208 - Pursuing Peace: Conflict Resolution, Reconciliation, Forgiveness, and Love - Part 2 [C]

 Hebrews Lesson 208
August 26, 2010

^NKJ Hebrews 4:12 For the word of God is living and powerful, and sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing even to the division of soul and spirit, and of joints and marrow, and is a discerner of the thoughts and intents of the heart.

We are studying in Hebrews 12, the verse (Hebrews 12:14) dealing with the topic of pursuing peace with all men. 

^NKJ Hebrews 12:14 Pursue peace with all people, and holiness, without which no one will see the Lord:

Now I've already gone through the verse as a whole, but I came back (2 or 3 lessons back) to deal with this topic of pursuing peace. How do we pursue peace with people? There are basically two groups of people that we pursue peace with: those that will be responsive to the attempt to pursue peace and those that won't. Those who will be responsive may not be right away; it may be a difficult endeavor. 

It involves humility. Whenever there is any level of conflict between people, there has to be humility on the part of both people in order for reconciliation to take place. On the other hand, we know that there are some people that are just so mired in their own arrogance and self-absorption. Their own anger, bitterness, resentment or whatever may have caused the breach in the relationship that they are not going to respond to any overtures on your part or on the part of the other person. 

You get into lot of different mechanics in any kind of a relational breakdown. Whenever there are conflicts, there are perceptions that each person has that they bring to the conflict resolution. There are many times people who come and they just want to be proven right. Well, they're not very teachable or humble. They're coming from a position of arrogance. Whenever one or more of the parties are coming together from the position of arrogance it is very difficult to reach true, genuine reconciliation between the two parties no matter who is guilty or who is not. So it's important to understand basic dynamics of understanding key concepts in any sort of conflict resolution. 

These come back to four words that have their root very deep into the Old Testament. These four words that we see are peace, reconciliation, forgiveness and love. Those four words come together in any process of conflict resolution. 

Of course as we studied in the first couple of lessons to understand conflict resolution and how we as believers in the Lord Jesus Christ are to be involved in conflict resolution, we really need to start with the pattern that we have that God has given us which is how God resolves the conflict with man. We have to understand the basis for that conflict with man, which always goes back to arrogance. That's what was seen in the Garden of Eden. 

As soon as the serpent comes along and addresses Eve and says, "Has God really said?" And the way the serpent asked that question really front-loaded her thinking to get her pointed in the wrong direction. 

That happens a lot of times in life. People ask us questions. If we answer the question, there is no right answer to the question, and we get sucked into a wrong position just by answering the question. 

Somebody goes up to a guy and says, "Well, have you stopped beating your wife yet?" 

If you say yes or no, you're in trouble. 

You have to stop and think about it and say, "Well, let me address that from another angle. I never beat my wife."

So you have to stop and think. If you don't stop and think and you just answer it, Proverbs says:

^NKJ Proverbs 26:4 Do not answer a fool according to his folly…

The idea in that proverb is don't let the way that the other person thinks (if it's a fallacious way) suck you into their framework because once you get into that framework then you are starting to think the way they think and you get caught in a trap. 

From the very beginning there is this problem with arrogance. Eve gets sucked right into the trap by the question the serpent asks: "Has God said?" 

The idea there isn't just the question of did God make that statement? There's the implication. Is God right in making this prohibition that you can't eat from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil? When it's phrased that way, it's calling upon Eve to answer in terms of making a value judgment on God. 

Now think about this a minute. If God is the ultimate authority in the universe – and by definition that is who God is. He's the ultimate being, the ultimate person in the universe. Biblically speaking He is the creator of all the heavens and the earth so He stands outside of creation. He is unique, as we've seen in various studies. We did it again on Sunday morning in many passages from the Old Testament that talk about God as the unique God. There is no god like the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob – then He becomes the standard himself. He is the one who sets the standard.  He's the one who sets all of the values of what is right and what is wrong. All of the norms and standards are determined by God because He is the one who creates everything. He's the one who creates everyone and He's the one who writes the owners' manual and puts it down in a PDF file. And we've got a copy of it here just to bring it into a modern illustration. We have the owner's manual. He as the creator-designer-builder-engineer is the one who has the right (and the only one has the right) to describe what the do's and don'ts are and to put into the owner's manual what the proper systems of maintenance are and everything else.

But when the serpent comes along and he asks Eve this question, he's asking her to make a judgment on the owners' manual. Of course the owner's manual is very short at that time. It's just don't eat from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. So she on the basis of a limited amount of knowledge – however long she'd been in the Garden of Eden whether it's a couple of days or a couple years or a couple of decades really doesn't matter – a finite amount of knowledge based on what she has directly experienced, what she has learned or experienced indirectly through what she's learned from her husband Adam or what she has learned from God as we're told God came and walked in the garden with them on a day-to-day basis. So she has a finite amount of knowledge, and this is set in contrast to God who has how much knowledge? According to the Bible He has unlimited knowledge, infinite knowledge. It has no boundaries to it. He knows everything that can possibly be known. He knows all of the things that will happen, could happen, or would have happened if this other thing had happened. 

So what Satan is doing is asking a finite creature whose knowledge could be measured by analogy to a grain of sand and the knowledge of God would be equivalent to all the grains of sand on all of the planets in all of the solar systems in all the galaxies in the whole universe. So on the basis for her microscopic grain of sand, she is asked to judge or evaluate the validity and veracity of this owner's manual. 

So she looks at it and falls right into the trap and says, "I can do that." That is just pure arrogance to think that on such limited knowledge she can judge or evaluate God. That's what starts the conflict. Now how is this conflict going to be resolved - because once the conflict enters, then you have all sorts of unintended consequences? The next thing that happened was Adam sins. 

The next thing that happens is God's shows up and says, "Well, where are y'all hiding; and why are you hiding?" 

He points out what the problem is, what the consequences are going to be, and He begins to teach them and to give them certain images and action in terms of sacrifice, clothing them with the skins of animals, things like that all designed within His omniscient framework to build in their thinking and the thinking of the subsequent generations a framework for understanding how the conflict is going to be resolved. 

What you see when you start studying the Bible and you start in the book of Genesis is that God begins to give information incrementally. He doesn't just do an information dump on Adam and hand him Schaffer's Systematic Theology, Baker Bible Dictionary, Logos Bible program and a computer and say, "Okay, here's everything you need to know." He recognizes that in the learning process you have to start off with basic simple sentences, propositions and images and then build upon those. As the centuries go by He continues to build upon and develop and to expand upon the same basic themes (the same basic ideas) over and over again; and each time you come back and He does this, He adds a little more. Each thing that He adds doesn't detract from what was there before, but it adds to it and gives it more complexity. And it's all pointing ahead to something that is going to be the ultimate resolution to the conflict.

Now that's you're opening illustration for tonight, and I'm going to come back to that in a little bit when we get into the passage that I want to look at this evening so that we can once again come to understand what the New Testament is teaching us within the framework of this build that God has from the Old Testament.

So last time, just to remind you of where we come in this study, I talked some about the mandates in Scripture in terms of reconciliation with people. I went to Matthew 7 dealing with Jesus' Sermon on the Mount in Matthew 7:1:

^NKJ Matthew 7:1 "Judge not, that you be not judged.

Then as Jesus is teaching about why we should not be involved in hypocritical or arrogant critical, negative critical evaluation of others. And I pointed out that the Bible never says we shouldn't evaluate other people. We do that all the time. If you are an employer, and you're going to hire somebody you have to evaluate them. You have to judge them. If you are a teacher and you have to fill out grades at the end of the six weeks you have to judge your students activities. So we judge people in a positive sense all the time; and it's good. 

But what Jesus is talking about in Matthew 7 is making negative, arrogant, harsh judgments about a person's spiritual life based on your own understanding, even if you might be right saying, "You know. That person's carnal. Or that person is a spiritual loser."

Now there are certain things that some people do that are clear and obvious and overt; and everybody knows that. But that's not our job to be their spiritual judge and evaluator within the framework of Christianity. That's not our job. We're to encourage other believers. So this is the point that we're not be out there trying to straighten everybody out according to whatever standards we have.

In fact when there are problems, Jesus gives us a guideline, Matthew 7:3-4 where He says:

^NKJ Matthew 7:3 "And why do you look at the speck in your brother's eye, but do not consider the plank in your own eye?

^NKJ Matthew 7:4 "Or how can you say to your brother, 'Let me remove the speck from your eye'; and look, a plank is in your own eye?

In other words, you're so concerned about this little idiosyncrasy in somebody else's life and this problem that they've created that in self absorption you have completely ignored the problems that you have or the role that you've played in contributing to the conflict and breakdown in the relationship. 

So Jesus points out basically that the place to start is that we have to evaluate ourselves in terms of objectively looking at our own life, our own contribution to the problem. Now we can conclude from that that either (a) we didn't contribute at all (b) our contribution was in a sort of general sense because of we're all imperfect. We all commit certain things, do certain things that are wrong or that are irresponsible or aren't as productive as they should be. So in some general sense there we can always look at something and say, "Well, if I had done this or if I had done that." Then the third thing is to recognize what I would call at direct contribution to a particular problem. We have to decide where we are and that's the focus of the self-evaluation. Are we just completely and totally innocent of anything? 

For example if you're in a contract with somebody and they're going to provide something for you. Let's say they're going to build a house for you. You give them a down payment of $20-30,000 to begin, and they abscond with that money, they have broken a contract. There is a breach in the relationship.  You've done nothing wrong; they've done something wrong. That's the first example.

The second example would be to work with somebody who's building a house. Over the period of time that the contractor begins to build on the house, you know - deadlines are missed. Maybe there are things that you were supposed to provide that you didn't get them provided in time. Something like just general things that happen living in a fallen world with the people who run late and make bad decisions, things like that. But it's nothing that's not reversible. That would be the second category.

The third category is where perhaps you have as the buyer that you have committed to the provision of certain things. You not only don't provide the things that you have committed to but you begin to (maybe) sabotage the building of the house. The builders are out there working for the day. The contractors and carpenters are out there during the day. At night you slip in there and begin to tear things down. So that is an example of where you are an active contributor to the breakdown of the relationship.

So we have to evaluate ourselves to see where are in terms of the spectrum. 

Now the problem that I pointed but the last time is some people have such a hypersensitive conscience that they'll always fail a lie detectors test. They'll go in and get all strapped up and you ask them, "Have you ever committed a crime?" They'll think about it and they'll say, "Oh I'm sure I have somewhere." They just immediately put themselves under a load of guilt. Immediately, as soon as somebody comes along and there is a conflict with someone – when that other person tries to avoid taking responsibility for the conflict and uses some various manipulative techniques he always assigns blame to the other person and make them accept blame – the person who has the really tender conscience is going to be the first person to say, "Okay, it's my fault. You're right. You're right." They haven't. So that's as bad as scenario as someone who's done everything wrong. I tried to point some of those things out last time. So we have to learn to work through these processes.

Now the illustrations that I'm using are illustrations that may not be as severe as we do find in people's lives. You have serious things that happen in people's lives in terms of business deals where there are people who breach contracts or they engage in fraudulent contracts. For example this last couple years everyone's familiar with the Bernie Madoff ponzi scheme. In a situation like that people's lives, their retirement, are virtually lost. They are ruined.  It's recoverable. Fortunes are destroyed. It's devastating. There are situations that occur within marriages that take place that cause terrible breaches within those relationships. There are things that happen between parents and children where children harbor resentment and anger for decades. Or parents harbor resentment. I know of families where children have grown up and they have been very ungrateful towards their parents. They've gotten involved in various illegal activities and drugs and drug use even to the point where the parents may have to completely wash their hands of any involvement with their children because of the way they have so irresponsibly been involved in criminal activity or drug use, things that nature. I know of a case within my extended family where this happened where one of my - something 4^th, 5^th, 6^th, 7^th, 8^th, 9^th cousins 15^th removed or whatever it is, just continuously did drugs, continuously got arrested. 

Finally his father, his mother had to say, "We're just going to cut you off completely. We can't do this anymore. We can't bail you out anymore. You're just going to have to take complete responsibility for their life." 

They didn't hear from him for twenty years. Think about that. Trying to resolve that is hard. Twenty years later he calls them up. He's married, has two kids. He's become a Christian. So there are a lot of hurt feelings there and you have to go through a process and deal with some of those issues that are still hanging or may still be hanging on. 

A little story about him is he and I went to high school together. I never could find him because he's always out behind the temporary buildings smoking dope with Dennis Quaid. He went back a long ways. When you have problems like that in a family and there are other things that happen within families.   It's really hard, really difficult to go through any kind of conflict resolution. 

That's when we have to go to the Scriptures, and we can't do this on our own. The Scripture say that the only way you can really truly do this. You can go through the motions but if you haven't dealt with the real internal heart issues and really learn what it means to biblically forgive somebody and to be reconciled with somebody. And it doesn't happen overnight. 

I remember the first time I saw some kids get in a fight in about the third grade and they had to kiss and make up. Well, they had to do the kiss and make up thing but they were fighting down the street after school that day because there was no resolution of the problem.

Scripture gives us the basics for this and it always goes back to the cross. That is why I keep emphasizing our understanding of the cross, thinking about the dynamics of what happens between God and man and that basic conflict that is from human perspective irreparable. Yet God provides the solution. That is always the pattern that the New Testament goes to if we are going to forgive one another and if there is going to be peace.

Tonight what I want to do is look at the passage in Ephesians 4:32ff. So turn with me in your Bibles to the 4^th chapter of Ephesians. Ephesians 4 and Ephesians 5 are two of the most challenging chapters for the Christian life that you'll find in the New Testament. The reason is that God's standard has never lowered. Just because you get on the other side of the cross (away from the Mosaic Law), doesn't mean the standard of God somehow lowers.   Grace doesn't mean the standard is lower. Grace means that God's relationship with us is not dependent on us keeping the standard. It means God relationship with us is dependent upon Him providing the solution for us having broken the standard. That's what grace is. It means that we don't have to go through 25 or 30 steps in order to then get God's forgiveness but that God gave that forgiveness freely on the basis of what Christ did on the cross. We just accept it. 

But when we get on the other side of that, it doesn't mean that there are no standards anymore. It doesn't mean that God doesn't expect a behavioral code out of us. What it does say is that our ultimate relationship (that family relationship with God) is not based on meeting those standards. 

But He is saying, "Okay. Now you're a member of my family. You can't ever lose that status. That status has been given to you freely because you trusted in Christ as your Savior. You're in the family. But if you're going to be part of his family, there are some things that we do and some things that we don't do. Here are the standards."

Now we're all going to break most of these (a lot of time) depending on various factors, but the recognition in the Scriptures is a realistic one. It is that we sin. We fail. But that does not mean we have to start over again. It doesn't mean we go to jail. It doesn't mean we go back to square one. It means that God meets us where we are with forgiveness. That is always the pattern.

So we'll look at Ephesians 4 and starting in verse 25 where we have a series of eleven imperative mood verbs. An imperative is just a command from God that this is the standard according to which my family members are going to live – just like if you were parent. I see a number of parents here. When you were a parent raising your children you said: "This is the way you're going to live if you're going to be in my house and you're my child. You're going to follow these rules." When kids broke the rules there was a punishment, but they didn't get kicked out of the house. They remained members of the family. 

The first imperative is in verse 25. The command is to speak the truth with his neighbor. Now in the first part of that verse you see the "ing" word there: "putting away lying". That's a participle in the Greek. It should be understood as an instrumental participle. "Let each of you speak truth with his neighbor by putting away lying." It's a description of you take off lying, you get rid of it, and you speak the truth. That's the positive command. 

The second is in verse 26 where you have another present imperative. Now all of these with the exception of one in verse 31 are present tense imperatives. Now the difference between a present tense imperative in the Greek and an aorist tense imperative in the Greek is a present tense is emphasizing something that is supposed to be ongoing, standard operating procedure. This is supposed to characterize your life day in, day out. This is expressing an ongoing standard. When the writer shifts to an aorist tense, (We don't have anything comparable to an aorist tense in English), it's sort of a summary type tense. But outside of the indicative mood, tenses don't have time factors in Greek so you're either talking about it in terms of continuous action or you're just punching something. So an aorist imperative is like you're taking the commandment and you're putting it in bold face. It is sort of saying this is supposed to be a priority. It's just for emphasis. So you have this whole string of present imperatives: "speak the truth". 

^NKJ Ephesians 4:26 "Be angry,…

Be angry. It's a passive imperative there; and so we recognize that it is valid to be angry in some areas. This is a self-righteous anger. Be angry. But the flip side is –

and do not sin

So it's an anger where there is no sin involved. They're not going to allow a sinful response to come out of the anger. 

Then the third imperative in that verse is:

do not let the sun go down on your wrath,

Or, down on your anger. In other words, deal with it. Don't let it fester. Don't let it be something that you sleep on and keep in your memory so that you keep a record of these offenses and someday when the time is right you just get mad you bring up your grocery list and read off all the things the other person has done wrong. You have to deal with it before the day is over with and set it aside. The hardest thing for us to do, especially in the conflicts that have hurt us deeply and profoundly, is to set that aside and act is if it never happened and to truly live and think as if it never happened.

^NKJ Ephesians 4:26 "Be angry, and do not sin": do not let the sun go down on your wrath,

Then third is don't give place or give an opportunity to the devil. Now that all needs to be understood together that when we are become angry and if we sin it gives an opportunity to the devil in the sense that that it gives us an opportunity through sin to continue to spiral out of control into more and more mental attitude sins or sins of the tongue as we react to this conflict that has been generated.

^NKJ Ephesians 4:28 Let him who stole steal no longer,

That's the imperative. Do not steal any longer. In contrast:

but rather let him labor, working with his hands what is good, that he may have something to give him who has need.

This is a great verse in the Bible. In several places you have in both the New Testament and Old Testament the emphasis on the importance of labor, not as a negative toilsome thing but the importance of work. In Thessalonians Paul says if you don't work, you don't eat. Period! In the Old Testament you have various passages back in the Mosaic Law emphasizing the value of work. Why? Work mirrors what God did in the six days of the creation week. He labored. That is the very first picture that we see of God as creator, as a laborer, as someone who is creating and working with all of the elements in order to make the solar system, make the planets, make the earth, make all of the creatures upon the earth. Labor is good. It's valuable. It's part of our makeup to imitate that in the image of God. So we are to labor. We are not to rely upon other people's labor and other people's productivity in order to benefit us.  This is a verse that is a direct contradiction to the whole philosophy of socialism and the whole philosophy of Marxism. 

It is going to surprise some of you when you get to heaven to discover that Karl Marx is going to be there. I'm just going to warn you and prepare you for this right now.

Karl Marx was born into Jewish family. His father converted to Christianity when he was about thirteen or fourteen years of age. It wasn't long after that Karl did as well. He was a very enthusiastic Christian. He was very devoted for about 5 years before he decided he didn't like Christianity anymore.  During that time when he was in high school he wrote a paper on justification by faith. My friend John Hense who is pastor of Tucson Bible Church has lost this somewhere in his file cabinet. But he read it some years ago when he told me, "Robby, it's the finest explanation of the New Testament Doctrine of Justification By Faith Alone that you will ever read. It's impossible for somebody to have written that who didn't believe it." 

I've seen this documented in a number of places. So just get ready. You never know who's going to end up in heaven because God is gracious. There are people who will see you there and wonder: how'd they get here? 

So we're to labor. Labor is honorable; and we're to live on the basis of our own work. That's all part of divine institution #1, human responsibility. 

^NKJ Ephesians 4:28 …working with his hands what is good, that he may have something to give him who has need.

That's the principle. Something parents ought to instill in their children is that as a believer part of your responsibility is to work hard, be productive, so that you have an excess that can be used to help those who just can't help themselves. All way through Scripture there's an emphasis on helping those who are unable. It's not that they could work; but they don't. It's that they just can't. Whether it's disease, whether it's age, whatever the situation may be, they are unable to take care of themselves. And so we are to be involved and to work hard, have a high standard. When you start them off in life as eight-year-old, ten-year-old, twelve-year-old, parents ought to be instilling in them to have a vision for making enough money to take care of other people. Don't have a selfish little ideal that you're just going to take care of yourself, but that you should excel as a Christian so that you have an abundance that you can then generously and graciously use to help those who have need.

^NKJ Ephesians 4:29 Let no corrupt word proceed out of your mouth, but what is good for necessary edification, that it may impart grace to the hearers.

That's verse 29.

Then in verse 30, the command:

^NKJ Ephesians 4:30 And do not grieve the Holy Spirit of God, by whom you were sealed for the day of redemption.

This is just one command in the midst of these 11 or so imperatives here. Don't grieve the Holy Spirit. 

Then I think that the relationship of the next verse is directly related to that. That's why we shift from a present tense to an aorist imperative. The aorist imperative sort of punctuates everything that's been said. And we were going to have a staccato effect here as Paul says, "Let all bitterness, wrath, anger, clamor, evil, evil speaking be put away from you with all malice." Notice this is just boom, boom, boom, boom. They're all either mental attitude sins or in the sense of evil speaking, sins of the tongue. These are always the worst sins. Most people go to 5 or 6 of their favorite overt sins. 

It's always interesting to ask people, "How do you define sin? What do you think sin is?"

Some people say, "Well, sin is smoking, drinking, and dancing. Sin is doing this or doing that." Or, they'll define sin in terms of whatever the current vogue social sins are that are big in that culture at that particular time in history. 

What is sin? Sin is any action, any thought, any deed that violates the character of God, that falls short of His standard. That's what the Hebrew word chattaah means – to fall short of a standard. 

So God sets the standard. Any time you fall short of that standard which is absolute perfection you have sinned. You've fallen short. When you violate a commandment, that's called a transgression. Both Old Testament and New Testament words have that same idea violating a standard. So sin is anything that falls short of God's absolute standard. It is missing the mark, falling short of the target. 

^NKJ Ephesians 4:31 Let all bitterness, wrath, anger, clamor, and evil speaking

These are all mental attitude sins. 

be put away from you, with all malice.

Then we have a contrast here. This is the verse I want to look at, verse 32. 

^NKJ Ephesians 4:32 And be kind to one another, tenderhearted,

This is modified. What does it mean to be kind to one another?

The next word is translated "to be tenderhearted." That means soft.

forgiving one another, just as God in Christ forgave you.

The key word is charizomai. The imperative is to be kind to one another. Now there are all kinds of things we can say about being kind. But we all know what "kind" is and sometimes at the end of the day it's a little convicting to say, "Was I really kind to people today?" 

At the end of the day somebody says, "Well, I saw you down at the grocery store talking to the person at the cash register. That wasn't really kind." 

Are you known for being a kind person? That's part of being grace oriented.

And be kind to one another, tenderhearted,

Now how is this kindness expressed? This is why grammar is important. In English you don't see it by looking. You see three things here: to be kind to one another. It's almost as if you have three commands: be kind of one another, be tender hearted, and be forgiving of one another. That is not what it means in the Greek. In the Greek it says to be kind to one another. Tender hearted has the idea of being compassionate, and it modifies or helps explain a little bit of what it means to be kind. Then forgiveness there (charizomai) in a participial form, and it's an instrumental adverb there indicating that you're kind to one another by forgiving them. That's how you demonstrate kindness. It is by forgiving somebody of the things, the violations, the hurt feelings, the breaches that they have generated or the conflicts that they've generated.

"And be kind to one another, tenderhearted by forgiving one another." 

Then we get the comparison. Don't be kind like your grandfather was. Don't be kind like the man down the street was or like your Sunday school teacher was. You are to be kind by forgiving one another just as God in Christ forgave you. That's the standard: as God in Christ forgave you.

Then the next verse (most of the time we don't read verse 1 immediately after verse 32 because there's a chapter division there, and sometimes there's a heading) should be read:

"Be kind to one another, tenderhearted by forgiving one another even as God in Christ forgave you. Therefore (command again) be imitators of God as dear children."

That is the pattern. If you're going to understand forgiveness that means then you have to go to what God does for the individual human being at the point of salvation. This is when we experience forgiveness and what forgiveness means. The word here that is translated forgiving is that the broader word. It's charizomai. Charis is the noun for grace so it has the idea being gracious to somebody. Grace is something that is undeserved and unmerited. So we are kind to one another by being gracious to them in the arena of forgiveness. When they have committed some fault against us, then we are going to charidomai them. That means we're going to wipe the slate clean. It's a word that is used in economic contests and monetary contests of wiping out a debt, of erasing the debt. 

When your erase the debt, you're not going to come back a year later and say, "I think that I need to remind you the fact that you still owe me $500." 

See you don't do that. You have erased the debt. You don't ever bring it up again. That ties us back to the idea in verse 26 of not letting the sun go down on your wrath. There is an eradication in your mind of this fault. You're not going to bring it up again. You're not going to think about it again. The next time you get angry with that person, you're not going to resurrect this list of faults in the past because they've been put in the shredder. And then the shredder has been emptied into the big hefty, big black hefty plastic garbage bag that has been put up the street and taken away. It's not an issue anymore. That's what it means to wipe out that debt. That's what forgiveness is. We forget completely about the previous faults. That's what God has done for us.

Now for many of us, when we sit down we think about what did God do for us we realize how many ways in which we have in small ways to large ways, broken God's commandment. Whether we think of the Ten Commandments, all the many mandates from the Old Testament to New Testament we break these time and time again.  

There are times when we know that our priorities aren't what God wants our priority to be.  Our values aren't what God's values are. There are many different things that we do that are wrong. But we do them, and we will continue to do them. That's not justifying it, it is a reality that we will do that; so get over yourself and don't be on a guilt trip. That's why we have grace. We are forgiven by God and He wipes the slate clean because He has provided the ultimate solution.

Now how did He do that? This is where I wanted go back into the Old Testament and point out a couple of things so that we can understand forgiveness.  So I want you to turn to Leviticus 3. We'll go back to the Torah. Leviticus 3 and we'll look at one of the offerings that you had in the tabernacle and temple, the peace offering. 

Now while you're turning there, I want to read to you a definition out of the Concise Oxford English Dictionary for forgiveness. The verb "forgive" means according to the Oxford English Dictionary to stop feeling angry or resentful toward somebody for an offence or a mistake, to stop feeling angry or resentful towards someone for something. That is the same thing that we have in this list of the mandates at the end of Ephesians 4.

^NKJ Ephesians 4:26 "Be angry, and do not sin": do not let the sun go down on your wrath,

In other words you're not going to maintain that feeling of anger. You're not going to maintain that feeling of resentment. You're going to move forward and wipe it out and forget about it. 

Forgiveness (the noun) is the action or the process of being forgiven. It's not a process of God but it's a process for us because what we tend to do is look at this thing that this person has done against us. We focus on the hurt. We focus on the way we have been betrayed. We put all focus on "look at what they did to me."

"Look at how I was betrayed!  How could they do that?"

We get so caught up in that that we just can't let it go. Then we come to Bible class and learn a lesson like this, and say: "I've got to let that go. So I'm going to forgive them even though they haven't asked me and they don't recognize that there's a wrong there. At least on my part there's going to be one category of forgiveness here and I'm not going to be bitter, resentful, have any mental attitude sins towards them." 

Then five minutes later you thought about it and you're starting to get mad again. We have to go through that process sometimes for days or weeks or months or years or decades before we finally sort of settle down and fully be able to apply the principle of forgiveness. And I'm a little bit facetious here when I say weeks and months and years. Some things are very serious and very hard for some people to get over. As long as you understand where you're headed and where you're moving and that you know you're going in the right direction. 

Some things you just can't flip a switch in some situations in life and you're immediately going to apply the doctrine, especially if you're just an immature baby believer. When you're a mature believer and you've built on years and years of practicing and applying these principles then it becomes much easier to do because you've managed to remove yourself from the mire of self-absorption and self-justification and all of the things that go with arrogance as you have grown and matured as a believer. But when you're young believer, when you're an immature believer, that's part of the growth process. You just have to learn to apply that. 

In the Hebrew you have a couple of words that are used. The primary word is salach, which means to forgive or to pardon. It's the same idea that we have in aphiemi - to pardon or to release somebody up from a debt. Another word that is used in Hebrew that is often used for forgiveness is the Hebrew word nasa and that indicates to lift or to carry something away. Now that is such a great illustration. We will come back and talk about this probably a couple of weeks as we get close to Yom Kippur and I'll talk about Leviticus in terms of Yom Kippur. 

But on the Day of Atonement there would be two goats brought in or two goats and lambs that are brought in that are without spot or blemish. The priest puts his hands on the heads of both of them, and he recites the sins of the people. It's that picture there of the priest putting his hands on the sacrificial animals. It's a picture of their identification with him and with those sins so they're being transferred via substitution. Those sins are being transferred and put upon those innocent sacrificial animals. 

One of them is taken to the altar. He is slaughtered on the altar. His blood is then taken and is put on the Ark of the Covenant, on The Mercy Seat. God in His righteousness looks upon that and is satisfied. That's the meaning of propitiation. His justice is satisfied by the shed blood because the shed blood represents the fact that a payment for the sin has been made.

Now the other goat is taken out into the wilderness. He is taken by a friend the Scripture says. We've talked about that before because you want to make sure it's somebody who's a trusted friend who will do what he is supposed to do and not become lazy in the process. But he's supposed to take that other goat and take it so far out in the wilderness that the goat can never find its way back. That's a picture of how far God removes our sin from us. When we're forgiven it's taken away, and it never comes back. That's the idea in nasa, that something is carried away. It's lifted up. It's like a burden being taken off of our shoulders and off of our back; and it is completely removed. Now under the Old Testament sacrificial system every year you have to come back to that Day of Atonement because the blood of bulls and goats cannot permanently solve the sin problem. They all look forward to something. 

If you look at the Scripture going back to where I was at the beginning, you have Adam and Eve in the garden; and they sinned. Now they try to hide the fact of their sin by sewing garments of fig leaves. 

God says, "That's not going to work. Man cannot cover up the sin problem. Fig leaves are not going to be any kind of a solution. So I've got to teach you a little bit about what's going to be involved in this solution. There's got to be a death."

Remember I said that the penalty for eating from the fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil was death. So there has to be a death. God took a lamb. It doesn't say that per se in the text but I think we can say that from what is indicated in the pattern of Scripture. He takes an animal (probably a lamb or a goat) and slaughters it, skins it and makes clothes for Adam and Eve from the animal hide. 

Then I've talked about how so much had to be going on there because God's got to teach them about anatomy. He has to teach them about how to sharpen a knife blade so it's sharp enough to skin the animal and to properly treat the hide and what to use in treating the hide so that it will stay soft and supple, how to remove the hair from the hide and how to lay out a pattern.

One of most surprising things I learned about my father was that he was kind of a math wiz. He was tutoring calculus at the University of Houston when he was 15 years old. When I was 15 I failed algebra. I didn't get that gene. I didn't get the math or the engineering gene. I got the theology gene and the philosophy gene but I didn't get the engineering gene. But when he was ten years old (remember he's a child of the depression) my grandmother would go to a store and see a dress that she wanted. She couldn't afford it so she would come home. My dad would take it, lay it out and draw out the pattern. Then she would cut the material on the basis of the pattern that he laid out. Then she would make a dress. I looked at my dad when I learned that. When I was in high school I couldn't begin to do something like that.

Anyhow, that's what God is doing. He had to teach them how to make a pattern so that they could make clothes for themselves. All that's going in there.  The point that the text is making theologically is that there had to be a covering. 

Now here you just have your basic lamb sacrifice in Genesis at the end of chapter 3 where it just says God clothed them with animal skins. Now if that's all we had then we might not be justified into saying all the things I just said, but what happens is you go into a couple more chapters in Genesis when Noah gets off of the Ark and he has a sacrifice and he already knows the difference between a clean and an unclean animal.

Unclean animals on the Ark were two by two male and female, but clean animals were by seven – three pair and an extra. The extra is for a sacrifice. The first thing Noah did when he got off the boat was he had a sacrifice. Where did he get the sacrifices? He took the seventh of each of these pairs (clean animals) and had a sacrifice. 

We don't get anymore information than that until later on when we get into Genesis 21 and Abraham has been told by God to take his son Isaac up to Mt. Moriah where he's going to sacrifice Isaac to God – human sacrifice. But Abraham has gone through these tests. We've gone through 13 key tests that we saw in the life of Abraham, all of them designed to teach Abraham to really trust God and to really believe God when God said: "I'm going to give you a seed and it's going to be your son Isaac and it's going to be through Isaac that your seed is named." 

Well, finally the light bulb went on. Abraham really got the point. When God said, "Go kill him," Abraham said, "Sure God because I know you're always faithful to your promises, which means that if You told me that my descendents are going to be made through Isaac they will be. Even if I kill him, you're going to have to bring him back to life so that you can fulfill your promises because I know you never break your word."

So we have a beautiful picture there of substitution. Then another the five hundred years goes by and we get the Mosaic Law with the whole detail of different sacrifices and offerings.

Just as we wrap up here, I just want to hit this one in Leviticus 3 is the peace offering. That's the foundation.

^NKJ Leviticus 3:1 'When his offering is a sacrifice of a peace offering, if he offers it of the herd, whether male or female,

So that would be a little more expensive sacrifice for a wealthier person.

he shall offer it without blemish before the LORD.

Why is it without blemish? Because it is depicting something that is going to happen in the future. There's got to be a sinless sacrifice to function as a substitute for a sinful human being. A sinful person can't be sacrificed for the sinful person. A sinless person has to be there. So it has to be without blemish.

^NKJ Leviticus 3:2 'And he shall lay his hand on the head of his offering,

That's the whole picture of transference of guilt and identification.

and kill it at the door of the tabernacle of meeting;

That's gateway going into the Tabernacle.

and Aaron's sons, the priests, shall sprinkle the blood all around on the altar.

The peace offering was a picture of the fellowship between God and man. This is the only sacrifice where the food is shared with the priests where they eat part of it indicating fellowship. But that fellowship (the reconciliation that comes) comes only because of what? Because a sacrifice has been made. And in terms of dealing with the subject of conflict resolution, the problem's got to be dealt with. The sin has got to be dealt with. It can't be just overlooked because then it's going to come back again and again and again.

You can't just be the innocent party and say, "Well, I'm going to accept blame for this," out of my own guilt complex because then the person who's committed the offense is just going to say, "Well, I got away with that. I can do it again."

So there's no real resolution. You can't have real forgiveness until the problem is honestly and openly dealt with and admitted. That's the meaning of confession – to admit and acknowledge guilt.

We'll come back and talk about that next time but the foundation here is that picture of that peace offering and the emphasis is there can be a subjective partial sort of subjective forgiveness on our part. We say, "Okay, this person has offended me. This person has caused a problem. This person has injured me in some way, but I'm not going to harbor mental attitude sins against them in terms of bitterness, anger, resentment, revenge motivation or anything like that."

That is one aspect of forgiveness that we can do. But we can't truly forgive them in the full sense of the word until there is a recognition and admission of guilt on their part. And sometimes they won't ever do that. So we have to go through that first stage in terms of our own spiritual health and not having resentment because it may be fifty years before that other person is going to come along and say, "You know I was wrong." They may never do it. So we can't let our mental attitude ever be dependent on other people's volition. We have to take care of that between ourselves and the Lord.

So next time we'll come back and look at this whole issue of forgiveness with God and how that impacts our understanding of forgiveness towards others.