Forgiveness Assured

by Pastor Dan Miller

^{Editor’s Note: This article was reprinted with permission from Dan Miller’s book Spiritual Reflections. It appears here verbatim.}

On a recent ministry trip to the East coast, my wife and I enjoyed a lively conversation with a young mother. Seated next to us on a crowded flight, she educated us about life as a New England potato and beef farmer. We found the conversation fascinating, laced as it was with local color and spiced with some of the more gruesome details of cattle management.

In course of time, she inquired concerning my occupation. I told her I was a pastor. That seemed to derail our conversation, but in the ensuing silence she was actually switching tracks from farming to spiritual realities. She was a meat-and-potatoes kind of woman in more ways than one—decorative parsley did not find a place on her conversational plate. And so without notice she jumped full length into a most difficult topic.

“So, who is my husband in God’s eyes?” she blurted out with no forewarning. It seems that some spiritual shepherds to whom she had appealed gave counsel that her second husband was her real husband. Others had suggested that God saw her as married to her first husband. “In God’s eyes, am I married to my second husband, or am I committing adultery with him?” she asked sincerely.

I’ve never met an honest divorcee who hasn’t dealt with guilt—no matter the circumstances contributing to the divorce—particularly when that individual has some sense of God’s will regarding marriage (Genesis 2:18-25; Mark 10:2-12, etc.). Standing in the beacon of God’s Word, you do not have to live long or possess an overly active conscience to realize you fall short of God’s standard (Romans 3:10-23). Divorced or not, if you haven’t gotten a sense of your sin and shortcomings before marriage, you should get one pretty soon after your wedding day. Marriage has a way of accentuating not only what we do best, but also where we fall shortest of God’s standard (Ephesians 4:25-32; 5:22-33; John 4:13-20). And thus it was with the woman seated next to me.

Sometimes the best response to a question is to question the legitimacy of the question. Realizing that the inquiry our new acquaintance had made concerning divorce was only symptomatic, I explained that the root issue is not so much a matter of what God happens to think about this or that particular sin or circumstance. The more essential issue is that God is an absolutely pure, holy and just God. By virtue of his very nature, he cannot tolerate or overlook any moral shortcoming on our part (Romans 1:18; Revelation 1:12-18; 20:11-15).

“How would you feel if a young child you loved was playing in her yard and a man walked into the yard and raped and murdered her before your very eyes? And how would you then feel if you sat at that man’s trial and a judge simply excused the perpetrator’s actions? You would condemn that judge as unjust. You would cry foul at such a miscarriage of justice, and so you should.”

“Well, God is not that kind of judge. He is a just judge. He judges with absolute purity and with complete wisdom, meaning he knows every sin I have ever committed and demands just penalty for every violation of his will. He not only judges the murderer and rapist. Stack up every sin committed by every human being throughout all time and realize that God comes down hard on all of it. He is a perfectly just judge.”

Having established that point, it was then my privilege to explain that there is a strange and loving twist at this juncture. Two thousand years ago God poured out his holy wrath against sin upon the head of his Son, Jesus Christ. In absolute, unimpeachable justice, God judged human sin by placing it on Christ and sacrificing his Son’s life as punishment (1 Peter 2:24; Romans 3:21-26). In unfathomable love, God then graciously washes away the sins of those who place their faith in Christ’s death in their place (Ephesians 2:7-9; Hebrews 10:11-14).

How can we know that such a message of forgiveness in Christ is real? How can I know God accepted Christ’s death in my place? How can such ideas be proclaimed with confidence to a total stranger? There is only one answer: Jesus Christ rose from the dead! Jesus beat death, the final penalty for sinners (Acts 2:22-32; 3:12-15; 4:8-10; 10:34-41; Romans 5:12; 6:23).

Without the resurrection of Christ, all talk of forgiveness of sin is wishful thinking and absolutely vain (1 Corinthians 15:12-19). But history records what the Bible declares: a Jew living 2,000 years ago conquered the grave, thereby proving he had secured forgiveness of sin from a holy God.

This is the triumphant and glorious message genuine believers can proclaim to a needy world with absolute confidence. Indeed, the offer of forgiven sin is no myth but a confident assurance—and there’s an empty grave to prove it!

Dan Miller has served as senior pastor of Eden Baptist Church (Savage, MN) since 1989. He graduated from Pillsbury Baptist Bible College (Owatonna, MN) with a B.S. degree in 1984. His graduate degrees include an M.A. in History from Minnesota State University, Mankato, and M.Div. and Th.M. degrees from Central Baptist Theological Seminary (Plymouth, MN). He is nearing completion of D.Min. studies at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School (Deerfield, IL). Dan is married to Beth, and the Lord has blessed them with four children.