Do You Understand God's Forgiveness?

How we view forgiveness shapes our understanding of everything in the Christian faith. To be more specific, our view of God's forgiveness impacts the way we forgive.

For a long time, many folks believed that God only forgave sin if he could punish before offering his act of forgiveness. This is a punitive or transactional view of forgiveness.

The standard storyline went something like this: God can't stand sin. Even though God loves you, God can't stand to be with you if you sin. God wants to forgive you but has to take out his disgust with sin by punishing you somehow until you get it right.

Since we're all sinners & repeat offenders, this creates quite a problem. According to the traditional story, Jesus came along and lived without ever sinning. Finally, here was someone God didn't have to punish. But in order to forgive you of your sins, God punished Jesus instead of you.

This standard version of the story of forgiveness is mostly rubbish in my book—and not very biblical. There are slivers of truth within it. But the key problem is the belief that God's forgiveness is always punitive, that he must always punish before he can forgive. This simply isn't what scripture teaches. God forgives out of his great love. It's true that those who sin sometimes experience sin's ugly consequences. At other times, God must punish in order to get people to wake up and seek forgiveness.

But if you can begin to understand that forgiveness is a free gift, then it will transform your view of faith.