Do You Need to Forgive God?

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Do You Need to Forgive God?

November 11, 2024

Questions about whether we ever need to forgive God in order to heal our emotions, whether it’s unbiblical to tell someone he needs to forgive himself, why poor people were allowed to offer a flour sacrifice without blood, and whether it’s wrong to call out one another’s sins.

* Is it true that sometimes we need to forgive God in order to heal our emotions?

* Is it unbiblical advice to tell someone he needs to forgive himself?

* If there is no forgiveness without the shedding of blood, why were poor people allowed to offer flour as a sin offering in Leviticus 5?

* What would you say to a pastor who said we should let the Holy Spirit change people and not call out one another’s sins?

Transcript

This is Stand to Reason's hashtag STRask Podcast with Amy Hall and Greg Koukl. And this is a show where we depend on your questions. So make sure you send us your questions on X with the hashtag STRask.

Or you can go to our website at str.org. Just look for our hashtag STRask page. And what we are looking for is a short question. So just make sure it's just a couple sentences long.

It should be about the length of a tweet. I'm not so careful that I make sure it's exactly that size, but it should just be a couple sentences. So Greg, today we have some questions about forgiveness.

So here is the first question from Pam. I've heard that in order to heal our emotions, we need to forgive God. What will be the theological argument for or against it? There is no theological argument for forgiving God.

You forgive those who wronged you. God hasn't wronged anybody. I have actually never heard that before.

I've heard people say you've got to forgive yourself. And I think that in a certain sense, somewhat odd, but nevertheless I kind of understand from an emotional perspective what may be going on there. But forgive God for what? What is it that God did wrong that we have to say, okay, God, as long as you repent and say you're sorry, then we'll forgive you.

I mean, you didn't even forget to repent and say you're sorry though. This is kind of, there's an implication there of wrongdoing, obviously, that needs to be rectified. There is no darkness in God at all.

That's in James. But the point is that there's no evil there. God is perfectly good.

He's just as he should be. There's nothing missing. There's nothing amiss.

He's just the way he's supposed to be. He's the ground of goodness. And frankly, if he is not perfectly good, then there is no standard to draw on.

For goodness, a perfection of goodness from which we can even begin to identify evil or wrong or bad as a deviation from that perspective of goodness. If God is subject to that standard, where does such a standard come from to begin with? I agree, Greg, because forgiving means you are releasing someone from the debt that they owe you. And God does not owe us any debt at all.

By the way, not even forgiveness, just saying. He doesn't owe us forgiveness. He does know us mercy.

He does know us grace. All of that is unmerited. Now, I think sometimes people might use the word forgive in other ways.

Like maybe they're just referring to releasing their anger. But I would never put it in the terms of forgiveness because that does imply a debt. I think if you need to get rid of your angry feelings against God, the way you do that is by, I almost want to use the word repent, but you need to change the way you're seeing the situation.

Which is what repentance means. Yes. Yes.

But I get your. You need to repent from your view of God in the situation because you have a wrong understanding of what is going on. Now, obviously you can be upset.

You can have gone through a lot of suffering. Many people in the Bible went through suffering. But if you're viewing it, if you're angry at God, you're not seeing it correctly.

You need to work on your understanding of what's going on. And one way you can do that is by looking at the cross because God proved that He loved us there. He proved that He is sovereign over history.

He proved that He is willing to suffer for our sake. He has a self sacrificial love. Of course, Romans 8 says if God did not spare his own son, but delivered him up for us all, how will you not give us all things? And all things here means all things to make us like Christ and to accomplish His purpose for us, which is to reveal Himself to us and to conform us to the image of Christ so that we're reflecting Him to the world and we can enjoy Him forever and live with Him forever.

So maybe all you need to do is look at what was God's purpose in this suffering. And I don't mean a specific purpose because I think too often we can't figure out what the specific purpose was, but we do know the general purpose because we know all sorts of things God is doing. And the main thing, like I said, making us like Christ, he's also teaching us to depend on Him.

When we don't turn against Him, we're revealing our understanding of His value that His value is greater than the depth of our suffering. When we don't turn away from Him and leave Him, that's just a statement of how much we love Him. And that is a huge statement to the world.

When we don't turn against others, Peter talks about this in 1 Peter, when we respond to suffering with goodness, people ask us to defend the hope that is within us. And that is a way of revealing God's worth and our love for Him. So if we are angry at Him, something's gone wrong with our understanding, not with God.

And that's when we have to start reminding ourselves because it is very easy to start believing lies about God when you're suffering. And telling yourself, God doesn't love me, God's turned against me, God did something wrong to me. You can get all of these thoughts, and the way you combat those is by looking at the truth.

And that is very clearly laid out for us in the Bible and in particular in 1 Peter, but throughout the Bible. We see Paul suffering, he suffered shipwreck, he was stoned. And he says four times, he was beaten with rods three times.

Yeah. And he says that's that that's just momentary light affliction compared to the glory that we will experience. So the problem is in the way we're looking at it.

So if you're angry at God, I would just you don't have to hide that from God, but I would just say help me to see you as you really are, because I shouldn't be angry at you. I'm not seeing you correctly. I'm not understanding you.

I'm not I'm not even believing you help my unbelief. I'm not believing that you love me enough to send your son to die for me and you're not withholding anything that's good for me. I just I don't understand what's good for me.

So just help me to trust you. And that's where I think we have to go. I mean, you're citing a different number of passages there in, you know, threading them into your response.

It was great. I think when you look at Job, who is like the archetypical example in the Old Testament of unjust suffering, even Job didn't ask demand that God repent, you know, he said his wife said curse God and die. And he said though I though he slay me, yet will I trust him.

So, you know, the idea that of holding God to account is just completely forward to scripture and also to a proper understanding of God's character. Now, we have examples that you pointed out of expressing our anger. I Psalm 13, you know, starts out how long old Lord actually there's four verses, four lines that start out.

How long will you reject me forever, et cetera, et cetera. And their David is pouring out his anguish and his confusion, yet he still ends on a good note. Most of those Psalms that start like that end on a good note, him expressing his trust, some don't, but that just shows that there's nothing wrong with us being completely candid with God about our anguish, our frustration, even our anger about different things.

Sometimes David's anger is against the non-Christian and or I should say the non-believer, you know, no Christians back then strictly speaking. But yeah, this is a little bit odd to talk about forgiving God. So, let's, here's a similar question and you already brought up the idea but didn't go into this.

So, this one comes from Barbara. I often hear Christians offer this advice to those struggling. You need to forgive yourself.

If Jesus already forgave our sins, is it even possible to forgive yourself? Then why did Jesus die? Isn't that adding to solo scriptura? Well, I don't know if it's adding to solo scriptura, but the idea of forgiveness, like you mentioned, is that there is a debt that has owed us that we release the other person from. Forgive us our debts. That means a way that the Lord's prayer is often translated.

And I don't know what debt we owe ourselves. So, I think strictly speaking that phrase doesn't apply to us. But I think I understand what people are meaning.

We are either matter, pardon me, matter ourselves or disappointed in ourselves or we can't believe we did this. We did something in the past that we are not willing to let go of the shame or the guilt or the anguish for. And it's almost like if we keep, in a certain sense, punishing ourselves because of that past behavior that somehow that's appropriate, we need to keep punishing ourselves.

We can't let that go because it's almost, it may be in our mind it's not taking the thing that we did morally serious enough, poorly seriously enough. So, but the fact is that for those things we have done in the past, if we have come to Christ, those are things that Jesus has released us of. We've acknowledged that.

Yes, if we confess our sin, and I think there in 1 John, he's talking about that we are sinners, not individual sins. But if we confess our sin writ large, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and cleanses of all unrighteousness. And so when these thoughts of self-recrimination revisit us, it's important for us to tell ourselves the truth about that.

And that is, yeah, that was wrong. And Jesus paid for that. My heart sprinkled clean-phone evil conscience and body washed with pure water, Hebrews 10, he who promised is faithful.

So these are the things we need to be telling ourselves to release that. And maybe when people are saying forgive ourselves, this is what we're talking about. They're talking about, let it go, just let it go.

But that requires a robust understanding of grace. And if you're not under grace, then you letting it go is not going to make it go away. Right.

If you have done all these bad things, and don't forgive yourself, all right, now you feel better about the bad things you did. But that doesn't solve anything because you haven't wronged yourself, you have wronged God with this. Not to say there aren't negative consequences that befall the Christian who does wrong, or the person who does wrong.

But the real crime, like David said, against you, and you only have I sinned, and done with evil in your sight. Psalm 51. So that's where the real crime is, and that's what we need to resolve.

If we are a non-believer, and we are still, that sin is still on our account, then we ought to be concerned about it. And if we just kind of deal with it and forgive ourselves, we are not dealing with the forgiveness that is necessary, that is forgiveness for God. But if God has forgiven us, then we can affirm what God has done.

And I'm thinking I cited 1 John chapter 1, the end of the chapter there. He's faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us of all our righteousness. John continues.

He says in the next verse, the beginning of the next chapter, that little children, if anyone falls into sin, we have an advocate in Jesus Christ, the righteous. And he himself is the propitiation. He's the satisfaction with the Father.

And later he says, see how great, how does it go? I think the Father is... How great of love, the Father is demonstrated toward us, that we should be called the children of God in such we are. So these are the verses, I think, if someone is troubled by their past and have been forgiven by Christ, these are the verses we should be looking at, in a sense, allow us to let that go. And if you want to call that forgiving yourself, okay, we are welcome to that if that works for you, but I don't think it's the right term.

It's acknowledging how God has forgiven and cleansed and made you one of his family. I absolutely agree, Greg. I think one thing you said, I think, is a great place to start.

If anyone is counseling or if you're counseling anyone in this, I would not focus on forgiving yourself. But one thing you said was, our offense is against God, not against us. So God is the one who needs to forgive us.

We're not even in that loop, really. So you can take that pressure off yourself and now look at, has God forgiven you? And if he has, then rest in Christ, rest in that. And if you can't rest in that, then you need to meditate on the truth of what has happened in all the ways that you mentioned.

So I would definitely move people away from saying forgive yourself to rest in Christ, rest in the knowledge that you are forgiven. It's just, it's done. It's objective.

And what came to mind for me was from Romans 8. And this comes right after, let's see, okay, so here it starts in verse 31. What then shall we say to these things? If God is for us, who is against us? He who did not spare his own son, but delivered him over for us all. How will he not also with him really give all things? Who will bring a charge against God's elect? God is the one who justifies.

Who is the one who condemns Christ? Jesus, is he who died? Yes, rather who was raised, who is at the right hand of God, who also intercedes for us. Who will separate us from the love of Christ? Will tribulation or distress or persecution or famine or nakedness or peril or sword? And the answer is nothing. So if God, if God has already justified us and Jesus is not going to condemn us, he died for us and he's interceding for us.

So who's left to condemn us? Nobody. So these are the things that I think, this is where we have to put our trust. Because if you're putting your trust in yourself to forgive yourself, well, good luck with that.

That's not, that's not an objective valuable thing to happen. Because it doesn't accomplish anything. All right, Greg, I have another question that's about forgiveness.

And this one comes from Katie from Montana. All right. Without the shedding of blood, there is no forgiveness of sins.

Why then were poor people allowed to offer flour as a sin offering in Leviticus 5? How does that accomplish a sin sacrifice? It's interesting the verse that she cited there out of, I think Hebrews 10 maybe. That isn't precisely the way the verse goes. The verse says, one might also say that without the shedding of blood, there's no forgiveness.

And there it's a picture of the entire sacrificial system that demonstrates the need for a substitution or atonement. Now notice that none of those, none of those sacrifices were ultimately efficacious, effective to forgive sin. It allowed God to pass over the sins previously committed until there was the blood sacrifice of Jesus that made full atonement for all of those sins that were kind of temporarily forgiven in light of the payment that would come.

So I think the best way to think of this is like a credit card. You pay with a credit card and you get the goods when you give the credit card. The payment comes later to cover that which you just purchased.

And in the same way the Old Testament says, in whatever provision God had made for them at the time, we're participating in a system that allowed them to get credit for Christ's sacrifice, which was a blood sacrifice, the sacrifice of a body to pay for sins that was to come later. Right. I think that's right.

And if you go look at Hebrew 7 through 10, it talks about how those sacrifices weren't actually bringing about the forgiveness. It was Jesus. It was always based on Jesus.

Even the blood of bulls and goats could never take away sin as the word says it. So if blood and bulls and goats could do that, then flower can't do that either. Right.

But it was a, it was a stop, so to speak. I always tuckled when I say that because that was the story of reality and you had an edit mark there. What we went over.

It was just a whole lot. I don't want you to use that word. Yeah, I know.

But I did. Chuckle, chuckle. But it was just to hold us, hold them over to the time when the full payment would be made.

Right. So God made provision for those who couldn't afford it to use something else, but it was within the whole system that was based on blood sacrifice, which is pointing to Jesus, who was the actual sacrifice, not the flower, not the bulls and goats. So again, I recommend Hebrews 7 through 10 that really does go into a lot of specifics on this.

Oh, Greg, I've got one more question and we still have a minute left. So I'm going to throw it out there. I know we're going to go long, but I'm just going to throw it out there.

This one comes from Julie. What would you tell your own pastors who tout? We have to let the Holy Spirit change us and others and we shouldn't call out one another sins, whether in a loving way or otherwise. I would take them to Galatians chapter 6, where Paul says, if anyone, this is the first couple verses, if anyone has caught in a trespass, let you who are spiritual restore such a one, looking to yourselves, lest you also stumble.

So there's a very clear statement from Paul about correction in the body. Jesus makes a statement similar in Matthew 18. He's got a sequence to follow in the local community, Christian community.

Paul goes through a process of discipline about an individual sinner in verse Corinthians 8, where there are sexual sin in the body that the Christians are not dealing with. And he said, I'm not there, but here I'm going to give that one over to Satan. And you shame on you because you didn't deal with this.

So there are a number of explicit circumstances in Scripture where people are called out or either called out or instructions are given to call them out. First Timothy, if an elder is caught in sin, then you don't receive an accusation that gets an elder without two or three witnesses. But if he has called, he should be rebuked in the presence of everyone that they'd be fearful of sinning.

So you have all of these explicit texts that say exactly what should be done here. Is it Titus or Timothy in the beginning? We're talking about elders. They're talking about people who are teaching wrong things and the elders have to act because these who are teaching falsehoods must be silenced.

Another example then of action taken about harm coming to the body of Christ either through resident sin or through false teaching. There's so many places where we either see it happening. Even at the beginning of Galatians, we see Paul talking about rebuking Peter and then of course the Matthew passage where they're explicit instructions about how to correct someone in the church.

I don't know how you ignore those. So maybe you could, you know, next time you read through the New Testament, just keep track or even if you just have those few ones. It's like six we just gave and all you need is one that makes the point explicit that you have a bunch of them.

So there's a theme through scripture that especially the shepherds, the pastoral staff are supposed to protect the sheep. And this advice will let the Holy Spirit do it. How is the Holy Spirit going to do that? The Holy Spirit works most of the time through other people and especially the leadership of the church.

In fact, that's what Jesus suggests there in the Matthew 18 passage of verse that's often misunderstood or mischaracterized but taken out of context. He says, you follow these, this procedure and he says, there I will be in their midst to help out. Now, you know, wherever two or three are gathered in my name, you know, so this is misconstrued oftentimes to be group prayer.

But the two or three is a phrase repeated from just above where you have two or three witnesses and then you have the process of church discipline. So there Jesus is saying, yes, I'm going to be there, you know, and if you will in the person of the Holy Spirit. To oversee this, the Spirit is using the process that Jesus and the apostles ordained in other writings.

Yeah, God created these institutions just like he created the government to be the institution by which he would bring about his wrath against evil doers on earth. The same thing is true. He's created the institution of the church to mature people and discipline people and raise them up.

And that has to require calling people out in their sin. All right. Well, thank you.

We really appreciate hearing from you. And if you have a question that you haven't sent in yet, we hope you will send that in. And thank you Pam and Barbara and Katie and Julie.

We got through for today. All right. This is Amy Hall and Greg Coco for Stand to Reason.

Thanks for listening.