THE COST OF FORGIVENESS

Heinrich Heine (1797-1856) on his death bed said, “The good God will forgive me, that’s his job.” This cheap understanding of forgiveness flies in the face of the holiness of God and the cost of the atonement.

The essence of the cross being ‘self-satisfaction by self-substitution’ cannot be understood without appreciating, and taking seriously, the nature of God as holy love. Forgiveness of sins required satisfaction. The sacrificial system of the Tabernacle and Temple worship in the Old Testament witnessed to the gravity of sin and the costly nature of forgiveness. At the very heart of the church’s worship is this realization.

Emil Brunner, in his famous book, The Mediator, describes the inviolability of the moral order of the universe. Sin is more than ‘an attack on God’s honor’, he wrote; it is an assault on the moral world order which is an expression of God’s moral will.

“The law of his divine Being, on which all the law and order in the world is based….the logical and reliable character of all that happens, the validity of all standards, of all intellectual, legal and moral order, the Law itself, in its most profound meaning, demands the divine reaction, the divine concern about sin, the divine resistance to this rebellion and this breach of order…If this were not true, then there would be no seriousness in the world at all; there would be no meaning in anything, no order, no stability; the world order would fall into ruins, chaos and desolation would be supreme. All order in the world depends on the inviolability of his (sc. God’s) honor, upon the certitude that those who rebel against him will be punished.”

Sin has caused ‘a break in the world order’, a disorder so deep-seated that reparation or restitution is necessary, that is, ‘Atonement’. The two complementary truths about God are brought together: God as Holy and Righteous, and God as Loving and Merciful, as if to remind us that we must beware of speaking of one aspect of God’s character without remembering its counterpart.

Brunner in The Mediator did not hesitate to write of God’s ‘dual nature’ as ‘the central mystery of the Christian revelation.’ For ‘God is not simply Love. The nature of God cannot be exhaustively stated in one single word’. Indeed, modern opposition to forensic language in relation to the cross is mainly ‘due to the fact that the idea of the Divine Holiness has been swallowed up in that of the Divine Love; this means that the biblical idea of God, in which the decisive element is this twofold nature of holiness and love, is being replaced by the modern, unilateral, monistic idea of God’. Yet ‘the dualism of holiness and love….or mercy and wrath cannot be dissolved, changed into one synthetic conception, without at the same time destroying the seriousness of the biblical knowledge of God, the reality and the mystery of revelation and atonement…..So then, the cross of Christ ‘is the event in which God makes known his holiness and his love simultaneously, in one event, in an absolute manner. The cross is the only place where the loving, forgiving, merciful God is revealed in such a way that we perceive that his holiness and his love are equally infinite’. In fact, ‘the objective aspect of the atonement…may be summed up thus: it consists in the combination of inflexible righteousness, with its penalties, and transcendent love.

This vision of God’s holy love will deliver us from caricatures of him. We must picture him neither as an indulgent God who compromises his holiness in order to spare and spoil us, nor as a harsh and vindictive God who suppresses his love in order to crush and destroy us. How then can God express his holiness without consuming us, and his love without condoning our sins? How can God satisfy his holy love? How can he save us and satisfy himself simultaneously? We reply at this point only that, in order to satisfy himself, he sacrificed – indeed substituted – himself for us.’

(Extract from Ted Schroder, John Stott: A Summary of his teaching, chapter 5, The Cross)