By Jonathan Keller
After three weeks of God’s magnificent love, we move to the part of God’s identity that offends us. Though this portion of His identity begins with “forgiving,” we must understand the content of His forgiveness. Cheap forgiveness, where God excuses accidental slights, moves my soul a micrometer; costly forgiveness, where God absorbs the cost of total rebellion, melts my soul under the warmth of His great love.
The Cost of Forgiveness: Iniquity
Throughout the Old Testament, three words for moral failures appear frequently: iniquity, transgression, and sin. In the southern United States, we make up all kinds of words for moral mishaps: shenanigans, tomfoolery, connivin’ (omitting the final “g” is the most important part), and more. God uses these words not to walk through cultural etiquette but to convey the totality of His omniscience and His forgiveness. He sees all kinds of sin, and He forgives all of them.
First, iniquity. In English, this refers directly to imbalances. The rich get richer, the poor get poorer. For Hebrew speakers, though, there’s a deeper meaning of “perversion.” Imbalance happens because the “way things ought to be” is out of order. The rich get richer because they twist the idea of the world diffusing resources through charity. Marriages fall apart and create fatherless homes because one or both spouses twisted the marital union away from its purpose and make it into a simple transaction for sex and companionship.
The Cost of Forgiveness: Transgression
Next, transgression speaks of crossing boundaries. It has a fiery flavor to it, more akin to the ideas of rebellion or revolution. A rebel looks at the systems of society and says, “Away with you!” As rebels against God, we look at His rules for caring relationships, sexuality in its proper place, food and drink in their measure, work and rest in theirs, and say, “Away with you!” Against the king who not only rules over all the earth but made it in the first place, we say, “Away with you! I have a new order to enact!”
Even Christians, who claim to carry the name of Christ, say, “Away with you!” when we allow ourselves to adopt the moral revolution of our surrounding culture. Why do we say white lies if those are rebellion to our king? Why do we cut at and gossip about each other if we tear down the Creator’s order?
The Cost of Forgiveness: Sin
Finally, sin is the catch-all word for moral disobedience. It carries the religious and legal dimensions of moral failing. It is sin that makes me guilty before God, where my record has “liable of these charges” on it. It is sin that defiles me and makes me impure and unclean. Bloody sacrifice for moral stains work as detergents and reminders that our sin comes at great cost to ourselves and to God. Our sins tear at God’s world and ruin how relationships ought to work for good, and the sum of all our sins create the world of chaos we call ordinary life.
To drive the point home, it is common to say that “humans are evil” or “life isn’t fair” in the sense that the world has always been a little off. From God’s perspective, that is the opposite of the truth. He made the world good and in good working order, and it was our sin, as the head of creation, that propagated the corruption we now call life. In a word, the only unnatural thing in all the world is our sin. Our disobedience is a stain, a rebellion, and a perversion of how we were created originally.
Forgiveness
In Christ, God looks at all our sin – our iniquity, our transgression, and our sin – as in the past. Through Christ, God has taken on the bloody cost of our evil, counted it as nothing against us, and brings us back into relationship with Himself. By faith in Christ, God appropriates that forgiveness to us. Without being united to Christ, no one, not even the church, can touch the healing rain of forgiveness. Connected to Christ by the Spirit, though, any person can experience the riches of having all corruption washed away to live according to their created purpose again.
How do you commit iniquity, transgression, or sin? What do you make of the historical fact that Christ, by faith, has forgiven you for all of it?