You Are Forgiven

Since the law has only a shadow of the good things to come and not the true form of these realities, it can never, by the same sacrifices that are continually offered year after year, make perfect those who approach. (10:1)

The law and the sacrificial system were not the true form or the deeper reality, only the shadows. This system could never make perfect those who desired to approach God. The blood of the bulls and goats was only a shadow of the reality of the blood of the Lamb.

The same is true of the law itself. The law was always outside of us, always judging, never helping. The law, also, was only a shadow. God’s true desire was to write the law on our hearts, so that it would not be outside of us judging us, but inside of us truly encouraging us. And it was prophesied by Jeremiah:

But this is the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel after those days, says the LORD: I will put my law within them, and I will write it on their hearts; and I will be their God, and they shall be my people. (31:33)

This prophecy became a reality in the cross and in the resurrection of Jesus. The author of Hebrews repeats this prophecy from Jeremiah, saying that this new covenant is now established by Jesus—no longer will the law be our judge (Hebrews 10). It will now be written in our hearts as God’s act of love, because the law, rightly understood, is “sweeter . . . than honey” (Psalm 19:10).

This actually upholds the law in its original intention. Paul, no doubt, heard people object by asking, “What then of the law?” when he taught that the cross was final. He writes, “Do we then overthrow the law by this faith? By no means! On the contrary, we uphold the law” (Romans 3:31). Imagine it this way: Let’s say you try to instill right and wrong into a child. To make sure they know right from wrong, you put a copy of the Ten Commandments into their coat pocket. When they are away from you, they are tempted to break the commandments that are written on the paper—they want to keep the commandments, but they fail. Now imagine those same commandments are written “on their heart,” meaning they truly embrace them. Now, when they are faced with temptation, they say no because it is the deep desire of their heart.

Salvation is not only the forgiveness of sins; salvation involves a change of heart. When we experience the abundant life of Jesus, sin becomes “slop,” to use Dallas Willard’s fitting term—it becomes garbage. When we have been set free from the guilt of sin, we are also set free from the power of sin. Salvation is about being caught up in a new way of living, of life with Jesus in his unshakable kingdom, being rescued from the kingdom of darkness and transferred into the kingdom of God’s beloved Son (Colossians 1:13).

Jesus, then, is “the end of the law so that there may be righteousness for everyone who believes” (Romans 10:4). Jesus is the end in the sense that the law is no longer our judge, and Jesus is the end in the sense that the law has been completed by the work of Jesus on the cross. The very last words of Jesus on the cross are, “It is finished” (John 19:30). The Greek word for finished is tetelestai, which means “paid in full.” It was the word people stamped on an unpaid bill once it had been paid. Tetelestai means the debt of our sin has been paid in full; nothing more needs to be paid. This is why the apostles said, “All the prophets testify about him that everyone who believes in him receives forgiveness of sins through his name” (Acts 10:43).

Jesus didn’t cover up sin, like the bulls and goats did, he took away sin. In fact, thanks to Jesus the sacrificial system was no longer the means to forgiveness, and the bulls and goats rejoiced! But many Christians, including myself, have replaced bulls and goats with confession. I would never have thought about getting my “sin account” with God settled by sacrificing an animal, but I was fully comfortable with the idea of viewing my heartfelt confession as a replacement for the goats. But since “it is finished” I no longer need to confess in order to get forgiven, in the same way I do not need a high priest to put an animal on the altar for my sins.

The idea that we must confess our sins in order to be forgiven is a deeply entrenched narrative. So much so that when I have taught the finality of the cross (and I have done so for years), I have received incredible pushback. After a lot of study, I concluded that this narrative is based on one, and only one, verse in the New Testament. It is this: “If we confess our sins, he who is faithful and just will forgive us our sins and cleanse us from all unrighteousness” (1 John 1:9). There is not another verse in the New Testament that equates sins being forgiven on the basis of confession. This entrenched narrative is largely due to Christianity’s roots in Judaism and the Old Testament, where, as we saw, there is no forgiveness of sins without the shedding of blood.

Do you recognize the false narrative that God’s forgiveness requires our confession? Or is this a new idea for you to ponder and identify?

And yet, this single verse is responsible for Christians believing that the forgiveness of our sins is dependent on our confession. When I teach on the finality of the cross, invariably someone quotes 1 John 1:9. But here is the truth about this verse—it only makes sense in light of the verse that precedes it. First John 1:8 reads, “If we say that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us.” There were people in the early Christian community who taught that they no longer sinned, that they were enlightened and transformed and could say, “I have no sin.” John is essentially responding with this: The truth is not in these people. But if we confess our sins, meaning, if we acknowledge we are sinners, God is faithful to forgive us our sins.

And note how many of our sins: all of them. Simply saying, “I am a sinner,” simply admitting that we have sin, enables God to “cleanse us from all unrighteousness.” Not some unrighteousness, but all unrighteousness. When you read 1 John 1:9 in the proper context, it actually supports the finality of the cross. So what then of confession —is confession of no value? What is confession for?

Confession is of great value; it is for healing, not forgiveness. James 5:16 reads, “Therefore confess your sins to one another, and pray for one another, so that you may be healed.” We confess in order to be healed—confession is the road to healing. In confession, whether to God or to a person, we bring our sins to the light and in doing so the power of sin is broken.

Ironically, after I understood and embraced the finality of the cross, I confessed more, and more often. But I have never asked God to forgive me again. That would be an insult to Jesus and his finished work. I confess my sins not to get God to forgive me, but to talk with God about why I sinned, what triggered me to sin when I knew better. I no longer ask God to forgive my sins—God has already done that sufficiently. I now ask God to help me not to sin.

After a year of study, I came to believe that this teaching about the finality of the cross was biblical. But did church tradition support this teaching? Did the great theologians and spiritual writers of the past hold to this view? I decided to ask the question to my mentor, Dallas Willard. First I wanted to see if Dallas himself believed in the finality of the cross, and second to see if he knew of other famous Christian leaders who believed it. I explained how I had listened to the AM radio preacher, gone to the retreat, and studied the Bible, and had come to the conclusion that Jesus died for all of our sins, once and for all.

“So, is this true? Is this biblically accurate?” I asked Dallas.

“Yes,” he answered.

Then he uttered a line so moving I had to scribble it down on a napkin, and I have never forgotten it. “It is a wonderful thing to know that God is no longer dealing with us on the basis of our sins,” Dallas said.

God is no longer dealing with us on the basis of our sins!

“So, you believe this?” I asked.

“Of course, and so did Luther and Calvin and Wesley,” Dallas said.

I would come to see that he was right.

Martin Luther built his reforming theology on the idea of the Latin term sola: sola fide (only by faith), sola gratia (only by grace), and solus Christus (only by Christ). Salvation is all the work of God, and not of ourselves.

Take a few minutes to write down “God is no longer dealing with us on the basis of our sins.” Reflect and write down what this means to you.

John Calvin gave us the term wondrous exchange. When God became human in the person of Jesus, God took on our humanity. Jesus fully identified with our sinful state and felt the full assault of evil. Jesus is the bridge between us and God. In the words of theologian Thomas Torrance, Jesus took on every human form of suffering and alienation and “endured it with joy, refusing to let go of God for our sakes, and refusing to let go of us for God’s sake. Jesus presented us also before God, so that we are already accepted of God in him once and for all.”

And John Wesley had his heart strangely warmed by the finality of the cross on May 24, 1738. He went to Christian fellowship one evening, where he heard a man reading the preface to Luther’s Commentary on Romans, and later wrote in his journal, “While he [Luther] was describing the change which God works in the heart through faith in Christ, I felt my heart strangely warmed. I felt I did trust in Christ, Christ alone for salvation; and an assurance was given me that He had taken away my sins, even mine, and saved me from the law of sin and death.” Most Methodists mark this event as the beginning of the Methodist movement, a movement that would turn England upside down in the eighteenth century and the United States in the nineteenth. Luther, Calvin, and Wesley came to believe, as Dallas said so well, that God was no longer dealing with us on the basis of our sins, a teaching so profound it sparked movements that have changed the world.

One time, after preaching a sermon on the finality of the cross, a man came up to me afterward and said, “You are a dangerous preacher.” I really liked the sound of that: dangerous preacher. But seriously, I wanted to know what he meant.

He said, “If we are forgiven forever by the cross, we then have a license to sin.”

I said, “Well, that is true. We can sin if we choose to. But let me ask this, how are you doing without your license to sin? Is that working for you?”

He paused, and then got quiet, and finally confessed, “No, it is not working very well. I am struggling with sin all of the time. I assumed that I needed guilt to help me not sin.”

I said, “Guilt is not a good long-term motivator. The better motivator is love. I have come to believe that guilt only makes the problem worse. I feel so bad about my sin that I seem to want to sin more. But the finality of the cross has actually made me feel God’s love in a deep way, and I am less inclined to sin.”

He said it made sense, and I told him, “Your way isn’t working. Why not give this a try for a while? Test it against what the Bible teaches, and then give it a try.”

A year later he came to where I was preaching, but he had a new look on his face. He said he was living in the freedom of the finality of the cross, and his battles with sin were greatly diminished. The finality of the cross is not about giving us a license to sin all we want; it is about the freedom to let God love us and to love God in return.

If we fail to recognize that the issue of sin between us and God is over, it will be impossible to grow in our faith; it will stunt our spiritual growth. We will forever be working to “get right and stay right” with God. But if we truly believe in the finality of the cross, we can stop focusing on sin and start focusing on our life with God. I have come to believe that our spiritual formation is learning to give more and more areas of our life to Jesus by faith. Put simply, how can we trust Christ with our lives if we are unsure of his attitude toward us? When I embraced my complete forgiveness in Christ, a new energy came into my body and soul, and my desire for sin became less and less.

Are you unsure of God’s attitude toward you? What is your belief about how God views you?

God forgave us all our trespasses, erasing the record that stood against us, nailing it to the cross (Colossians 2:13-14). Every time I hear the hymn “It Is Well with My Soul,” my heart soars during the third verse: “My sin—oh, the bliss of this glorious thought! / My sin—not in part but the whole, / Is nailed to His cross and I bear it no more; / Praise the Lord, praise the Lord, oh my soul.” Our sins, not in part but the whole—past, present, and future—have been nailed to the cross, and we bear them no more, forever.

In doing this for us, God made it possible for you and me to be made alive. This is what Bob George meant when he said, over and over, “Until you rest in the finality of the cross, you will never experience the reality of the resurrection.” The reality of the resurrection, being made alive by Christ, can only happen when the issue of our sin is over. Now we can live as new creations and sing and dance in the kingdom of God’s beloved Son.