"When the Christian says, 'I believe in the forgiveness of sins,' he means that he believes not in the overlooking of sin, but in its overcoming; not in making light of it, but in making away with it."

                           William Merrill, The Common Creed of Christians

“The forgiveness of sins;”

“remissionem peccatorum;”

         "With his future apparently mortgaged to his past, unable to escape from the consequences of his sin, unable to forget the chain of evil habit, even after it is broken, the sinner comes to God in Christ and is set free by the power of Divine Love which transcends nature."

                           A. E. Burn, The Apostles' Creed

         "If we knew what sin was, could we go on sinning?"

                           Alfred Mortimer, The Creeds
                                   

         "So I saw in my dream, that just as Christian came up [to] the
cross, his burden loosed from off his shoulders, and fell from off his back, and began to tumble, and so continued to do, till it came to the mouth of the sepulchre, where it fell in, and I saw it no more."

                           John Bunyan, The Pilgrim's Progress

         "The great mystery of the future is not punishment but forgiveness."
                           B. F. Westcott, The Historic Faith

         Like the death of Christ that atoned for it, human sin is a fact of history.  Indeed, human history is everywhere the record of evil and the heroism that combats it, and of suffering and the wickedness that caused it.  Regardless of country, century, or culture, sin is one of the chief and enduring characteristics of earthly existence.  Every history text, every newspaper, every chronicle of human life bears eloquent and irrefutable testimony to human depravity, though in modern times such texts seldom employ the word "sin."  Even in our best moments, we find that something in our actions or in our motivations is not quite right, and it bothers us, though perhaps not as much as it ought.  We are conscious of a law concerning right and wrong and we are conscious that we have broken it. 
         None of us escapes the long arm of evil.  None of us is truly righteous.  We are a fallen race.  Sin is the condition of every human soul everywhere.  Sin is not something that undermines the souls of but an unfortunate few.  In the words of Scripture, all we like sheep have gone astray, for all of us have sinned and fallen short of God's glory and praise (Isa. 53: 6, Rom. 3: 23).  The universality of human sin helps explain why virtually every religion makes some attempt to deal with depravity and to alleviate it.  This sense of sin is one of the fundamental facts of human consciousness, one of the diagnostic lessons of life.
         In Scripture, the word "sin" has many meanings, such as missing the target or failing to be what we ought to be (hamartia), stepping across a line or trespassing (parabasis), stumbling or falling (paraptoma), law breaking or lawlessness (anomia), disobeying or ignoring commandments (parakoe) and moral debt (opheilema).  In other words, like the people who commit it, sin is multifaceted.  Its multiple dimensions, however, can be reduced to this:  Sin is whatever is contrary to the righteous will of God, and it is always destructive to the sinner:

"Man by sinning strikes with his puny arm at God, but the blow falls really upon himself; for sin destroys all that is best in man.  It wounds every power of his soul, clouding his intellect, poisoning his imagination, deadening the voice of conscience, weakening his will . . . [If] indulged in sufficiently it ends in killing all that is godlike in man, all that is truly human, and so it becomes an act of suicide, for by sin a man murders his true self." (Mortimer, The Creeds 255)
 
         Theologians often distinguish between sin and sins, the first being the condition of spiritual death and moral alienation from God (the condition in which we all find ourselves apart from faith in Christ), the second being the wicked actions arising from that spiritual death and alienation.  The first is our nature, the second is our conduct.  The latter arises from, or is given birth by, the former.  That is, our individual acts of evil, our sins, arise from our fallenness, our sin.  The one is what we do, the other is what we are.            To employ an analogy, whatever is down in the well comes up in the bucket.  That being so, we quickly realize that only to forgive sins will not cure all that ails us because, given the fallenness that generates such actions, more sins naturally follow those that are washed away.  Rather, we need to purify the well.  That purification we call regeneration and sanctification, or being born again and growing in purity, actions whereby an inwardly new person is created and habits of virtue are nurtured.  The Christian convert becomes a new person at the heart, one with new hopes, new desires, new loves, new aspirations and new modes of conduct.  Old things are done away and new things grow up in their place, which Paul describes as taking off the old nature and putting on the new (Eph. 4: 22-24).  In that light, we see that the forgiveness of sins spoken about here in the creed has two parts to it, the one positive and the other negative.  The negative side involves the cleansing or washing away of our sins; the positive involves our rebirth and inner transformation.  This rebirth and inner transformation are the work of the Holy Spirit, which is why the creed's affirmation concerning forgiveness appears in its third section, which deals with the Spirit, rather than in its second, which deals with the Son.
         Looked at from another perspective, sin is an attempt to satisfy a legitimate need in an illegitimate manner.  All persons, for example, seem to require intimacy and love.  But sex outside marriage is no way to get them, though people try.  To desire intimacy and love is perfectly legitimate.  To try to get them by means of illicit sex is both evil and ill-conceived, not to mention potentially deadly.  That is, to seek intimacy and love by means of illicit sex is wicked and cannot work.  Sexual contact outside marriage is not love, it is sin. 
         We humans are slow to learn even the most obvious lessons about sin, especially that it is ultimately unsatisfying.  It promises one thing and delivers another.  It promises happiness; it delivers self-recrimination, doubt, alienation and spiritual death, which is why medieval sculptors often portrayed sin from the front as a handsome young man, beckoning the unsuspecting to indulge themselves in what promises to be nearly innocent fun.  But from behind, those sculptors portrayed sin either as a writhing nest of vipers or as a withered and ugly skeleton, the personification of death and putrefaction.  Sin, in other words, never practices truth in advertising.  Sin is the reverse of the cloud with a silver lining. 
         Near the beginning of his famous Confessions, St. Augustine said to God, "You have made us for Yourself, and our hearts are restless until they find their rest in You."  St. Augustine said so because he learned from personal experience and with great difficulty that no matter where one looked, no matter how hard one tried, nothing in this world can satisfy the human heart except the God Who made it -- not money, not fame, not power, not privilege, not excitement and not prestige.  Our chief problem seems to be that we have not yet learned what Augustine knew centuries ago.  We insist on looking for love and joy in all the wrong places, in all places but the one where they can actually be found, namely in God.  That failure is sin.  We have not yet learned what Blaise Pascal knew -- there is a God-shaped vacuum in every heart, though we try foolishly to fill it with everything but God, always to our disappointment and injury.
         Sin, we fail to realize, results in the fragmenting of our hearts and minds.  The one who breaks the law is broken.  You do not break the immutable law of righteousness that governs the universe, you break yourself against it.  As Plato understood, because of the destructive effects of our own wickedness upon us, the horses that draw our heart's chariot now pull in different directions.  We are, so to speak, drawn and quartered by our own evil, though that has not persuaded us to pursue it with any less ardor or glee.  Sin is an employer for whom we all work and by whom we all get paid.  The payment we receive for our sin is death (Gen. 2: 15-17, Rom. 6: 23).  In other words, your sin has issued a death warrant bearing your name.  That warrant will be served.
         Nevertheless, we take sin lightly, as if it were unimportant, as if it would not eat alive both we ourselves and all those we love.  We even maintain our own pet sins, as if evil could be safely or routinely domesticated.  But to see sin as it really is, to see it in all its horrific ugliness, we need to see it as God sees it.  To do so we need to look carefully at the cross of Christ, at the death of the One Who made us and redeemed us.
         Imagine, if you will, that you are the proud and happy parent of a beautiful infant, whom you love.  Imagine further that one morning you entered the child's room only to find it lying in its crib, cold, motionless and blue, a snake curled up upon the child's small dead chest.  How much would you hate that snake?  That's how much we ought to hate sin, and that's a faint hint of how much our Heavenly Father hates sin, which cost Him the life of his only Son.  The passion of Jesus Christ expresses with eloquent pathos what God thinks of sin.  So does Hell.  The crucifixion of his only Son and the punishment that awaits the unrepentant are proof that God takes sin seriously.  They are evidence of what one theologian called the uncompromising severity of sin.  Still, in our self-deluding foolishness, we imagine that sin can be winked at, that it can be passed off as inconsequential or unimportant.  We tell ourselves that one or another particular sin is no longer of consequence because it was committed long ago, as if the mere passing of time were the cure for wickedness.  Not clocks ticking but Christ dying atones for sin.  That atonement can be appropriated only by faith, not by waiting.
         The more you sin, the more likely you are not to feel its sting, and the more likely you are to become oblivious to its approach.  Thomas Carlyle was right:  The best security against sin is to be shocked by its presence.  In that light, we leave ourselves utterly unprotected.  If you cannot feel sin's approach, you cannot arm yourself or ready yourself against it.  If you no longer feel pangs of conscience once you commit sin, you strip yourself of the remorse that makes you determined not to repeat your mistakes.  Without that determination, you sin all the more.  Thus, because it is morally debilitating, sin breeds sin.  The ancient Jewish Talmud puts it like this:  Commit a sin twice and it will no longer seem to you a moral crime. 
         Because He is completely pure, and because not to punish sin is to condone it, God cannot and will not say of our sin that He shall simply let bygones be bygones.  He does not shrug his shoulders and sigh to Himself about how boys will be boys.  He either punishes sin or forgives it.  There is no other way.  As a result, each of us stands in desperate need of mercy and grace.  We stand in need of the forgiveness of sins.  In the New Testament, to forgive sins means to cover them, to send them away, to blot them out.  Forgiveness entails both the absolute putting away of sin and the reinstatement of the sinner.  In the words of Wolfhart Pannenberg, "Forgiveness of sins means liberation from everything which divides us from God and therefore from a fulfilled and free life" (Pannenberg, The Apostles' Creed 160).  Here we see why Christianity is a religion of joy:  It restores sinners to the filial relationship they ought to have had with God.
         The cure for sin is not moral reform, as important as that might be, but forgiveness, mercy, grace.  Forgiveness means that Christ has taken our place, that He has stood in our stead and received the punishment we deserved.  If we attach ourselves to Him by faith, his death in our place permits us to go free.  Our punishment has been paid.  But rather than turning to Christ in faith, too many people seek to deal with sin in a way that does not deal with it at all.  They seek to assuage their feelings of guilt but do nothing actually to rid themselves of the sin that spawns it.  They seem not to realize that most people feel guilty because they are.  All too often, such persons want badly to alleviate the symptoms of their disease but not the disease itself, as if the cancer in our souls would miraculously get better if only we ignored it, as if not going to the doctor were a form of therapy.  But sin is a real wickedness; it requires a real remedy.  That remedy comes only from the great Physician of our souls.  That remedy is the grace of God in the death of Christ.  Foolishly, however, rather than availing ourselves of the only antidote to evil, we flock to the secular messiahs of our age, the psychologists and psychiatrists who can lighten the feelings of guilt but not the guilt itself.  They drug the conscience instead of quickening it.  They cover sin instead of healing it.
         We seem not to realize that the pains of sin, our pangs of conscience, are a great grace.  We flee from them; we seek to rid ourselves of them by any imaginary means that presents itself rather than the only way possible.  To rid ourselves improperly of the pangs of conscience is to infect ourselves with a deadly disease without symptoms.  If you have no symptoms, you fail to realize you are sick.  If you fail to realize your sickness, you do not go to the doctor.  If you do not go to the doctor, you receive no medicine.  Without medicine, you die.
         God does not treat sin the way we do.  To forgive sin is not to ignore it or to play it down.  To forgive sin is to take it upon yourself, much the way a creditor must pay for every outstanding debt owed to him but which he elects to cancel.  The cost of the bad loan is borne, though not by the borrower.  Thus, from the creed we learn yet another thing about "God the Father almighty, maker of Heaven and earth:"  He forgives.  Our maker is our redeemer.  God does not excuse sin and He does not condone it.  He judges it.  The sentence He passes upon sin is a sentence He Himself has borne.  God brooks no compromise with evil.  He eradicates it root and branch, and at high cost to Himself.  He deals with it the only way a righteous God can -- judgement.  But because He loves us, this judgement He has taken upon Himself.  In the mirror of human redemption, therefore, we see two faces reflected -- God's and our own.  He is high, pure and loving; we are sinners in need of rescue.  Were God not merciful, we would be utterly undone.  Our redemption is the proof that God is love and that we are sinners, yet beloved. 
         Our forgiveness is based upon the saving work of God in Christ.  It rests upon the death of Jesus on our behalf.  It costs us nothing; it cost God everything.  The forgiveness God offers us is free, though it is not cheap.  That is, it was provided for us by Christ.  He saved us by his righteous life and atoning death.  He paid our penalty, providing for us what we, of ourselves, could never have provided.  God puts Himself in the place of the sinner.  He died so that we might live.  Mercy is free to us though not to God.  It is purchased at the price of God's Son, whose life was the ransom paid to redeem a race captive to evil.  He is the Lamb who takes away the sins of the world (John 1: 29).  The forgiveness of sins demonstrates that in the battle between love and evil, love is stronger.  Love has wrestled with sin, has engaged it in mortal combat, and won.  Once we accept this free gift of grace, however, we are to give ourselves fully to God, not in order to be redeemed, but because we are redeemed.  This is gratitude, not achievement.
         Of course, our forgiveness has a human dimension to it as well.  Our forgiveness hinges not only upon the grace of God but upon our repentance, our confession and our readiness to forgive.  Repentance is not the same as regret or as the desire to escape punishment.  Desperately desiring to escape the punishment of sin is natural, but it is not repentance, only fear.  It fails to distinguish between evil and its penalties.  We are to repent of our sins, not merely to fear their consequences.  If we fear impending punishment and employ that fear as we ought, we repent of, and flee from, our sin.  Our flight from evil toward God is good, and is made possible partly by the fear instilled within us by divine judgement.  But if we permit our fear of punishment to loom so large in our minds that we see nothing else, if it prevents us from truly repenting, then the good has become enemy of the best.  For sinners, repentance is best. 
         In the New Testament, "repentance" (metanoia) means literally to have an after thought, to think again, to reassess one's actions.  Put differently, repentance is a U-turn, an about-face, a radical change of heart regarding one's sinful actions.  Of this we must be clear:  There is no forgiveness of sins without a truly repentant heart, a heart to which sin is painful and which renounces it with honesty and sincerity.  To wish to have God's forgiveness without this renunciation of things contrary to God, without this about-face, is impudence.  It is to play a nasty and dangerous game with the grace of God.
         To confess means, literally, to speak along with, or to agree with, someone.  To confess one's sins is to say about them what God says about them, to agree with Him that those sins are indeed evil.  To confess is to admit that you have done something wrong and to take responsibility for it.  You must own your sin.  Forgiveness depends upon the sinner being forgivable, that is, being in a condition where the remission of sins does no harm, a condition that sees sin as sin.  Were God merely to forgive sins indiscriminately, that is, without regard to the moral condition of the sinner, He would do us great injury, not great good, for He would be undermining, perhaps even obliterating, the difference between sin and virtue, for He would be treating them as if they were the same.  But this He does not do.  He requires us to confess.  If we confess our sins, the Bible says, God is faithful and just and will forgive us for our sins and cleanse us from all unrighteousness (1 John 1: 9).  But confess we must.  
         Finally, we must be forgiving if we are to be forgiven.  That is, we believe that God forgives sin; we believe that we ought to grow to be like God.  We too must be merciful.  He who would withhold forgiveness from his brother cannot expect to receive it from God, as Jesus Himself taught (Matt. 5: 7; 6: 14-15).  The possibility of forgiveness goes hand-in-hand with the desire, indeed the responsibility, to be forgiving.  Only the forgiving can be forgiven, for only they really believe in forgiveness.  To paraphrase something said centuries ago by the English poet George Herbert, he that cannot forgive others destroys the very bridge over which he himself must pass if he is ever to reach Heaven.
         But here is good news:  If you repent, if you confess and forgive, God will forgive you.  He will pardon your offenses and never call them to mind again (Jer. 31: 34).  Or, to return to the words of William Merrill, "If you want with all your heart to be rid of sin, and to live in the beauty of holiness, I declare to you that nothing can keep you from that great joy and success of overcoming; for God is merciful and gracious, long-suffering and tender" (Merrill, The Common Creed of Christians 138).

          "Everything is included in the forgiveness of sins.  And any principle independent of forgiveness of sins can only be insufficient, and in the last resort dangerous both to the Christian life and to human life."

                           Karl Barth, The Faith of the Church

date modified:
5 July 2006