The Cycle of Forgiveness

          Maybe it is because I just finished watching “The Wheel of Time”, but thinking about how patterns repeat is on my mind.  (Maybe a review of “The Wheel of Time” will make a separate post).  It is a good thing to have our point of view, our perceptions, challenged sometimes, to consider other ways of how things occur.

          Under the Covenant that God has made with us, there is a cycle of forgiveness.  It is built into the structure that we, as humans, will be in need of God’s forgiveness.   And that structure of God’s forgiveness has certain pieces that have never changed, from the Old Testament into the New.

          First, it is ongoing.  There is never a time in this life when we can say “I am a sinner no longer.”  The idea of ‘original sin’ has been interpreted in many ways, some helpful and some not so helpful.  But it does help us to understand that sin is original to our very being.

          Second, forgiveness too is ongoing.  As we sin, we are called upon to confess.  We ask for God’s strength, we ask for God’s favor, we ask for God’s healing.  As we pray for those things, we receive them.  Our sinful inclinations and actions can be tempered, we can align ourselves more to the example of Christ.  But that is an ongoing process.

          Thirdly, ‘the wages of sin’ are death.  Paul says that in Romans, but it is the truth right along the history of the covenant.  It goes back to ‘an eye for an eye’, ‘blood for blood’.  Disobedience of God’s law, sinning, is first and foremost disobedience to the Almighty, calling for death as the penalty.  In the Law of Moses, the blood sacrifice was the means of atonement, was the means of providing the blood of an animal in place of the demand for the blood of the sinner.

          This is where the biggest change took place in Jesus.  Instead of the animal sacrifice, the blood sacrifice happened once for all in the perfect sacrifice, the blood of Jesus (the Lamb).  Jesus, the Son of God, who called equality with God as something not to be grasped, was the one whose sacrifice is sufficient for all people.  Thus, instead of the ways of the Old Testament, an entire industrial-religious complex of animal slaughter and meat distribution, which was never enough on its own, because the sacrifice always demanded the desire of the changed heart, we come to the Way of Christ.  We confess our sins, we desire the changed heart, and in the sacrifice of Christ, payment for our sins has been made.

          The Cycle of Forgiveness is ongoing.  To understand the vengeful and angry God of the Old Testament is to understand that this Cycle was no longer being followed.  Or was being followed out of rote and ritual, instead of true repentance and desire of change.  It is when the people turned away from God, stopped the Cycle of Forgiveness, that God’s intervention took place.  And it was never the final judgement. 

          When Israel was invaded or exiled or otherwise punished, it was for ending the provisions of the Covenant.  This happened most often when they turned to other gods, but there were moments of great prosperity in the lives of the people when they fell into the trap of believing in themselves to the exclusion of God.  Thankfully, God never used that as an excuse to end the Covenant.  God was always faithful, even if we were not.  Because if God were no so, if the Cycle of Forgiveness was not in place for us, we all carry the death sentence.