Portraits of Grace

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Well, this morning as we prepare our hearts for the Lord's Table, I want us to step away from our study of Matthew's Gospel and the Sermon on the Mount, and I want us to think for a few minutes about the issue of forgiveness. Mankind's greatest need is forgiveness, not from one another but from God. Here's the basic problem that we all have. God created us; God created you. Therefore, as Creator He has a right of ownership .He owns you. He sustains your life; He keeps your heart beating every moment; He gives you everything you need; everything you enjoy is ultimately the fruit of His goodness and generosity. Therefore, because He made you, because He owns you, because He sustains you in every way, He has every right to tell you what to do. In other words, in words the Scripture uses, He is your rightful King. As our King, He has laid down just laws for life on this planet, just laws that reflect His own moral character.

And yet tragically, every one of us has willfully chosen to break our King's laws and to do whatever it was we wanted to do. Of course, the Bible calls those acts of rebellion sin, and you know, as I do of myself, you know that you have sinned. We all experience the feeling of guilt. We feel guilty. The reason we feel guilty is because God has placed within every human soul a mechanism that we call the conscience. That conscience is like a warning light on the dashboard of your soul. It's put there by your Creator to tell you when you violate His commands, when you cross over into disobedience.

But those feelings of guilt that we deal with are not our real problem. Our true dilemma is much greater than some feeling down in our hearts because every time we sin, we also accumulate real, legal, personal guilt before God, before our Creator. You see, the Scripture's very clear about the nature of God. He is omniscient. That means He is all-knowing. God knows everything. He is also omnipresent. That means He's everywhere present. There's nowhere you can go where the fullness of God's being is not present: seeing, observing, watching, listening, knowing. That means that not one sin ever escapes God's notice. He knows every time we break His laws.

When we choose to think contrary to His laws, He knows. He has heard every sinful word you have ever spoken. He has seen and witnessed firsthand every sinful act you have ever committed, even those done in secret or in the darkness, because as the Scripture says, The "darkness and the light are alike" to Him. He hasn't missed a single sin you have ever committed. Proverbs 5:21 says, "The ways of a man are before the eyes of the Lord, and He watches all his paths." Psalms 90:8, "You have placed our iniquities before You, [O God] our secret sins in the [blazing] light of Your presence." Matthew 12:36, says God knows "every careless word" we have ever spoken. In 1 Corinthians 4, He even says He knows our motives and thoughts. We don't even have to speak our sin. He knows it within us.

But what's really frightening is that not only does God see every sin of motive and thought and attitude and word and act, (This may come as a surprise to you.) but He actually keeps record of them. In Revelation 20 the Apostle John is allowed a vision of the future and to see how things will unfold. And he sees a scene that theologians call the Great White Throne Judgment where all those who have lived and died are gathered, all those who are not in Christ face God their Creator.

And John watches that scene, and he sees at that throne these massive books being opened. And then he explains in Revelation 20:12, what those books are. He says, "The dead [That is, those who are raised to life out of the grave.] ... were judged from the things which were written in the books, according to their deeds." You see, in heaven there is the equivalent of a written record of every single sin every sinner has ever committed, and it will be used to judge him when he stands before his rightful King.

You see, our sin makes us guilty before God. When we break God's laws, not only do we immediately experience an internal feeling of guilt, but we immediately accumulate real, personal guilt in God's presence; and it's that objective guilt that is our real problem. Now, there's only two ways-there are only two ways in the universe to deal with that real, objective guilt before God. And every single person under the sound of my voice this morning will ultimately see your sin dealt with in one of these two ways, that record that exists of every single sin. Either you will pay for that sin in the entirety of the punishment it deserves, or God will forgive it. Those are the only two options. That's it. So, the greatest human need then is for the just God, whose laws we have ignored and broken, to forgive us.

But here's the problem: God can't just forgive you. You understand that the Scriptures tell us that the very foundation of God's throne is justice? "Justice [is] the foundation of Your throne," O God, the Psalmist says. What does that mean? That means God's entire rule, the essence of who God is, is built on justice. And so, He cannot, like some indulgent grandfather, just say, "O, it's alright, I forgive you." Because that's not just. The penalty has not been paid. It would violate His own perfectly just character. It would be to act like your rebellion against Him, your rightful King, was in fact no big deal—when it is. It wouldn't be just. So, understand then that forgiveness of our sin is not an easy thing for God.

But here's the amazing truth about our God. In eternity past, in the council of His own triune being, God created a brilliant and yet costly plan in which He made a way to forgive us without in any way violating or compromising His own holiness or justice. It was through His Son. And so, we come to the most famous verse in all the Scripture: "For God so loved the world that He gave [us] His Son." He sent His Son, made in the likeness of men. He became one of us. He didn't just come for a weekend; He came for thirty-three years. And He didn't just come as God, He came as the God-man, fully man. And He came into the world for two reasons.

Jesus came into the world, number one, to live the life you should have lived, and number two, to die the death you should have died. That's why He came. So, in Ephesians 1:7, we read, "In Him [that is in Christ] we have redemption through His blood, the forgiveness of [our trespasses.]" Forgiveness, that's why He came. So, if you have repented of your sin, if you have believed in Jesus Christ as your Lord and Savior, God has forgiven the real, personal guilt of every single sin you have ever or will ever commit. That's an amazing truth, and yet it's really hard for us to get our minds around that. It's really hard for us to fully appreciate the forgiveness we enjoy as followers of Jesus Christ, and so in various ways in the Scripture God explains that forgiveness so that we can understand what He has done in His Son. In fact, He hasn't just told us about forgiveness, but in a number of places in Scripture He paints a picture of forgiveness to help us understand what we have come to experience.

Over the last number of weeks including my time away, my own heart and mind have been drawn to a passage that has such pictures in it: Colossians 2. Colossians 2, because in Colossians 2 God gives us three magnificent portraits of the grace of forgiveness. Let me read it for you. Colossians 2. Now in the context here, Paul is dealing with false teachers in Colossae who were telling people that they still had to earn their way into God's presence by keeping His law. In the middle of that he puts this little package of theology. Look at Colossians 2:13,

When you were dead in your transgressions and the uncircumcision of your flesh, He made you alive together with Him, having forgiven us all our transgressions, having canceled out the certificate of debt consisting of decrees against us, which was hostile to us; and He has taken it out of the way, having nailed it to the cross.

In these two short verses there are three powerful pictures, three powerful portraits of the forgiveness that we enjoy. God wants us to understand what He has done for us in Christ. Let's look at these portraits together.

The first one let's call a king's pardon. It's a picture of a king's pardon. Verse 13, "When you were dead in your transgressions and the uncircumcision of your flesh, He made you alive together with Him." We were spiritually dead for two reasons, Paul says. We were dead in our transgressions; that is, we were dead because of our acts of rebellion against our rightful King.

And secondly, we were dead in the uncircumcision of our flesh. He's not talking here about the outward physical right, he's talking about the spiritual reality it symbolized: our state or condition of alienation to God. Our spiritual death was caused both by our own acts of rebellion and by our sinful nature that we inherited. We were twice dead. But when we were spiritually dead, notice Paul says, God sovereignly, miraculously intervened, and "He made you alive." How? Notice what He says, "He made us alive in Him." That is, in Christ. He made us alive by joining us to Jesus Christ, by uniting us to Christ.

Paul explains this in other places. In Romans 6 for example, he explains that when Jesus Christ died on the cross, it's as if that old person that we used to be before Christ died when Jesus died. We died with him. That person no longer exists if you're in Christ. And when God raised Jesus from the dead, He raised you to new life with Him. And when you came to faith in Christ, that reality was applied to you by the Holy Spirit. At that moment when you believed (It's true that you died.) the old person you used to be died with Christ on the cross, and you were raised to a new life with His very life. You understand that you share the new life of Jesus Christ?

Now Paul goes on to explain how those who were once dead to God can be reconciled to Him and have the life of His Son now coursing through their own being. Verse 13: "… He made you alive together with Him, having forgiven us all our transgressions." Here's the first word picture of forgiveness, "… having forgiven us all our transgressions." The word "transgressions" specifically refers to "an act of going beyond the law." It's a violation of law. It emphasizes deliberate acts of rebellion against our rightful King. This is how God sees our sin. It's not how we see it, we give ourselves the benefit of the doubt. It's not how God sees it. God looks at our sin and He sees it as willful acts of rebellion against Him our rightful King: transgressions.

You say, "But what about all the good things that people seem to do? I mean, look around in the world, and-and while there's plenty of evil to see, there're are people who-who are people of generosity and benevolence, and they help others." Do you understand that in the sight of God even those good things on a human level are bad to Him? And the reason is because that person is still doing them in a state of rebellion against their rightful King. No different than a bunch of insurrectionists who are kind to one another. The king still sees them as what? Rebels. And it's true of us and God.

But motivated by His grace and secured through Christ's death, notice Paul says, God has "forgiven ... our transgressions," our acts of rebellion. Now the word translated "forgiven" here is not the most common New Testament word for forgiveness; instead, it's a verb form of the word-the noun "grace". Here's how the leading Greek lexicon defines it: He says, "It means 'to show oneself gracious by forgiving wrongdoing' or 'to pardon.'" Paul tells us that our sin is like repeated acts of rebellion against our rightful King, but then our King, God, as an expression of His grace, has pardoned those acts of rebellion. We have broken His law again and again. We have been actively trying to overthrow His rightful role and rule in our lives; and then the King, who had every right to put us to death, solely as an expression of His grace, decides to pardon the rebels, the insurrectionists, the revolutionaries. This is what our forgiveness is like. This is how God wants us to understand it.

He saw us as rebels, with every right to condemn us, but instead He pardons us. God our rightful King has removed the legal guilt for our rebellion, and He has forever canceled the penalty, and now we can live in His realm as if we were loyal citizens. We have been pardoned, and it's an irreversible decision. Now, how can a just King, (Remember? The foundation of His throne is justice.) how can a just King do that? The answer (as we'll see in a moment) is by carrying out His justice, but not on the rebel, but on a willing substitute. We have been pardoned. Think about that. Think about what it would be like to have been a revolutionary, to be facing the penalty of death, and then to be told by the king, "Here is your pardon."

There's a second portrait of forgiveness in this passage, not only a King pardoning a rebel, but also a canceled debt. Look at verse 14, "Having canceled out the certificate of debt consisting of decrees against us, which was hostile to us." Now notice that expression "the certificate of debt." In Greek that's just one word. Literally, it's "the handwriting or the autograph or the signature."

Now, when I was in seminary, I spent six months translating papyri. It's not something I would recommend, but it was helpful in some ways. And when I was translating the papyri, those are simply old documents written in the ancient world on papyrus reeds that were pressed together to make pap-writing surface. And then when they were done with some of them, they would throw them in the trash heaps. And because of the dry climate, those have been preserved. And now we can recover those and see everyday documents from the ancient world. Those were compiled in books, and I spent six months translating them.

And in that process there's this particular word translated "certificate of debt" here (which means "autograph or signature") comes up quite often, because it's used often in the papyri to describe a signature on a promissory note or an IOU, if you will. In the ancient world as in today, if you had a debt, if you agreed to a debt, you accumulated a debt, then the debt would be written out on a piece of paper, perhaps by you, perhaps by the creditor. And then when everything was stipulated, when all the debt was enumerated, then you would sign your signature to it and say, "Yes, I'm obligated to this. This is, in fact, my debt."

Here, it's a picture of human sin, and debt is a common picture of human sin. In fact, in Aramaic, the language that was spoken every day in Israel in the first century (It's the language Jesus spoke most frequently in the first century, Aramaic.) in that language the word for "sin" is the word "debt".

Now what's the implication behind this picture of sin as a debt? It's that every single one of us owes God perfect obedience. We owe it to Him. And when we fail to render that obedience, we accumulate debt. Every time that we fail to love God with all of our heart, soul, mind, and strength, we accumulate debt. Every time we fail to love our neighbor as ourselves, we accumulate debt. Every time we respond in anger, every time we lust, every time we use language that is inappropriate and sinful, every time we act in dishonesty, or we lie, or we cheat, or we do anything that Scripture identifies as sin, we accumulate debt with God. Before a person comes to Jesus Christ, they are not only in debt (This is key.) they have accumulated a debt so large, so massage, that it is completely unpayable even if they lived a million lifetimes. That's God's picture of what you owe Him. It's unpayable.

Now, Paul goes on to say that our debt, there in verse 14, consisted of "decrees." In context Paul is referring to the Mosaic Law with its moral stipulations. He says those decrees were "against us." What he means by that is that both Jews and Gentiles were bound to keep God's moral law. The Jews, after all, entered into a covenant saying they would keep it. And according to Romans 2, even Gentiles, who don't have a written copy of it, have the substance of the Law written on their heart; and they ascent to its truthfulness by affirming the things it affirms and their conscience smiting them when they go contrary to it. Not only is it against us, but he goes on to say it's "hostile to us." Why? Because it condemns us.

Galatians 3 says, "Cursed is everyone who does not abide by all things written in Book of the Law, to perform them." Yeah, that's hostility. It curses us, pronounces a curse on us because we don't keep it. So, do you see what Paul is saying? Paul said to both the Jews and the Gentiles in Colossae, and he says to us, that our sin is like a debt that we daily accumulate. We owe God our full and complete obedience, and we understand that. And it's, as it were, we signed our own signature saying, "Yes God, I understand I ought to do this. I owe You this."

And then we consistently fail to keep that Law, and therefore as we go through life, we accumulate a massive, unpayable debt. But notice what God has done to our unpayable debt, verse 14, "Having canceled out the certificate of debt." The Greek word translated "canceled" literally means "to wash or wipe away." It was used for canceling a debt. It was also used literally for washing the writing off a piece of papyrus. Again, Greek lexicon defines it this way, "It means to remove so as to leave no trace, to destroy, to obliterate."

I mentioned that in the first century the most common writing surface was papyrus. From the banks of the Nile River they would harvest the papyrus reed. They would take those reeds and-and cut them into little thin slices. Then they would take them and press them together cross grain and lay them under a heavy rock and allow them to dry. When they were dried, they became a fairly good, flat, writing surface. But because it was somewhat difficult to get, when you were done writing a document on papyrus, when you were done with that document, when it no longer needed to exist, it was not uncommon at all for them to take water and a cloth and to literally wipe the ink away from the papyrus and then to write a fresh document on its top. I've actually seen pictures of documents where it wasn't (the first document wasn't) wiped away as well as it should've been, and you can still see the remnants of it bleeding through the new document that was written on top.

That's what Paul is saying God has done with our unpayable debt. He has canceled it, and He has washed the record of it completely away. He has removed it, so there is absolutely no trace. He's destroyed it; He's obliterated it. Why? Because the debt had already been paid in full by someone else. Again, God didn't just say, "Fine, you don't need to pay, nobody needs to pay." That's not just. And so, what God did, He sent His own Son, who lived on this earth for thirty-three years the life that the decrees demanded. He kept the Law, and so, He didn't accumulate any debt. He paid that in our place. His perfect life cancels out our sinful life. His perfect life pays our debt to God to keep His Law. So, God canceled our debt to His Law when His Son, (by His own life of perfect obedience) fully met its demands. And here's the wonderful news: God has even destroyed the record of the debt. He's wiped it away.

There's a third portrait of grace in these two verses. Let's call it a criminal's substitute. A criminal's substitute. Verse 14, "He has taken it out of the way, having nailed it to the cross." The cross of course was a place of death for convicted criminals. And that's the picture in this final expression. All of us were convicted criminals in the court of God's justice. Part of the evidence brought against us was a document with our own signatures in which we acknowledged our obligation to keep God's laws. But then God's perfect observation of our lives is brought out, the evidence is brought out, and it shows that we have absolutely miserably failed to do so.

And, in fact, in God's courtroom we are all criminals. We have been found guilty and sentenced to the death penalty, to eternal death. In fact, Romans 3 has an interesting word picture. It describes every human being, every single human being without Christ as if they are living on death row, already awaiting execution. But God allowed Christ, the Righteous One, to substitute for the criminals. In other words, God allowed Christ to take the punishment I deserved.

You remember Isaiah 53 where it's put so poignantly: "He was wounded for [What?] our transgressions," our acts of rebellion. He was wounded for our acts of rebellion, for our crimes. Romans 3:25, God displayed Christ as a "propitiation," the satisfaction of His just wrath against sin in His blood. On the cross God punished Christ in my place. And so, in the divine court room my crimes have been paid in full, and there is no punishment left for me. That's why Paul in Romans 8:1, can say, "There is therefore [What?] now no condemnation [no guilty verdict] for those who are in Christ Jesus."

Listen, let me talk to you this morning if you're here, and you've never experienced this kind of forgiveness. If not only do you feel guilty, but you bear objective guilt before God your Creator because you have rebelled against His rule in your life, listen, you can experience this kind of forgiveness today, this moment, if you will humble yourself before your rightful King, acknowledge your sin against Him and seek His forgiveness found in His Son. He's promised. He's promised to exscind it.

But if Jesus Christ is already your Lord and Savior, then understand the implications of this. God has taken His written record of every sinful thought and attitude you've ever had or will have, every sinful word you've ever spoken, every wicked act you've ever committed, and He has nailed it to the cross. You understand how much you have to celebrate? You see the picture here? A just and a holy God has personally witnessed every sin you have ever committed, and He has kept a perfect written record of those sins. And He was bound by His own unchanging character to punish every infraction without a single exception.

But here's the amazing thing about grace. That just Judge, who knew you to be a criminal, who had record of every criminal act, He went to the book that contained your offenses; and that offended Judge tore the pages of your offenses against Him out of the book of heaven, and He nailed them to the cross. Now what's the significance of that? In the first century when the Romans crucified a man, they always posted on the cross the crimes for which he was being crucified, the indictment for which he was suffering, this ignominy in shame and death.

In Jesus' case, of course, He was completely innocent. And so, all that was-Pilot posted on the cross in His case was the simple accusation against Him, this is Jesus of Nazareth, "King of the Jews." That was what He was dying for from a human standpoint. That's what Pilot nailed to the cross. But God nailed something entirely different to the cross. Paul says, God nailed a comprehensive list of every sin you have ever committed to the cross. And then for those six hours, God poured out His just wrath against every single one of those crimes, not on the criminal, but on the criminal substitute. That's the amazing thing about grace.

The reason communion is such a celebration is because it pictures the reality that God has pardoned our rebellion, our rightful King pardons us from our rebellion against Him. Our creditor, to whom we owe perfect obedience, cancels our debt; and Christ died in our place bearing the complete punishment for every single crime we have ever committed. The justice of God is satisfied, and His grace is extended at the cross.

Let's pray together.

Our Father, we are overwhelmed by these pictures, these portraits, of the grace You have extended us in forgiveness. To think that You would treat us in this way overwhelms us. But Father, we love You, and we want to understand even more of Your forgiveness. We want to live in the light of it.

But Father, now as we come to celebrate that forgiveness, at the same time we come asking for forgiveness; because while You have bathed our souls in justification, You have forgiven us in the court room of Your justice, yet as we walk through this world we accumulate dirt on our feet as Jesus reminded us. And Father, we need to seek Your forgiveness, no longer as our Judge [That's settled.) but as our Father whom we've offended. And so, we come today to celebrate Your forgiveness by asking for forgiveness.

Lord, forgive us for our sinful thoughts, forgive us for harboring resentment and anger and bitterness, forgive us for being proud and judgmental. Forgive us, O God, for being selfish, forgive us for lust, forgive us for anger allowed to fester in the heart. Forgive us, O God, for our words: words spoken in anger, words intended to hurt and harm rather than build up. Forgive us for slander and for lying, for intentionally misleading others to make ourselves look good. Father, forgive us for the ways we sin against You and break Your perfect laws with our tongue. Forgive us as well, O God, for our actions, acts of rebellion against You. Forgive us and cleanse us for Christ's sake.

And Father, allow us to partake of this reminder of what our Lord did in a way that honors His sacrifice.

We pray it in His name, Amen.