The Person of God No.1 Gods Forgiveness

Well, welcome, glad to have you all with us this morning, looking to the Lord for his blessing to be upon us as we meet to worship him. The Old Testament, as I've often told you from this pulpit, the concept of worship was always a very attractive thing. I very much doubt whether we appreciate just how free and spontaneous and also how enthusiastic worship was, particularly in the temple, perhaps not so much in the synagogues, but definitely at the temple, when the Hebrews use those occasions of gathering together as holidays.

So a holiday is basically a religious festival. It's got its basis in Christianity and in the Old Testament. A holy day, a holiday, and they look forward to going to the temple.

Well, number 64 in the supplement actually takes that concept of enthusiasm of God's people in Old Testament times. It suggests that we too might have that same degree of attraction to coming to the house of God and worshipping him. So let's enjoy singing How Pleased and Blessed Was I, 64.

In your Bibles, will you turn to Matthew chapter 18 and verse 21. At the beginning of the chapter, the disciples came to Jesus and asked about who is greatest in the kingdom of heaven, and Jesus gives them some illustrations and some teaching. Then in verse 21, then Peter came to Jesus and asked, Lord, how many times shall I forgive my brother when he sins against me, up to seven times? Jesus answered, I tell you not seven times, but seventy-seven times.

Therefore the kingdom of God is like a king who wanted to settle accounts with his servants. As he began the settlement, a man who owed him 10,000 talents was brought to him. Since he was not able to pay, the master ordered that he and his wife and his children and all that he had be sold to repay the debt.

The servant fell on his knees before him. Be patient with me, he begged, and I will pay back everything. The servant's master took pity on him, cancelled the debt and let him go.

But when that servant went out, he found one of his fellow servants who owed him a hundred denarii. He grabbed him and began to choke him. Pay back what you owe me, he demanded.

His fellow servant fell to his knees and begged him, be patient with me and I will pay you back. But he refused. Instead, he went off and had the man thrown into prison until he could pay the debt.

When the other servants saw what had happened, they were greatly distressed and went and told their master everything that had happened. Then the master called the servant in. You, wicked servant, he said, I cancelled all that debt of yours because you begged me to.

Shouldn't you have had mercy on your fellow servant just as I had on you? In anger, his master turned him over to the jailers to be tortured until he should pay back all he owed. This is how my heavenly father will treat each of you unless you forgive your brother from your heart. Let's turn the word to the Word of God again and to the book of Psalms.

Here is the hundred and thirtieth Psalm and a couple of wonderful verses. The second and the, or rather the third and the fourth verses of Psalm 130. If you, O Lord, kept a record of sins, O Lord, who could stand? But you, with you there is forgiveness.

Therefore, you are feared. Let's move on to Matthew's Gospel in chapter 6. And here you find the teaching of our Lord on the sermon, in the Sermon on the Mount. And he speaks to the disciples of the way that they should address God in prayer.

And he gives us the Lord's Prayer. This is from the ninth verse of Matthew 6. But it concludes with our Lord's comments, our Lord's applicatory remarks about that prayer. For if you forgive men, this is verse 14, when they sin against you, your heavenly Father will also forgive you.

But if you do not forgive men their sins, your Father will not forgive your sins. And then here is our Lord on that tremendous day when he offered his life for us in the 23rd chapter of the Gospel of Luke. You find these sacred words when our Lord Jesus Christ is almost at the point of expiring.

Luke 23 and verse 34. I pick up the context from the 32nd verse. Two other men, both criminals, were also led out with him, the Lord Jesus, to be executed.

When they came to the place called the Skull there, they crucified him along with the criminals. One on his right, the other on his left. Jesus said, Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they're doing.

And they divided up his clothes by casting lots. Forgiveness. If you recorded iniquity, Lord, no one could stand.

Lord, you forgive me and I will forgive others. Lord Jesus, we hear from your parched lips that final prayer that we who contributed to your death might not bear the consequences of that crime, but rather we might be forgiven. I guess my thinking in this area was triggered on a number of counts, but particularly the presence of the Emperor of Japan, the successor, the son of the Emperor, who was one of the most three infamous men in the last world war, ranking alongside Hitler and Mussolini.

And the picture two weeks back of men who, and women, who had been so cruelly treated by the Japanese in prisoners of war camps. And time and time again, the media here, but not in Asia, focused in on these men, on these women, as they asked for an apology to be made. And said that without that apology, they found it would be very difficult, really, to forgive.

And I thought about this whole concept of Christian forgiveness. You see, earlier this year, I was teaching in the services prior to Easter week, and took up the theme a little later on, that if there's one thing that is a characteristic, the outstanding characteristic of Christianity, it is that Christianity is the religion of the forgiven. The very idea of Jesus Christ bearing the consequences of your sins on the cross, to make your pardon possible, in Islamic theology, is blasphemy.

So the Islamicists, the Muslims, have actually rewritten the Bible in this area, because there are certain aspects of the Bible they agree to. And there are certain parts of the teaching of our Lord that they would cling on to as much as you or me. They certainly would not allow him to be blasphemed.

But the idea that the Lord Jesus should die on the cross, that God somehow should be satisfied with his death in terms of meeting the demands of our sin, that this is the way that forgiveness comes about, that to them is anathema. Christianity is a religion of the forgiven. In fact, the only common denominator that we have in this church is that we are forgiven people.

You want to know how to become a member of Worthingtab, the bottom line, we want to know that you have asked the Lord Jesus to forgive you for what you have done that is wrong. Now, because we are forgiven people, we are also forgivers. That means that over against anyone else, and I'm not saying that there aren't other categories within the human race that don't fulfill this requirement at all, but as far as Christian people are concerned, the desire to forgive is what indicates the genuineness of their walk with God.

You cannot be a Christian and fail to be a forgiver. Listen to this. I was reading this quite late last evening.

This is my old mentor, Martin Lloyd-Jones, and he's preaching in London and here's a transcript of what he had to say on one occasion. He's dealing with the love of God and how you can test that a person has received the love of God. And it's quite striking that he who was so strong on orthodoxy in terms of creedal statements makes this concession.

I do not hesitate therefore to say that the ultimate test of our profession of the Christian faith is, I believe, this whole question of our loving one another. Indeed, I do not hesitate to aver that it is a more vital test than our orthodoxy. I am the last man in the world to say anything against orthodoxy, but I am here to say that it is not the final test.

Orthodoxy is absolutely essential. The letter of John shows us this repeatedly. We must believe the right things, for apart from that we have nothing at all and we have no standing whatsoever.

So the correctness of belief is absolutely essential. And yet I say that when we come to the realm of experience and self-examination, the test of orthodoxy is not the ultimate test. What does he mean? Well, to understand the Christian doctrine of forgiveness in itself is not the most important thing.

It's where you go from there. It's not what you receive from this pulpit. I hesitate to say this, it's not even what you receive at the cerebral, the intellectual level from the Word of God.

It's the way that that triggers you into working through your belief. Now, this is nothing new. This is no sensational teaching.

This is the Lord's Prayer. Forgive us our sins as we forgive those who sin against us. Which leads me to make a statement, or at least to quote a statement and break it into two propositions.

Forgiveness is to us the plainest of duties. To God it is the profoundest of problems. Listen again.

Forgiveness is to us, you, me, the plainest of duties. For God it is the profoundest of problems. I'll pick up on the last bit and extend in just a moment or two, but let me satisfy you with this at this point.

One problem that God has with forgiveness is that he doesn't need to be forgiven. That's why forgiveness is a problem to God. But one of the things that is a common denominator, as I've just argued as far as we're concerned, is that we all have been forgiven.

That's what binds us together. So the plainest duty of the Christian is to forgive one another. It was Shakespeare who said to her, as human, to forgive divine.

He was wrong. It should really be, well, not quite the other way around, but it needs qualifying. To forgive should be human.

In other words, natural to you should be a capacity to say to others who have done you wrong, it does not really matter. I accept that you are sorry and I am privileged to forgive you. The Christian's duty to forgive is, as I've just argued, the test of our orthodoxy.

It's not just the test of our orthodoxy, it's a recognition of our frailty. We have done those things we ought not to have done. We have left undone those things we should have done.

Straight from the Book of Common Prayer, it wasn't any unique statement of mine in my prayers earlier on. Think it through. It's a bit of a conundrum.

But when you have grasped what it's saying, then you have to identify with it. You are frail. You have done wrong.

The degrees of wrongdoing may vary. We've all fallen short of what God intended for us. I go further.

We've all fallen short of what other people expected us to do. Every yardstick has been broken at some level in action or in thought, which means that we all desperately do need to be forgotten. So, the parable that Tony read to us so clearly from our beloved Lord, I don't take time to expand it, at least not in any detail.

Here you've got a man who was in tremendous debt and therefore as a consequence in great trouble. And he's forgiven. He's forgiven on the basis, well, unless you forgive me, then I go to jail, my family are in difficulty, and the whole of our family connections are blighted by the debt that I have incurred.

And the debt was colossal. And equal to the colossal amount of the debt was the nature of the forgiveness. The man is allowed to go free.

And then he comes along someone who owes him something and the statistics are appalling. I mean by that it's miserly. We're talking about pence.

I was with a Christian financier on Friday. A man who must live, I would think, and mix with people the like of whom I only read about. Now, it was in that area of debt, debted to a multi-millionaire, that this man has been forgiven so much, but here comes some unfortunate guy who owes him a few pence.

And he refuses to be merciful. And our Lord in the teaching has this man who refuses to show the same mercy as he has received. Well, he's pushed out of the kingdom.

He suffers for the consequences of his first debt. You see, that the test of your forgiveness is not theological. Now, I wouldn't be doing what I'm intending to do in a few months time if I didn't believe in the importance of theology.

It's got its limits. It's got to trigger you into something beyond mere words. The world is fed up of words.

I mean, Murdoch can turn words out by the millions, and the Times, and the Mirror, and rather the Sun, and all the other groups that he controls. So does the media. This world is fed up of words.

It's not words that they want to hear. It's something that's a little bit more practical down to earth. So here we are.

We are the forgiven people, and therefore it is natural to us to forgive. Especially if we're Christian. What's more, it's the secret of our power.

The man, the woman who is a forgiver, is a very powerful person. Remember our Lord's metaphor about heaping coals of fire on someone's head? In one sense, for someone who is not seeking to be forgiven, to be forgiven can annoy them. You ever notice that? You know, here they were expecting to get a real telling-off, and instead of that, they got an embrace.

Instead of a harsh response, there was a soft answer, and the person concerned who received it found it hard to cope with. I blush at a lot of things my generation has done. I used to think when I was a kid back in the north of England that it was the previous generation that had got everything wrong, you know, that were really the reasons for the First and the Second World War.

Then I think what's happened in my own lifetime, and I realized that I have to apply the same criterion to myself as I did to the previous generation. One of the things I am ashamed about is the Vietnam War. I never have understood the Vietnam War and the overkill, the bombs that were dropped, that have damaged the ecology of that part of Asia, not only for our generation, but for generations to come.

But from that Vietnam War has come one of the most remarkable illustrations of forgiveness. Do you remember, some of you are old enough to, the picture of that naked little girl who was running away from her village? It showed the power of the camera. They got this shot of this little lass.

She couldn't have been more than nine or ten years of age, her skin burnt away by napalm. And later on, because of the miracle of modern methods of photography and filming and what have you, it was possible to work out who was responsible for the dropping of those bombs. And that poor American, he had this on his mind for years.

It drove him into alcoholism. I mean, he of all people realized that the cause of the bombs that had been dropped, that he'd allowed, had been registered internationally by the picture of this girl. And in God's grace, she came to know the Lord Jesus as Saviour.

Within the last couple of years, she was in the United States at a meeting of the American military. It was a sort of all boys get together as far as I can gather. And they were talking about what happened in Vietnam.

And she identified the man who had given permission for those bombs to be dropped that hit her village. She went to see him. He, by this time, too, had become a Christian.

And the media captured it. One of the most moving documentaries I ever saw in my life, as documentaries sometimes can be good, was the meeting of these two people, embracing one another. The one had forgiven, and the other was the one who had received the forgiveness.

It was one of the most wonderful moments, I think, historically in this century. The ability to forgive. Tremendous power in having a forgiving attitude.

Someone has said, Christians find it cheaper to pardon than to resent. Forgiveness saves us the expense of anger, the cost of hatred, the waste of energy. Confession's good for the soul.

Twenty-three years ago, I walked the beach from Worthing through to Little Hampton. Someone here who, not here now, with the Lord. Why, I thought, in their attitude towards me, towards the church, was somewhat acid, to say the least.

I felt it so unfair and so unjust. I felt within my spirit a resentment building up, and I needed to deal with it. I'm not telling this story so that I'll stand out as a goody.

I was ashamed that I even had that resentment, but it was there, and it was there for a long time. And then suddenly, as sometimes is the case, the boil burst, and in the presence of God, all the sort of hurt and the malevolent thinking on my part towards this individual came out, and I went back to the person concerned. It's not a story that is happy ever afterwards.

I'm not too sure that it actually changed the relationship as far as the individual was concerned and the church, but it changed mine. There's such a liberty, isn't there? Such a freedom. When you're honestly able to say, before a person, before God, I forgive.

Now, the basis of that forgiveness was really this whole question of God's largesse. You have forgiven me all that, and yet I've got this little bit of resentment. This is the practicality of forgiveness.

Lloyd-Jones again, the Christian is a man who believes he is going to look into the face of Christ. And when that great morning comes, when he looks into the face of one who endured the cruel cross for him in spite of his vileness, he does not want to remember as he looks into those eyes that he refused to forgive someone while he was here on earth, or that he did not love that other person but despised and hated him, and did everything he could against him. He does not want to be reminded of things like that.

Brothers and sisters, let us be part of that Christian community of the forgiven. Forgiveness, as Dick Lucas forms the church. Well, it's the Christian's plainest duty.

But having said that, and consider that nothing superficially seems simpler than forgiveness, actually when we look at it more deeply, it's one of the most mysterious and difficult things to understand in terms of God. You see, if it's our greatest duty, our plainest duty, it's the Lord's greatest problem. Why? Well, think it through.

Now, you may think this is a bit tortuous, but you're never really going to benefit from the cross in all its fullness, not that you ever will by my persuasion, but at least it can be deepened, unless you can understand now what I'm going to say about God and the difficulty that God has in forgiving. You see, your problem with God is the same as mine. You look on him in a sort of anthropomorphic way, which means to say you look on God as though he's just someone like us, but glorified.

But he's not just like us. You see, in this area of forgiveness, he doesn't need to ask your forgiveness. He never did anything that was wrong.

Now, it's very easy to misunderstand God by saying God is love. He is love, but that's not enough. God is holy love, and the way that he handles your sin has an effect on who he is.

If he's just love and can push away sin as though it doesn't matter, when actually sin is an offence against him, then what happens to the concept of the holiness of God? What happens to the concept of the law of God? Because the standards that God gives are actually standards that flow from him, from his character. He wants purity. He wants perfection.

What sort of God have you and I got? Sometimes I don't think we have a conception of the God that is declared in the Bible. Listen to Isaiah as he tells us about the God who is. He says in the 21st verse of Isaiah 45, declare what is to be, present it, let them take counsel together.

Who foretold this long ago? Who declared it from the distant past? Now, here's the punchline. Was it not I the Lord? Who is God? There is no God apart from me, a righteous God and a Savior. There is none but me.

He's not any old God. He's a righteous God. There are four things that you need to know about God which will revolutionize your understanding.

I dare to suggest of the cross and all that happened that I'll be touching on this evening in terms of the death of our beloved Lord Jesus and the pardon that he brought as a result of his substitutionary offering. Four things you need to know about God. First of all, God is the Most High.

He is the Most High God. Time and time again in Scripture you get this reference to God as the Most High. Here is Melchizedek and he's coming to Abraham and he's going to bring gifts.

Abraham is going to give gifts to the King of Sodom. Verse 22 of Genesis 14, Abraham said to the King of Sodom, I have raised my hand to the Lord God Most High, Creator of heaven and earth, and have taken an oath that I will accept nothing belonging to you, not even a thread or the thong of a sandal, so that you will never be able to say I made Abraham rich. And Melchizedek's opening comment to Abraham was this, Blessed be Abraham by God Most High, Creator of heaven and earth, and blessed be God Most High.

It's that point, high, high, high. You get it, H-I-G-H. Not the American high saying hello.

We're talking, if you like, literally of altitude. God is the Most High. But it's not the literal point that is being made.

It's the otherness of God. God is the Most High, the Exalted One. You can't get higher than God is.

God is the Most High who dismisses the arrogant and the haughty. You dwell in the high and holy place, but with Him who is of a humble and a contrite spirit. God is His Royal Highness.

Not the Prince of Wales, not with respect, not even the Queen of England. God is His Royal Highness. But God is not only the Most High, He is the Most Distant.

Remember I told you a little while ago, with human in my objective, of a, of a, of a, of a, of a, of a, of a, of a roadworks in Sheffield, where they got the, notice of danger men at work. And I said on this particular occasion, you'd have to have great ingenuity to recognise that the, notice of any reflection on what was happening down the tram track, because two were on the shovel and one was digging. But, but when you come to the Bible, what you get are notices so to speak.

The danger, God at work. Moses, take the shoes from off your feet. You're on holy ground.

Distance yourself from this revelation of me. That's Exodus 3. If you go to Exodus 19, here is Moses and he's on Mount Sinai. Moses, you can come up, but not the rest.

Put a border up. Put a fence up. Stop people coming up Mount Sinai.

Why? Because I'm the most high God. I'm the holy other. It's unsafe, Moses, for people to be in my presence in a condition of unconfessed sin.

Uzzah pushes out, puts out his hand and he stays the ark and he dies. As a result, the holiness of God affects him and it's a fatal blow and critics come along and say this is the capriciousness of God in the Old Testament. It's not at all.

There's nothing capricious about the anger of God in the Old Testament. It's a controlled anger. Jesus, when he speaks about God, his Father, and when he speaks about righteousness and judgment, he speaks of a time when he will come and his language is far more apocalyptic and far more frightening than anything in the Old Testament when people will say to the rocks, fall on me.

Depart from me. I cannot be in your presence. Who told you this about God? The most high, the most distant, the most brilliant.

God is a God of light and fire. Both inhibit a close approach. God is light.

In him is no darkness at all. Our God is a consuming fire, says the writer of the Hebrew epistle. God lives in unapproachable light, in light inaccessible, hid from our eyes.

No one can see God and live. Even Moses can only see the back parts of God and the transfiguration mount when the glory of God irradiates our Lord Jesus. Peter, James, and John are prevented from seeing the most intimate and its most intense because of the cloud that falls.

No one can see God and live. God is the most high, God is the most distant, God is the most brilliant. Now listen for something that's very difficult.

God is the most discriminant. Why it's difficult is because of the language that scripture uses, which you won't believe, but it's there. God has a delicate palate.

It's God who says to the Israelites, when you come into the land, the land of Israel that I will give you, the land that I gave, that I pledged to Abraham, if you behave like the Canaanites behaved, I will vomit you out of the land. He doesn't say that once, he doesn't say it twice, he says it several times. And our Lord Jesus Christ, when he speaks about those who don't make it into the kingdom, when he talks about those who are fast and loose, neither hot nor cold, he talks about spewing them out of his mouth.

This is Jesus in Revelation. Now put all that together and you get a God that is not completely fashionable in evangelicalism. God cannot operate in or tolerate or digest evil.

That's basically what it's saying. This is our God. He cannot digest evil.

He's the most high God. He's the most distant God. He's the most brilliant God.

He's the most discriminant God. Now you see the difficulty. QED, quadrat demonstrandum, what I set out to prove, I've now declared in front of you.

Your plainest duty is forgiveness. God's greatest problem is forgiveness. How does he remain God, a holy, loving God and forgive? And there was a man by the name of Anselm, my hero, at least one of my heroes from church history, Bishop Anselm.

He wrote a book in the Latin tongue called Cur Deus Homo, brilliant book, still available today in an English translation. But you'll need to work hard at it to get the juice and the nourishment that's in his writings. Why did God become man? And Anselm answers that God has to become man so that as the representative of man, but with a divine nature, he can do for man what no one else can do.

He can stand in the presence of God as a substitute for man's sin so that the holiness of God shall remain unimpaired so that his impeccable law will remain as it is the greatest disclosure for human conduct that there has ever been, that there can ever be. Now, you see, some of you were discomfited when I spelt out the doctrine of God in terms of him being most high, most distant, most brilliant and most discriminant. But you see, when you've got that firmly in mind, it helps you to appreciate more what happened to the cross.

The most high God is made accessible. The most distant God comes near. The discriminatory nature of God is such now that seeing you through the cross of his son, seeing you through the blood of Christ, you become acceptable to him.

And the light of God's glory and the fire of his power can be something on which you can feast your eyes, something which will stimulate you into service, to work for him. You see, when you have a true understanding of who God is, then you begin to get a true understanding of what happened at the cross. The cross of the cross where I first saw the light and the burden of my sin rolled away.

It was there by faith I received my sight. And I'm happy all the day. The wrong side of the cross.

God is fearful. You see, the problem is as evangelicals, we go too quickly by the cross. To quote a Puritan, we heal ourselves too quickly.

We don't do what Watts did when I survey. I called a dear friend yesterday. And she said, Will you call again? I said, Why? She said, We've got the surveyor at our home.

Two hours they needed for the surveyor to disclose what he had to say. When did we last spend two hours at the cross? Realizing that the most high God has been satisfied in terms of some atonement made for our sins by the death of his son. How often have we realized this through the cross? That God comes nigh just as I am without one plea, but that thy blood was shed for me and that thou bidst me come to thee.

O Lamb of God, I come. Remember the words of Dr. Graham, God says, on the cross there's no one else. This is why it's desperately necessary to take the message of the cross to the Islamic world and to the Hindu world.

This God has dealt with sin and has become a forgiving, a pardoning God. But it was, I speak with reverence, it was difficult for God so to do because it cost him the death of the Lord Jesus Christ. That was the solution.

It pleased God to allow his son to come into the world as it pleased him for preachers to take up this message and placard it throughout the centuries and around the globe. That this holy, pure God, this God who is higher than you will ever be able to comprehend, this distant God, this holy God will relate to you, will do away with your sin, will press the delete button. All you need a greater understanding of God to understand the cross.

And the more you start with a majesty of God, the more you'll appreciate what the Lord Jesus has done. It's not just a question of he died for me, the just for the unjust. That's right, of course.

On a hill far away stood an old rugged cross, the emblem of sorrow and shame. These hymns, they're wonderful. They take the simplest, simple aspects of the cross and they not allow us to sing it.

But behind that cross is the majesty of God. And when you come to the cross like that, not only does it heighten your appreciation of what Jesus Christ has done for you, it enables you to sing, praise my soul, the King of heaven, who like me his praise should bring. Ransomed, healed, restored, forgiven.

So those great hymns go on. Let's stop, we've had enough this morning. This evening I talked to you about the pardon of our Lord Jesus, the pardon that he offers you and me, and take up where I've left off.

This is one of my favorite hymns because it packs the punch and tells us of the greatness and the grandeur of God. And over against that we can respond to his love. Sing again with what we'll crowd thy gates with thankful songs, high as the heavens our voices raise, and earth with her ten thousand tongues shall fill thy courts with sounding praise.