Hebrews Lesson 208
NKJ Hebrews
We are studying in Hebrews 12, the verse (Hebrews
Hebrews
NKJ Hebrews
Now I’ve already gone through the verse as a whole; but I
came back (2 or 3 lessons back) to deal with this topic of pursuing peace. How do we pursue peace with people? There are basically two groups of people that
we pursue peace with - those that will be responsive to the attempt to pursue
peace and those that won’t. Those who
will be responsive may not be right away.
It may be a difficult endeavor.
It involves…as I pointed out the last two times, it involves
humility. Whenever there is any level of
conflict between people, there has to be humility on the part of both people in
order for reconciliation to take place.
On the other hand, we know that there are some people that are just so
mired in their own arrogance and self absorption. Their own anger, bitterness, resentment or
whatever may have caused the breach in the relationship that they are not going
to respond to any overtures on your part or on the part of the other person.
You get into lot of different mechanics in any kind of a
relational breakdown. Whenever there are
conflicts, there are perceptions that each person has that they bring to the
conflict resolution. There are many times
people who come; and they just want to be proven right. Well, they're not very teachable or
humble. They’re coming from a position
of arrogance. Whenever one or more of
the parties are coming together from the position of arrogance; it is very
difficult to reach true, genuine reconciliation between the two parties - no
matter who's guilty or who's not. So
it's important to understand basic dynamics of understanding key concepts in
any sort of conflict resolution.
These come back to three words (actually I could include a
fourth word that we have) that have their root very deep into the Old
Testament. These four words that we see
are peace, reconciliation, forgiveness and love – peace, reconciliation,
forgiveness and love. Those four words
come together in any process of conflict resolution.
Of course as we studied in the first couple of lessons to
understand conflict resolution and how we as Christians (as believers in the
Lord Jesus Christ) are to be involved in conflict resolution, we really need to
start with the pattern that we have that God has given us which is how God
resolves the conflict with man. We have
to understand the basis for that conflict with man which always goes back to
arrogance. That's what was seen in the
Garden of Eden.
As soon as the serpent comes along and addresses Eve and
says, “Has God really said?” - and the way the serpent asked that question
really front loaded her thinking to get her pointed in the wrong
direction.
That happens a lot of times in life. People ask us questions. If we answer the question, there is no right
answer to the question; and we get sucked into a wrong position just by
answering the question.
Somebody goes up to a guy and says, “Well, have you stopped
beating your wife yet?”
If you say yes or no, you're in trouble.
You have to stop and think about it and say, “Well, let me
address that from another angle. I never
beat my wife.”
So you have to stop and think. If you don't stop and think and you just
answer it, Proverbs says:
NKJ Proverbs
26:4
Do not answer a fool according to his folly…
The idea in that proverb is don't let the way that the other
person thinks (if it's a fallacious way) suck you into their framework because
once you get into that framework; then you are starting to think the way they
think and you get caught in a trap.
So from the very beginning, there's this problem with
arrogance. Eve gets sucked right into
the trap by the question the serpent asks – “Has God said?”
The idea there isn't just the question of - did God make
that statement? There’s the implication
– is God right in making this prohibition that you can’t eat from the Tree of
the Knowledge of Good and Evil? When
it's phrased that way, it's calling upon Eve to answer in terms of making a
value judgment on God.
Now think about this a minute. If God is the ultimate authority in the
universe (and by definition that's what God is), He's the ultimate being, the
ultimate person in the universe.
Biblically speaking He is the creator of all the heavens and the earth so
He stands outside of creation. He is
unique as we've seen in various studies.
We did it again on Sunday morning in many passages from the Old
Testament that talk about God as the unique God. There is no god like the God of Abraham,
Isaac, and Jacob. So if this God is
outside of creation, then He becomes the standard himself. He is the one who sets the standard. He's the one who sets all of the values of
what is right and what is wrong. All of
the norms and standards are determined by God because He is the one who creates
everything. He's the one who creates
everyone and He's the one who writes the owners’ manual and puts it down in a
PDF file. And we've got a copy of it
here okay - just to bring it into a modern illustration. We have the owner's manual. He as the creator-designer-builder-engineer
is the one who has the right (and the only one has the right) to describe what
the do's and don'ts are and to put into the owner's manual what the proper
systems of maintenance are and everything else.
But when the serpent comes along and he asks Eve this
question, he's asking her to make a judgment on the owners' manual. Of course
the owner's manual is very short at that time.
It’s just don’t eat from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. So she on the basis of a limited amount of knowledge
- however long she'd been in the Garden of Eden whether it's a couple of days
or a couple years or a couple of decades really doesn't matter. She has a finite amount of knowledge based on
what she has directly experienced, what she has learned or experienced
indirectly through what she’s learned from her husband Adam or what she has
learned from God as we're told God came and
walked in the garden with them on a day-to-day basis. So she has a finite amount of knowledge, and
this is set in contrast to God who has how much knowledge? According to the Bible He has unlimited
knowledge, infinite knowledge. It has no
boundaries to it. He knows everything
that can possibly be known. He knows all
of the things that will happen, could happen, or would have happened if this
other thing had happened.
So what Satan is doing is asking a finite creature whose
knowledge could be measured by analogy to a grain of sand and the knowledge of
God would be equivalent to all the grains of sand on all of the planets in all
of the solar systems in all the galaxies in the whole universe. So on the basis for her microscopic grain of
sand, she is asked to judge or evaluate the validity and veracity of this
owner’s manual.
So she looks at it and falls right into the trap and says,
“I can do that.” That’s just pure
arrogance to think that on such limited knowledge she can judge or evaluate
God. That's what starts the conflict. Now how is this conflict going to be resolved
- because once the conflict enters, then you have all sorts of unintended
consequences? The next thing that
happened was Adam sins.
The next thing that happens is God's shows up and says,
“Well, where are y’all hiding; and why are you hiding?”
He points out what the problem is, what the consequences are
going to be; and He begins to teach them and to give them certain images and
action in terms of sacrifice, clothing them with the skins of animals, things
like that all designed within His omniscient framework to build in their
thinking and the thinking of the subsequent generations a framework for
understanding how the conflict is going to be resolved.
That's what you see when you start studying the Bible and
you start in the book of Genesis is that God begins to give information
incrementally. He doesn't just do an
information dump on Adam and hand him Schaffer’s Systematic Theology, Baker
Bible Dictionary, Logos Bible program and a computer and say, “Okay, here's
everything you need to know.” He
recognizes that in the learning process you have to start off with basic simple
sentences, propositions and images and then build upon those. As the centuries go by, He continues to build
upon and develop and to expand upon the same basic themes (the same basic
ideas) over and over again; and each time you come back and He does this, He
adds a little more. Each thing that He
adds doesn't detract from what was there before; but it adds to it and gives it
more complexity. But it’s all pointing
ahead to something that is going to be the ultimate resolution to the conflict.
Now that’s you're opening illustration for tonight; and I’m
going to come back to that in a little bit when we get into the passage that I
want to look at this evening so that we can once again come to understand what
the New Testament is teaching us within the framework of this build that God
has from the Old Testament. Okay.
So last time just to remind you of where we come in this
study - last time I talked some about the mandates in Scripture in terms of
reconciliation with people. I went to
Matthew 7 dealing with Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount in Matthew 7:1:
NKJ Matthew 7:1
"Judge not, that you be not judged.
Then as Jesus is teaching about why we should not be
involved in hypocritical or arrogant critical, negative critical evaluation of
others; and I pointed out that the Bible never says we shouldn’t evaluate other
people. We do that all the time. If you are an employer, and you're going to
hire somebody; you have to evaluate them.
You have to judge them. If you
are a teacher and you have to fill out grades at the end of the six weeks; you
have to judge your students activities.
So we judge people in a positive sense all the time; and it's good.
But what Jesus is talking about in Matthew 7 is making negative,
arrogant, harsh judgments about a person's spiritual life based on your own
understanding - even if you might be right saying, “You know. That person's carnal. Or that person is a spiritual loser.”
Now there are certain things that some people do that are
clear and obvious and overt; and everybody knows that. But that's not our job to be their spiritual
judge and evaluator within the framework of Christianity. That's not our job. We’re to encourage other believers. So this is the point that we're not be out
there trying to straighten everybody out according to whatever standards we
have.
In fact when there are problems, Jesus gives us a guideline,
Matthew 7:3-4 where He says:
NKJ Matthew 7:3 "And
why do you look at the speck in your brother's eye, but do not consider the
plank in your own eye?
NKJ Matthew 7:4 "Or
how can you say to your brother, 'Let me remove the speck from your eye'; and
look, a plank is in your own eye?
In other words, you’re so concerned about this little
idiosyncrasy in somebody else’s life and this problem that they’ve created that
you have turned a blind eye – in self absorption you have completely ignored
the problems that you have or the role that you’ve played in contributing to
the conflict and breakdown in the
relationship.
So He (Jesus) points out basically that the place to start
is that we have to evaluate ourselves in terms of objectively looking at our
own life, our own contribution to the problem.
Now we can conclude from that that either - (a) we didn't contribute at all (b) our
contribution was in a sort of general sense because of we’re all imperfect. We
all commit certain things, do certain things that are wrong or that are
irresponsible or aren't as productive as they should be. So in some general sense there we can always
look at something and say, “Well, if I had done this or if I had done
that.” Then the third thing is to
recognize what I would call at direct contribution to a particular problem. We have to decide where we are; and that's
the focus of the self evaluation. Are we
just completely and totally innocent of anything?
For example if you're in a contract with somebody and
they're going to provide something for you.
Let’s say they're going to build a house for you. You give them a down payment of $20-30,000 to
begin, and they abscond with that money; they have broken a contract. There is a breach in the relationship. You've done nothing wrong; they've done
something wrong. That's the first example.
The second example would be – let’s continue to work with
somebody who’s building a house. Over the period of time that the contractor
begins to build on the house, you know - deadlines are missed. Maybe there are things that you were supposed
to provide that you didn't get them provided in time - something like - just
general things that happen living in a fallen world with the people who run
late and make bad decisions, things like that.
But it's nothing that's not reversible.
That would be the second category.
The third category is where perhaps you have as the buyer
that you have committed to the provision of certain things. You not only don’t provide the things that
you have committed to; but you begin to (maybe) sabotage the building of the
house. The builders are out there
working for the day. The contractors and
carpenters are out there during the day.
At night you slip in there and begin to tear things down. So that is an example of where you are an
active contributor to the breakdown of the relationship.
So we have to evaluate ourselves to see where are in terms
of the spectrum.
Now the problem that I pointed but the last time is some
people have such a hypersensitive conscience that they’ll always fail a lie
detectors test. They’ll go in and get
all strapped up and you ask them, “Have you ever committed a crime?’ They'll think about it and they’ll say, “Oh
I'm sure I have somewhere.” They just
immediately put themselves under a load of guilt. So they immediately as soon as somebody comes
along there's a conflict with someone.
When that other person tries to avoid taking responsibility for the
conflict and uses some various manipulative techniques to try to get - they
always assign blame to the other person and make them accept blame.
The person who has the really tender conscience is going to
be the first person to say, “Okay, it’s my fault. You're right. You’re right.” They haven’t. So that’s as bad as scenario as
someone who's done everything wrong. I
tried to point some of those things out last time. So we have to learn to work through these
processes.
Now the illustrations that I’m using are illustrations that
may not be as severe as we do find in people's lives. You have serious things that happen in
people's lives in terms of business deals where there are people who breach
contracts or they engage in fraudulent contracts. For example this last couple years everyone's
familiar with the Bernie Madoff ponzi scheme.
In a situation like that people's lives, their retirement are virtually
lost. They are ruined. It’s recoverable. Fortunes are destroyed. It's devastating. There are situations that occur within
marriages that take place that cause terrible breaches within those
relationships. There are things that
happen between parents and children – that children harbor resentment and anger
for decades. Or, parents harbor
resentment. I know of families where
children have grown up and they have been very ungrateful towards their
parents. They’ve gotten involved in
various illegal activities and drugs and drug use even to the point where the
parents may have to completely wash their hands of any involvement with their
children because of the way they have so irresponsibly been involved in
criminal activity or drug use, things that nature. Then years later – I know of a case within my
extended family where this happened where one of my - something 4th,
5th, 6th, 7th, 8th, 9th
cousins 15th removed or whatever it is, just continuous did drugs,
continuously got arrested.
Finally his father, his mother had to say, “We're just going
to cut you off completely. We can't do
this anymore. We can’t bail you out
anymore. You’re just going to have to take complete responsibility for their
life.”
They didn’t hear from him for twenty years. Think about that. Trying to resolve that is hard. Twenty years later he calls them up. He's married, has two kids. He's become a Christian. So there are a lot of hurt feelings there;
and you have to go through a process and deal with some of those issues that
are still hanging or may still be hanging on.
A little story about him is he and I went to high school
together. I never could find him because
he's always out behind the temporary buildings smoking dope with Dennis
Quaid. He went back a long ways. When you have problems like that in a family
and there are other things that happen within families. It's really hard; it’s really difficult to
go through any kind of conflict resolution.
That's when we have to go to the Scriptures; and we can’t do
this on our own. The Scripture say that
the only way you can really truly do this - you can go through the motions, but
if you haven't dealt with the real internal heart issues and really learn what
it means to biblically forgive somebody and to be reconciled with
somebody. And it doesn't happen
overnight.
You can’t have real peace with people if it's just… like I
remember the first time I saw some kids get in a fight in about the third
grade; and they had to kiss and make up.
Well, they had to do the kiss and make up thing; but they were fighting
down the street after school that day because there's no resolution of the
problem.
So Scripture gives us the basics for this, and it always
goes back to the cross. That’s why I
keep emphasizing our understanding of the cross, thinking about the dynamics of
what happens between God and man and that basic conflict that is from human
perspective irreparable. Yet God
provides the solution. That is always
the pattern that the New Testament goes to if we are going to forgive one
another and if there is going to be peace.
So tonight what I want to do is look at the passage in
Ephesians 4:32f. So turn with me in your
Bibles to the 4th chapter of Ephesians. Ephesians 4 and Ephesians 5 are two of the
most challenging chapters for the Christian life that you'll find in the New
Testament. The reason is that God’s
standard has never lowered. Just because
you get on the other side of the cross (away from the Mosaic Law), doesn't mean
the standard of God somehow lowers.
Grace doesn’t mean the standard is lower. Grace means that God's relationship with us
is not dependent on us keeping the standard.
It means God relationship with us is dependent upon Him providing the
solution for us having broken the standard.
That's what grace is. It means
that we don't have to go through 25 or 30 steps in order to then get God's
forgiveness; but that God gave that forgiveness freely on the basis of what
Christ did on the cross; we just accept it.
But when we get on the other side of that, it doesn't mean
that there are no standards anymore. It
doesn't mean that God doesn't expect a behavioral code out of us. What it does say is that our ultimate
relationship (that family relationship with God) is not based on meeting those
standards.
But He's saying, “Okay.
Now you’re a member of my family.
You can’t ever lose that status. That status has been given to you
freely because you trusted in Christ as your Savior. You're in the family. But if you’re going to be part of his family,
there are some things that we do and some things that we don't do. Here are the standards.”
Now we're all going to break most of these (a lot of time)
depending on various factors; but the recognition in the Scriptures is a realistic
one - that we sin. We fail. But that does not mean we have to start over
again. It doesn't mean we go to jail. It doesn't mean we go back to square
one. It means that God meets us where we
are with forgiveness. So that’s always
the pattern.
So we’ll look at Ephesians 4 and starting in - let's
see. Let's go down to verse 25. Starting about verse 25 we have a series of
imperative mood verbs – 11 imperative mood verbs. An imperative is just a command from God that
this is the standard according to which my family members are going to
live. Okay – just like if you were
parent. I see a number of parents
here. When you were a parent raising
your children you said, “This is the way you're going to live if you're going
to be in my house and you’re my child.
You're going to follow these rules.”
When kids violated the rules (broke the rules) there was a punishment;
but they didn’t get kicked out of the house.
They remained members of the family.
So the first imperative is in verse 25. The command is to speak the truth with his
neighbor. Now the first part of that
verse – you see the “ing” word there -putting away lying. That's a participle in the Greek. It should be understood as an instrumental
participle. “Let each of you speak truth
with his neighbor by putting away lying.”
It’s a description of you take off lying, you get rid of it, and you
speak the truth. That's the positive
command.
The second is in verse 26, you have another present
imperative. Now all of these with the
exception of one in verse 31 are present tense imperatives. Now the difference between a present tense
imperative in the Greek and an aorist tense imperative in the Greek is a
present tense is emphasizing something that is supposed to be ongoing, standard
operating procedure. This is supposed to
characterize your life day in, day out.
This is expressing an ongoing standard.
When the writer shifts to an aorist tense, (We don't have anything
comparable to an aorist tense in English.), it’s sort of a summary type
tense. But outside of the indicative
mood, tenses don't have time factors in Greek.
So you're either talking about it in terms of continuous action or
you’re talking about it. You’re just
punching something. So an aorist
imperative is like you’re taking the commandment; and you're putting it in bold
face. It is sort of saying this is
supposed to be a priority. It’s just for
emphasis. So, you have this whole string
of present imperatives: speak the
truth.
Verse 26 says:
NKJ Ephesians
Be angry. It’s a
passive imperative there; and so we recognize that it is valid to be angry in
some areas. This is a self righteous
anger. Be angry. But the flip side is –
and do not sin
So it's an anger there’s no sin involved. They're not going to allow sin (a sinful
response) to come out of the anger.
Then the third imperative in that verse is:
do not let the sun go down on
your wrath,
Or, down on your anger.
In other words, deal with it.
Don't let it fester. Don't let it
be something that you sleep on and keep in your memory so that you keep a
record of these offenses and someday when the time is right you just get mad
you bring up your grocery list and read off all the things the other person has
done wrong. You have to deal with it
before the day is over with and set it aside.
That’s the hardest thing for us to do, especially in the conflicts that
have hurt us deeply and profoundly - is to set that aside and act is if it
never happened and to truly live and think as if it never happened.
NKJ Ephesians
Then third is don’t give place or give an opportunity to the
devil. Now that all needs to be
understood together that when we are become angry and if we sin it gives an
opportunity to the devil in the sense that that it gives us an opportunity
through sin to continue to spiral out of control into more and more mental
attitude sins or sins of the tongue as we react to this conflict that has been
generated.
Verse 28 says:
NKJ Ephesians
That’s the imperative.
Do not steal any longer. In
contrast:
but rather let him labor,
working with his hands what is good, that he may have something to give
him who has need.
This is a great verse in the Bible. In several places you have in both the New
Testament and Old Testament the emphasis on the importance of labor - not as a
negative toilsome thing but the importance of work. In Thessalonians Paul says if you don't work,
you don't eat. Period! In the Old Testament you have various passages
that back in the Mosaic Law emphasizing the value of work. Why?
Work mirrors what God did in the six days of the creation week. He labored.
That's the very first picture that we see of God as creator, as a
laborer, as someone who is creating and working with all of the elements in order
to make the solar system, make the planets, make the earth, make all of the
creatures upon the earth. Labor is
good. It's valuable. It's part of our makeup to imitate that in
the image of God. So we are to labor. We
are not to rely upon other people’s labor and other people’s productivity in
order to benefit us. This is a verse
that is a direct contradiction to the whole philosophy of socialism and the
whole philosophy of Marxism.
That’s going to surprise some of you when you get to heaven
to discover that Karl Marx is going to be there. I’m just going to warn you and prepare you
for this right now.
Karl Marx was born into Jewish family. His father converted to Christianity when he
was about thirteen or fourteen years of age. It wasn’t long after that Karl did
as well. He was a very enthusiastic
Christian. He was very devoted for about
5 years before he decided he didn't like Christianity anymore. During that time - I'm trying to get a hold
of this, but during that time when he was in high school he wrote a paper on
justification by faith. My friend John
Hense who’s pastor of
But he read it some years ago when he told me, “Robby, it's
the finest explanation of the New Testament Doctrine of Justification By Faith
Alone that you will ever read. It's
impossible for somebody to have written that who believe it.”
I've seen this documented in a number of places. So just get ready. You never know who's going to end up in
heaven because God is gracious. There
are people who will see you there and wonder – how’d they get here?
So we’re to labor.
Labor is honorable; and we’re to live on the basis of our own work. That's all part of divine institution #1,
human responsibility.
NKJ Ephesians
That's the principle.
This is something parents ought to instill in their children that as a
believer part of your responsibility is to work hard, be productive so that you
have an excess that can be used to help those who just can't help
themselves. All way through Scripture
there's an emphasis on helping those who are unable. It's not that they could work; but they
don’t; It’s that they just can’t - whether it's disease, whether it’s age. Whatever the situation may be, they are
unable to take care of themselves; and so we are to be involved and to work
hard, have a high standard. When you
start off in life as eight year old, ten year old, twelve year old; parents
ought to be instill in them – have a vision for making enough money to take
care of other people. Don't have a
selfish little ideal that you’re just going to take care of yourself; but that
you should excel as a Christian so that you have an abundance that you can then
generously and graciously use to help those who have need.
Verse 29, the next command:
NKJ Ephesians
That’s verse 29.
Then in verse 30, the command:
NKJ Ephesians
This is just one command in the midst of these 11 or so
imperatives here. Don't grieve the Holy
Spirit.
Then I think that the relationship of the next verse is
directly related to that. That's why we
shift from a present tense to an aorist imperative. The aorist imperative sort of punctuates
everything that's been said; and we were going to have a staccato effect here
as Paul says, “Let all bitterness, wrath, anger, clamor, evil, evil speaking be
put away from you with all malice.”
Notice, this is just boom, boom, boom, boom. They're all either mental attitude sins or in
the sense of evil speaking, sins of the tongue.
These are always the worst sins.
Most people go to 5 or 6 of their favorite overt sins.
It’s always interesting to ask people, “How do you define
sin? What do you think sin is?”
Some people say, “Well, sin is smoking, drinking, and dancing. Sin is doing this or doing that.” Or, they’ll define sin in terms of whatever
the current vogue social sins are that are big in that culture at that
particular time in history.
What is a sin? Sin is
any action, any thought, any deed that violates the character of God – that
falls short of His standard. That’s what
the Hebrew word chattaah means – to
fall short of a standard.
So God sets the standard. Any time you fall short of that
standard which is absolute perfection; then you have sinned. You've fallen short. When you violate a commandment, that's called
a transgression. Both Old Testament and
New Testament words have that same idea violating a standard. So sin is anything that falls short of God's
absolute standard. It is missing the
mark, falling short of the target.
NKJ Ephesians
These are all mental attitude sins.
be put away from you, with all
malice.
Then we have a contrast here. This is the verse I want to look at, verse
32.
NKJ Ephesians
This is modified.
What does it mean to be kind to one another?
The next word is translated “to be tenderhearted.” That means soft.
forgiving one another, just as
God in Christ forgave you.
The key word is charizomai. The imperative is to be kind to one
another. Now there are all kinds of
things we can say about being kind. But
we all know what “kind” is and sometimes at the end of the day it’s a little
convicting to say, “Was I really kind to people today?”
At the end of the day somebody says, “Well, I saw you down
at the grocery store talking to the person at the cash register. That wasn’t really kind.”
Are you known for being a kind person? That’s part of being grace oriented.
And be kind to one another,
tenderhearted,
Now how is this kindness expressed? This is why grammar is important. In English you don’t see it by looking. You see three things here: to be kind to one another… It's almost as if
you have three commands: the kind of one
another, be tender hearted, and be forgiving of one another. That's not what it means in the Greek. In the Greek it says to be kind to one
another. Tender hearted has the idea of
being compassionate; and it modifies or helps explain a little bit of what it
means to be kind. Then forgiveness there
(charizomai) in a participial form;
and it's an instrumental adverb there indicating that you're kind to one
another by forgiving them. That's how
you demonstrate kindness - is by forgiving somebody of the things, the
violations, the hurt feelings, the breaches that they have generated or the
conflicts that they’ve generated.
“And be kind to one another, tenderhearted
by forgiving one another.”
Then we get the comparison.
Don't be kind like your grandfather was.
Don't be kind like the man down the street was or like your Sunday
school teacher was. You are to be kind
by forgiving one another just as God in Christ forgave you. Okay, that's the standard - as God in Christ
forgave you.
Then the next verse - most the time we don't read verse 1
immediately after verse 32 because there's a chapter division there; and
sometimes there's a heading. But it should
be read:
“Be kind to one another, tenderhearted by forgiving one
another even as God in Christ forgave you. Therefore (command again) be
imitators of God as dear children.”
So that's the pattern.
If you're going to understand forgiveness that means then you have to go
to what God does for the individual human being at the point of salvation. This is when we experience forgiveness and
what forgiveness means. The word here that
is translated forgiving is that the broader word. It’s charizomai. Charis
is the noun for grace so it has the idea being gracious to somebody. Grace is
something that is undeserved and unmerited.
So we are kind to one another by being gracious to them in the arena of
forgiveness. When they have committed
some fault against us, then we are going to charidomai
them. That means we're going to wipe
the slate clean. It’s a word that is
used in economic contests and monetary contests of wiping out a debt, of
erasing the debt.
When your erase the debt, you're not going to come back a
year later and say, “I think that I need to remind you the fact that you still
owe me $500.”
See you don’t do that.
You have erased the debt. You
don’t ever bring it up again. That ties
us back to the idea in verse 26 of not letting the sun go down on your
wrath. There is an eradication in your
mind of this fault. You're not going to
bring it up again. You're not going to
think about it again. The next time you get angry with that person, you're not
going to resurrect this list of faults in the past because they've been put in
the shredder; and then the shredder has been emptied into the big hefty, big
black hefty plastic garbage bag. That's
been put up the street and taken away.
It's not an issue anymore. That's what it means to wipe out that
debt. That's what forgiveness is. We forget completely about the previous
faults. That's what God has done for
us.
Now for many of us, when we sit down we think about what did
God do for us we realize how many ways in which we have in small ways to large
ways, how we have broken God's commandments – whether we think of the Ten
Commandments, all the many mandates from
the Old Testament to New Testament we break these time and time again.
There are times when we know that our priorities aren’t what
God wants our priority to be. Our values
aren’t what God's values are. There are
many different things that we do that are wrong. But we do them, and we will continue to do
them. That's not justifying it. It is a reality that we will do that so get
over yourself and don't be on a guilt trip.
That’s why we have grace. We are forgiven by God; and He wipes the slate
clean because He's provided the ultimate solution.
Now how did He do that? This is where I wanted go back into
the Old Testament and point out a couple of things so that we can understand
forgiveness. So I want you to turn to
Leviticus 3. We’ll go back to the Torah. Leviticus 3 and we’ll look at one of the
offerings that you had in the Tabernacle and
Now while you’re turning there, I want to read to you a
definition out of the Concise Oxford English Dictionary for forgiveness. The
verb “forgive” means according to the Oxford
English Dictionary to stop feeling
angry or resentful toward somebody for an offence or a mistake, to stop feeling
angry or resentful towards someone for something. That’s the same thing that we have in this
list of the mandates at the end of Ephesians 4.
NKJ Ephesians
In other words you're not going to maintain that feeling of
anger. You’re not going to maintain that
feeling of resentment. You're going to
move forward and wipe it out and forget about it.
Forgiveness (the noun) is the action or the process of being
forgiven. I think that word process for
us – it’s not a process of God. But,
it's a process for us because what we tend to do is we look at this thing that
this person has done against us. We
focus on the hurt. We focus on the way
we have been betrayed. We put all focus
on “look at what they did to me.”
“Look at how I was betrayed!
How could they do that?”
We get so caught up in that that we just can't let it
go. Then we realize, we come to Bible
class. We learn a lesson like this.
“I’ve got to let that go.
So, I’m going to forgive them even though they haven’t asked me and they
don’t recognize that there’s a wrong there.
At least on my part, there’s going to be one category of forgiveness
here; and I’m not going to be bitter, resentful, have any mental attitude sins
towards them.”
Then five minutes later you thought about it; and you’re
starting to get mad again. We have to go
through that process sometimes for days or weeks or months or years or decades
before we finally sort of settle down and fully be able to apply the principle
of forgiveness. And I’m a little bit
facetious here when I say weeks and months and years. Some things are very serious and very hard
for some people to get over. As long as
you understand where you're headed and where you're moving and that you know
you're going in the right direction.
Some things you just can't flip a switch in some situations
in life; and you’re immediately going to apply the doctrine especially if
you’re just an immature baby believer.
When you're a mature believer and you’ve built on years and years of
practicing and applying these principles; then it becomes much easier to do
because you've managed to remove yourself from the mire of self absorption and
self justification and all of the things that go with arrogance as you have
grown and matured as a believer. But
when you're young believer, when you’re an immature believer, that's part of
the growth process. You just have to
learn to apply that.
In the Hebrew you have a couple of words that are used - the
primary words are salach (S A L A C
H) which means to forgive or to pardon.
It's the same idea that we have in
aphiemi - to pardon or to release somebody up from a debt. Another word that is used in Hebrew that is
often used for forgiveness is the Hebrew word nasa and that indicates to lift or to carry something away. Now that is such a great illustration. We will come back and talk about this probably
a couple of weeks as we get close to Yom Kippur; and I’ll talk about Leviticus
in terms of Yom Kippur.
But on the Day of Atonement there would be two goats brought
in or two goats and lambs that are brought in that are without spot or blemish.
The priest puts his hands on the heads
of both of them, and he recites the sins of the people. It's that picture there of the priest putting
his hands on the sacrificial animals.
It’s a picture of their identification with him and with those sins so
they're being transferred via substitution.
Those sins are being transferred and put upon those innocent sacrificial
animals.
One of them is taken to the altar. He is slaughtered on the altar. His blood is then taken and is put on the Ark
of the Covenant, on The Mercy Seat. God
in His righteousness looks upon that and is satisfied. That’s the meaning of propitiation. His justice is satisfied by the shed blood
because the shed blood represents the fact that a payment for the sin has been
made.
Now the other goat is taken out into the wilderness. He is taken by a friend the Scripture
says. We’ve talked about that before
because you want to make sure it’s somebody who's a trusted friend who will do
what he is supposed to do and not become lazy in the process. But he's supposed to take that other goat and
take it so far out in the wilderness that the goat can never find its way
back. That's a picture of how far God
removes our sin from us. When we’re
forgiven it's taken away; and it never comes back. That's the idea in nasa, that something is carried away. It’s lifted up. It’s like a burden being taken off of our
shoulders and off of our back; and it is completely removed. Now the thing is that under the Old Testament
sacrificial system every year you have to come back to that Day of Atonement
because the blood of bulls and goats cannot permanently solve the sin
problem. They all look forward to
something.
If you look at the Scripture going back to where I was at
the beginning, you have Adam and Eve in the garden; and they sinned. Now they try to hide the fact of their sin by
sewing garments of fig leaves.
God says, “That’s not going to work. Man cannot cover up the sin problem. Fig leaves are not going to be any kind of a
solution. So I’ve got to teach you a little bit about what's going to be
involved in this solution. There's got
to be a death.”
Remember I said that the penalty for eating from the fruit
of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil was death. So, there has to be a death. So God took a lamb. It doesn’t say that per say in the text; but
I think we can say that from what is indicated in the pattern of
Scripture. He takes an animal (probably
a lamb or a goat) and slaughters it, skins it and makes clothes for Adam and
Eve from the animal hide.
So then I’ve talked about how so much had to be going on
there because God's got to teach them about anatomy; He has to teach them about
how to sharpen a knife blade so it’s sharp enough to skin the animal and to
properly treat the hide and what to use in treating the hide so that it will
stay soft and supple and how to remove the hair from the hide and how to lay
out a pattern.
One of most surprising things I learned about my father was
that - my father was kind of a math wiz.
He was tutoring calculus at the
Anyhow, that's what God is doing. He had to teach them how to make a pattern so
that they could make clothes for themselves.
All that’s going in there. The
point that the text is making theologically is that there had to be a
covering.
Now here you just have your basic lamb sacrifice in Genesis
at the end of chapter 3 where it just says God clothed them with animal
skins. Now if that's all we had, then we
might not be justified into saying all the things I just said; but what happens
is you go into a couple more chapters in Genesis when Noah gets off of the Ark
and he has a sacrifice and he already knows the difference between a clean and
an unclean animal.
Unclean animals on the
We don't get anymore information than that until later on
when we get into Genesis 21 and Abraham has been told by God to take his son
Isaac up to
Well, finally the light bulb went off. Abraham really got
the point. When God said, “Go kill him,”
Abraham said, “Sure God because I know you're always faithful to your
promises,” which means that if You told me that my descendents are going to be
made through Isaac they will be. Even if
I kill him, you're going to have to bring him back to life so that you can
fulfill your promises because I know you never break your word.”
So we have a beautiful picture there of substitution. Then we get - another the five hundred years
goes by and we get the Mosaic Law with the whole detail of different sacrifices
and offerings.
Just as we wrap up here, I just want to hit this one in
Leviticus 3 is the peace offering.
That's the foundation.
Moses writes:
NKJ Leviticus
3:1
'When his offering is a sacrifice of a peace offering, if he offers it
of the herd, whether male or female,
So that would be a little more expensive sacrifice for a
wealthier person.
he shall offer it without
blemish before the LORD.
Why is it without blemish?
Because it's going - it's depicting something that’s going to happen in
the future. There's going to be a
sinless sacrifice to function as a substitute for a sinful human being. A sinful person can't be sacrificed for the
sinful person. A sinless person has to
be there. So it has to be without
blemish.
NKJ Leviticus
3:2
'And he shall lay his hand on the head of his offering,
That’s the whole picture of transference of guilt and
identification.
and kill it at the door
of the tabernacle of meeting;
That’s gateway going into the Tabernacle.
and Aaron's sons, the priests,
shall sprinkle the blood all around on the altar.
So the peace offering was a picture of sacrifice – I mean it
was a picture of the fellowship between God and man. This is the only sacrifice where the food is
shared between - with the priests where they eat part of it indicating fellowship. But that fellowship (the reconciliation that
comes) comes only because of what?
Because a sacrifice has been made.
And in terms of dealing with the subject of conflict resolution, the
problem's got to be dealt with. The sin
has got to be dealt with. It can’t be
just overlooked because then it's going to come back again and again and again.
You can't just be the innocent party and say, “Well, I’m
going to accept blame for this,” out of my own guilt complex because then the
person who's committed the offense is just going to say, “Well, I got away with
that. I can do it again.”
So there's no real resolution. You can’t have real resolution until the
problem is honestly and openly dealt with and admitted. That's the meaning of confession – to admit
and acknowledge guilt.
We’ll come back and talk about that next time; but the
foundation here's that picture of that peace offering and the emphasis is there
can't be real forgiveness - there can be a subjective partial sort of
subjective forgiveness on our part.
We say, “Okay, this person has offended me. This person has caused a problem. This person has injured me in some way; but
I'm not going to harbor mental attitude sins against them in terms of
bitterness, anger, resentment, revenge motivation or anything like that.”
That's one aspect of forgiveness that we can do. But we can't truly forgive them in the full
sense of the word until there is a recognition and admission of guilt on their
part. And sometimes they won’t ever do
that. So we have to go through that
first stage in terms of our own spiritual health and not having resentment
because it may be fifty years before that other person is going to come along
and say, “You know I was wrong.” They
may never do it. So we can't let our
mental attitude ever be dependent on other people's volition. We have to take care of that between
ourselves and the Lord.
So next time we’ll come back and look at this whole issue of
forgiveness with God and how that impacts our understanding of forgiveness
towards others.