:8), by disciplined habits of thinking and living, so that His ‘fruit’ will appear and ripen in our lives. This is the Christian way of holiness. The last verse of the Epistle is a fitting conclusion: ‘The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ be with your spirit’ (6:18). F

Matthew 5:10–12 (MSM): How did Jesus expect his disciples to react under persecution? Verse 12: Rejoice and be glad! We are not to retaliate like an unbeliever, nor to sulk like a child, nor to lick our wounds in self-pity like a dog, nor just to grin and bear it like a Stoic, still less to pretend we enjoy it like a masochist. What then? We are to rejoice as a Christian should rejoice and even to ‘leap for joy’. Why so? Partly because, Jesus added, your reward is great in heaven (12a). We may lose everything on earth, but we shall inherit everything in heaven—not as a reward for merit, however, because ‘the promise of the reward is free’. Partly because persecution is a token of genuineness, a certificate of Christian authenticity, for so men persecuted the prophets who were before you (12b). If we are persecuted today, we belong to a noble succession. But the major reason why we should rejoice is because we are suffering, he said, on my account (11), on account of our loyalty to him and to his standards of truth and righteousness. Certainly the apostles learnt this lesson well for, having been beaten and threatened by the Sanhedrin, ‘they left the presence of the council, rejoicing that they were counted worthy to suffer dishonour for the name’. They knew, as we should, that ‘wounds and hurts are medals of honour’.

We must, therefore, hold fast to the biblical revelation of the living God who hates evil, is disgusted and angered by it, and refuses ever to come to terms with it. In consequence, we may be sure that when he searched in his mercy for some way to forgive, cleanse and accept evil-doers, it was not along the road of moral compromise. It had to be a way that was equally expressive of his love and of his wrath. As Brunner put it, “where the idea of the wrath of God is ignored, there also will there be no understanding of the central conception of the Gospel: the uniqueness of the revelation in the Mediator.” Similarly, “only he who knows the greatness of wrath will be mastered by the greatness of mercy.” All inadequate doctrines of the atonement are due to inadequate doctrines of God and humanity. If we bring God down to our level and raise ourselves to his, then of course we see no need for a radical salvation, let alone for a radical atonement to secure it. When, on the other hand, we have glimpsed the blinding glory of the holiness of God and have been so convicted of our sin by the Holy Spirit that we tremble before God and acknowledge what we are, namely “hell-deserving sinners,” then and only then does the necessity of the cross appear so obvious that we are astonished we never saw it before.

we have a responsibility to grapple with Christ’s teaching, its perplexities and problems, seeking to understand it and to relate it to our own situation. But ultimately the question which faces the church is very simple: is Jesus Christ Lord or not? And if he is Lord, is he Lord of all? The lordship of Jesus must be allowed to extend over every aspect of the lives of those who claim that ‘Jesus is Lord’, including their minds and their wills. Why should these be excluded from his otherwise universal dominion? No-one is truly converted who is not intellectually and morally converted. And no-one is intellectually converted if they have not submitted their mind to the mind of the Lord Christ, nor morally converted if they have not submitted their will to the will of the Lord Christ. The thing is that such submission is not bondage but freedom—freedom from the inconsistencies of self, the fashions of the world and the trends of the church. It spells freedom from the shifting sands of subjectivity, freedom to exercise our minds and our wills as God intended them to be exercised, not in rebellion against him but in submission to him. I do not hesitate to say that these are the kind of people Jesus Christ is looking for in the church today, people who will take him seriously as their Teacher and Lord, not paying lip-service to these titles (‘Why do you call me, “Lord, Lord,” and do not do what I say?’), but actually taking his yoke upon them, in order to learn from him and to ‘take captive every thought to make it obedient to Christ’.

1 John 1:9 (TNTC 1-3 Jn): The proper Christian attitude to sin is not to deny it but to admit it, and then to receive the forgiveness which God has made possible and promises to us. If we confess our sins, acknowledging before God that we are sinners not only by nature (sin) but by practice also (our sins), God will both forgive us our sins and purify us from all unrighteousness. In the first phrase sin is a debt which he remits and in the second a stain which he removes. In both he is said to be faithful and just. The first word may mean that he is faithful to his nature and character (cf. 2 Tim. 2:13). But the faithfulness of God in Scripture is constantly associated with his covenant promises (e.g. Ps. 89; Heb. 10:23). He is true to his word and faithful to his covenant. Since the new covenant includes the pledge, ‘I will forgive their wickedness and will remember their sins no more’ (Jer. 31:34), it is not difficult to see why God is said to be ‘faithful’ in forgiving our sins. But how can he also be described as just when he forgives us our sins? Some commentators relate God’s justice to his faithfulness and suggest that it is by being faithful to his promises that God is just to forgive. Even so it is a strange adjective to use. Justice is associated in our minds with punishment or acquittal, not with forgiveness. If God visits upon the sinner his sin and ‘does not leave the guilty unpunished’ (Exod. 34:7), how can he forgive sins? This is the divine dilemma. The Judge of all the earth cannot lightly remit sin. The cross is, in fact, the only moral ground on which he can forgive sin at all, for there the blood of Jesus his Son was shed that he might be ‘the atoning sacrifice for our sins’ (2:2). Cf. Romans 3:25, another passage in which the justice of God is related to the atoning sacrifice of Christ. So we may say that in forgiving our sins and cleansing us from them, God displays loyalty to his covenant—his faithfulness because of the word which initiated it and his justice because of the deed which ratified it. More simply, he is faithful to forgive because he has promised to do so, and just because his Son died for our sins. John Stott Letters to John. 1988 .

We believe that Jesus still calls some people (perhaps even us) to follow him in a lifestyle of total, voluntary poverty. He calls all his followers to an inner freedom from the seduction of riches (for it is impossible to serve God and money) and to sacrificial generosity (‘to be rich in good works, to be generous and ready to share’, 1 Timothy 6:18). Indeed, the motivation and model for Christian generosity are nothing less than the example of Jesus Christ himself who, though rich, became poor that through his poverty we might become rich (2 Corinthians 8:9). It was a costly, purposeful self-sacrifice; we mean to seek his grace to follow him. We resolve to get to know poor and oppressed people, to learn issues of injustice from them, to seek to relieve their suffering, and to include them regularly in our prayers.

The second picture is that of distance. God is not only “high above” us but “far away” from us. We dare not approach too close. Indeed, many are the biblical injunctions to keep our distance. “Do not come any closer,” God said to Moses out of the burning bush. So it was that the arrangements for Israel’s worship expressed the complementary truths of his nearness to them because of his covenant and his separation from them because of his holiness. Even as he came down to them at Mount Sinai to reveal himself to them, he told Moses to put limits for the people around the base of the mountain and to urge them not to come near. Similarly, when God gave instructions for the building of the tabernacle (and later the temple), he both promised to live among his people and yet warned them to erect a curtain before the inner sanctuary as a permanent sign that he was out of reach to sinners. Nobody was permitted to penetrate the veil, on pain of death, except the high priest, and then only once a year on the Day of Atonement, and then only if he took with him the blood of sacrifice. And when the Israelites were about to cross the Jordan into the Promised Land, they were given this precise command: “Keep a distance of about a thousand yards between you and the ark; do not go near it” (Josh 3:4). It is against the background of this plain teaching about God’s holiness and about the perils of presumption that the story of Uzzah’s death must be understood. When the oxen carrying the ark stumbled, he reached out and took hold of it. But “the Lord’s anger burned against Uzzah because of his irreverent act,” and he died. Commentators tend to protest at this “primitive” Old Testament understanding of God’s wrath as “fundamentally an irrational and in the last resort inexplicable thing which broke out with enigmatic, mysterious and primal force” and which bordered closely on “caprice.” But no, there is nothing inexplicable about God’s wrath: its explanation is always the presence of evil in some form or other. Sinners cannot approach the all-holy God with impunity. On the last day, those who have not found refuge and cleansing in Christ will hear those most terrible of all words: “Depart from me” (e.g., Mt 7:23; 25:41). John Stott. The Cross of Christ.

I move on now to some Christian biographies, and I begin with that great early-church father, Augustine of Hippo. He was born in North Africa (in what we now call Algeria) in the middle of the fourth century. Already in his teens he was leading a dissolute, even promiscuous, life, enslaved by his passions. He wrote in his Confessions: Clouds of muddy carnal concupiscence filled the air. The bubbling impulses of puberty befogged and obscured my heart so that it could not see the difference between love’s serenity and lust’s darkness. Confusion of the two things boiled within me. It seized hold of my youthful weakness sweeping me through the precipitous rocks of desire to submerge me in a whirlpool of vice. Even while half-drowned in sin, Augustine also plunged into study, and his studies took him first to Carthage, and then to Rome and to Milan. A great tug of war was going on in his mind between Christianity (which at this time he rejected) and Manicheism (which he had embraced). In this turmoil of moral shame and intellectual confusion he found himself in utter misery. Yet, through his inner restlessness of mind and conscience, as also through the prayers and tears of his saintly mother Monica, and through the kindly admonitions of Bishop Ambrose of Milan, Jesus Christ was surely pursuing him. As with Saul of Tarsus, so with Augustine of Hippo, the climax came suddenly. He went out into the garden attached to his lodgings, accompanied by his friend Alypius. He threw himself down under a tree and let his tears flow freely, as he cried out, ‘How long, O Lord?’ As I was saying this and weeping in the bitter agony of my heart, suddenly I heard a voice from the nearby house chanting as if it might be a boy or a girl (I do not know which), saying and repeating over and over again, ‘pick up and read, pick up and read …’ I checked the flood of tears and stood up. I interpreted it solely as a divine command to me to open the book and read the first chapter I might find … So I hurried back to the place where Alypius was sitting. There I had put down the book of the apostle when I got up. I seized it, opened it and in silence read the first passage on which my eyes lit: ‘Not in riots and drunken parties, not in eroticism and indecencies, not in strife and rivalry, but put on the Lord Jesus Christ and make no provision for the flesh in its lusts’ (Romans 13:13–14). I neither wished nor needed to read further. At once, with the last words of this sentence, it was as if a light of relief from all anxiety flooded into my heart. All the shadows of doubt were dispelled. Augustine attributed his experience to the sheer grace, that is, the free and unmerited favour, of God. He claimed that God had quickened all five of his spiritual senses—hearing, sight, smell, taste and touch: You called and cried out loud and shattered my deafness. You were radiant and resplendent, you put to flight my blindness. You were fragrant, and I drew in my breath and now pant after you. I tasted you, and I feel but hunger and thirst for you. You touched me, and I am set on fire to attain the peace which is yours. Stott. Why I am a Christian.