Romans
4:6-8 (ESV)
[6] just as David also speaks of the blessing of the one to
whom God counts righteousness apart from works:
[7] “Blessed
are those whose lawless deeds are forgiven,
and whose
sins are covered;
[8] blessed
is the man against whom the Lord will not count his sin.”
These are increasingly verses that
make no sense to our world. “Blessed are those who lawless deeds are forgiven
and whose sins are covered.”? But we haven’t sinned. We are taught to accept
ourselves as we are. We are taught to indulge every passion. The ultimate good
in our society is the ability to accept yourself. Yet in accepting oneself we
must then criticize, or even attack those who disagree with us. Evil is not
what I do, it is what you do. Forgiveness, then, is reserved for those closest
to me with the least offense against me. In fact we rarely hear talk of
forgiveness. We hear talk of acceptance and tolerance, but rarely forgiveness.
But what would we expect from those raised to believe that they can do no wrong?
But there is an hypocrisy in all
this. Intolerance is considered the greatest evil, yet we see passionate, angry
intolerance for those who are, in our minds, intolerant. Intolerance for the
intolerant is accepted as good. The standards that define good are fluid at
best. There is no foundation. No ground upon which to build a system of
morality. It is constantly changing like a piece of flotsam on the sea tossed
here and there, its position changing by the moment. No wonder our young people
are more anxious than any generation before. It is not Covid, or even screen
time increasing anxiety in our world, although that certainly contributes to
it. We live in a world where nothing is certain anymore. The words I use one
day are suddenly incorrect and intolerant the next. To explain our anxiety we
lash out at those with a fixed sense of morality. Law becomes evil.
It is law that reveals the depth of
our own sin. That can never happen in our new world of tolerance. I am okay. It’s
you that needs to be fixed. Thus I have nothing for which to be forgiven, and
yet there is an inner sense that something is wrong with me. Something is not
quite right. God calls it sin, but sin is an word of intolerance. We don’t
speak of sin. We speak of centering ourselves. We speaking of being “spiritual.”
But our spirituality is not something that demands anything of us. It serves
us. Therefore the idea that God would forgive is actually a message of
intolerance. It implies that I have done something wrong, that there is something
wrong with me. It offends us that God would forgive. And the Good News is lost.
Yet when we face our brokenness,
admit our sin, and find forgiveness, we find the brokenness in us is healed. We
find the anxiety is eased. We find solid ground upon which to stand. These
verses in Romans 4 become truly good news. God does not accept us because we
have reached a certain level of righteousness. He does not accept us because we
have learned to be good. He forgives us because he is a forgiving God who has
made a way of acceptance, through the death and resurrection of Jesus, entered
into by faith. All he calls us to is faith, but in believing we find that we are
truly accepted, made holy and whole, and empowered to live out a life we were designed
to live. Wholeness does not come by finding our center or becoming spiritual.
It comes by admitting our brokenness and believing God. “David also speaks of
the blessing of the one to whom God counts righteousness apart from works.” May
this generation find that blessing.
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