Unshackled Moments ~ October 3 ~ Justice Demands Satisfaction

A stone [is] heavy, and the sand [is] heavy, And the anger of a fool Is heavier than they both.

- Proverbs 27:3 Young's Literal Translation

I used to think that this proverb referred to the idea of something along the lines that it felt heavy to have a fool angry with you. But this morning it hit me how wrong I have always been as I read this verse. Perhaps it was the literal word for word translation I'm using for my current Bible study and how it reads so awkwardly that I can't skim over things, or maybe I was just ready to see it. I feel like that guy who gets the joke five minutes later, after the conversation has moved on, but I am the angry fool he's talking about, and so are you. This is a personal proverb. It's heavy carrying around rocks and bags of sand. And it's heavy carrying around anger. To do so after finding relationship with God and learning the freedom of forgiveness is to show oneself to be a fool.

But we love our anger. We like to hold onto it, and life doesn't feel right without it and our bag of pretty rocks. There is something that fears if we throw away our anchors we will float up, up and away like a helium balloon, until we snag on a tree or get too close to the sun and pop. We need to stay grounded and in control, and our anger helps us do that. Besides, we earned our anger with every wrong done to us. We have the right to be angry, and those same wrongs justify our selfishness and bad behavior excusing our actions and demanding that those who feel they have every right to be angry at us should get over it, let it go and forgive us already. After all, if they understood what we'd been through they'd understand we can't help being selfish jerks, it's a matter of survival. Yes, it's self defense.

But we won't float away. We might bounce a little, as though we are dancing on the moon, while we laugh with joy at the feeling of ZeroG(uilt). Yeah, I threw in the G word, because anger and guilt are an old married couple that refuse to go anywhere without the other. Saturday's Unshackled Moment, Have You Dubbed Thee Unforgiven?, dealt with how we have things backwards when we think that we have to earn our forgiveness by forgiving others first. There is more to say on the subject though, as forgiveness is the key to being able to walk away from playing the fool and growing wise. The awareness of our own forgiveness both leads to our forgiving others and depends on our ability to, by grace, allow the love of Jesus within us to produce the fruit of forgiveness in our life. Those who have  been forgiven much love much, and those who have been forgiven little love little (Luke 7:36-50). Forgiveness is the fuel for the engine of love.

Allow the love of Jesus within us to produce the fruit of forgiveness in our life. I just thought about how that sentence could sound like a bunch of Christian gobbly gook and religious double speak that sounds spiritual but doesn't really help. But I assure you it isn't. There is a reason I wrote that sentence the way that I did, and that is because we can't love and forgive. We need to quit trying. I can't forgive those selfish jerks who hurt me any more than the people I hurt can forgive my selfishness. Our pain doesn't really care what they've been through or why they stomped on us, only that we've been stomped. Sure, we can look at the person as though they are spiritually sick and treat them like they have terminal cancer, but that won't enable us to forgive.

We may be more restrained, and act less selfish and out for what's ours with the terminal patient, and therefore be able to act like we've let things go with those who hurt us when we see them as sick. It will help us pretend to forgive for a while. But that's why the pain continues to return, because the forgiveness is only on the surface and our will and determination can only control us and give us patience for so long, even with the sick. We don't have the power to forgive deeply and truly and without strings and forever, any more than we have the power to love unselfishly and to completely divorce our self from our motives or decide to stop sinning and actually be successful at that for more than five minutes or so.

We can't love, obey, serve with joy, stop being bad, control our own impulses and desires, much less eliminate and truly subjugate them on a core heart level, and we most certainly can not truly forgive the things that matter, the offenses that truly caused us pain and damage.. Because of that , we have trouble accepting our own forgiveness from God. We stumble on the chains of the past rather than strolling free from our shackles because while we know mentally that Jesus has paid for our forgiveness, we have no awareness of the reality of it. It's a theoretical concept rather than a weighty truth to us. We struggle with our own forgiveness because it feels too easy, it isn't fair and we don't deserve it. We should hurt or suffer, at least some, for the wrong we've done and the damage we've done in our own lives and the lives of others. It doesn't seem right that we can do what we have done  and simply say, "Sorry, my bad," and walk away without having to pay the  damages.

But that is one of the ways that we have forgiveness wrong and misunderstood. Forgiveness does not kill or even slight justice. Justice still demands her say and that the price be paid. It isn't that we get to walk away and nobody pays for the evil that we've done, and it also isn't that when we forgive that the evil done to us goes unanswered. No, forgiveness doesn't erase the debt. It erases our debt. And not because the debt isn't paid, but the opposite. Our debt is paid for on the cross by Jesus, who died the death we deserved. Justice demands payment and receives it.

When we accept the  price Jesus paid so that we can become the children of God, which includes being forgiven and having the perfect status of sinless Jesus attributed to our filthy lives, we have the Spirit of the Living God actually come into our lives and make His home, His place of comfort and peace sometimes referred to in religion as His abode, within us. This gives us the ability to fellowship and commune with Him and it also places the higher outside power of the Creator in us. Through the access of God's power that we gain when we become His, we learn how to walk by grace and by the power of the Spirit. Those are just spiritual ways of saying God in us does for us and with us what we can't do ourselves. God in us stops doing things that destroy us. God in us starts doing things that bring us life. God in us submits to God above us and finds joy and peace in service to God and others. God in us loves unselfishly, even the enemy, the stranger and the outcast. God in us, the same God who loved us enough to die for us and forgive us as He hung on that cross, forgives those who have hurt us.

He has every right to say the debt is paid, because He's the One who paid it, and He, more than anyone else, knows the cost and that it was covered in full. So as we see the love transforming us and find ourselves able to forgive others we also find it more believable to accept that we too have been forgiven. We become aware that we are forgiven, we can walk in the joy of being debt free. And when we understand God's love for us and how much our forgiveness cost Him on the cross in order to satisfy justice, we find it natural and easier to forgive and love others without demanding payment, or our interest on the payment that Christ made.

You see, the truth is that there are not two categories of people, one group that has been forgiven much and one group that has been forgiven little. No, we have all been forgiven so much that we actually deserve to die to pay the price and balance the scales of justice. All of us. But there is one group of people who are aware of how much they need forgiveness and one group of people who actually believe they're not that bad and don't really need forgiveness. Those are the people who love much and love little, and it is tied, as most things are, to self. We've lived with our self for so long that we've become spiritually nose blind and get to where we no longer detect the stench of death and decay in our pits. But the truth is that we are in serious need of purification and cleaning.

And when we reject the price that Jesus paid for our sins and for the sins of others, we wrap ourselves in an empowering cloak of anger that hides our stench from ourselves and demands interest on a debt that has been paid. We're spiritual loan sharks. Jesus paid the bill.  He paid with suffering and death on the cross. He paid with the weight of my sin and yours and the entirety of humanity suddenly thrust upon His perfect and clean conscious. He paid. And when we say it isn't enough, that forgiveness is too cheap and easy and demand to pay or extract interest by somehow doing more to deserve it or demanding it be deserved from others, what we are really saying is that we don't understand the cost of the cross.

When we hold onto anger we go through life trying to pay interest on a paid debt and trying to demand payment and interest from those who  do not owe. That makes us fools. But when we surrender our anger, place our right to be angry on the altar with everything else that is a part of us, the good and the bad, we give God in us the access and ability to forgive through us. We see that Jesus not only paid the price for our sin but for the sin of those who hurt us. It's not so much about excusing the sinner because they reacted from the pain of their sickness when they hurt us. It's about justice demanding to be satisfying, no excuses allowed, somebody has to pay and then seeing that somebody did pay so that person's debt is no longer owed us.

But our recognizing the debt is paid doesn't make anything easy, nor does it let anyone get away free without payment. One day we will all stand before a God who is every bit as much Justice as He is Love. We will see our sin for what it is and understand the price that must be paid for it, separation from sinless God. Then we will see the price being paid by Jesus on the cross, and if we accepted that payment and our need for it, we will find that we owe nothing because a heavy price was indeed paid. But if we didn't believe we had a debt, or tried to pay it ourselves, or tried to pay it with counterfeit funds rather than the sacrifice of Jesus, we will find ourselves facing owing the totality of our part of the check and unable to pay.

That's the issue with the interest. When we don't accept our forgiveness as costing enough and try to earn it or deserve it, we reject the work of Christ. We either owe the entire debt, or we owe nothing. We either accept the payment of Jesus or we don't. Jesus never made any partial payments. He said it is completely finished and paid for. So, today let us walk in the truth and freedom that we have been forgiven. Let us ask the Lord to make us aware of how much we needed it and how much it cost and in that awareness find access to the gratitude and grace to in turn love and forgive much. Let us stop demanding interest of a paid debt, both of ourselves and of others. And let us sacrifice the anger that weighs us down on the altar of forgiveness and learn to laugh in our lightness when we realize that our debt is paid, their debt is paid, all debt is paid and justice is satisfied.



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