Our Forgiveness Precedes Their Repentance

Be kind to one another, compassionate,
forgiving each other, just as God in Christ also has forgiven you. Ephesians 4:32

Recently, a friend told me about a counseling course he had just completed. When they got to the subject of forgiveness, the presenter taught that one should not forgive until the offending party repents. They went so far as to say that it would be wrong to forgive someone before they repented. This is a commonly held position, and I understand why. It seems to make a lot of sense. The problem is that the Gospel message teaches the exact opposite. We don’t need to look any further than the Creation story to discover that, in God’s economy, forgiveness always precedes repentance.

Genesis 3 explains how mankind’s relationship with God was severed when our first parents violated God’s command. From that moment on, mankind had no hope of restoring our connection with God without help. But God gives us a simple clue nestled in the proclamation of God’s curse to the serpent that He already had a plan to provide forgiveness for man’s sin.

Then the Lord God said to the serpent, “Because you have done this, cursed are you more than all the livestock, and more than any animal of the field; on your belly you shall go, and dust you shall eat all the days of your life; and I will make enemies of you and the woman, and of your seed and her Seed; He shall bruise you on the head, and you shall bruise Him on the heel.” (Genesis 3:14-15)

God is promising that the woman’s “Seed” will crush the serpent’s head, a reference to Christ’s defeat of Satan through His death and resurrection. What this indicates to us is that God already had a plan of dealing with our sin before sin entered the world. Paul taught the same truth in Ephesians 1:3-7:

“Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places in Christ, just as He chose us in Him before the foundation of the world, that we would be holy and blameless before Him. In love, He predestined us to adoption as sons and daughters through Jesus Christ to Himself, according to the good pleasure of His will, to the praise of the glory of His grace, with which He favored us in the Beloved. In Him we have redemption through His blood, the forgiveness of our wrongdoings, according to the riches of His grace.”

Before the foundation of the world, God made the decision to forgive us in order that we could stand holy and blameless before Him! My question to you is this: When was the foundation of the world? Was it before or after you sinned? The answer, of course, is before. It logically follows, then, that before we repented God made the decision to pay the price necessary for our forgiveness. Before God created the dust that He used to craft man, He had already decided to send His Son to pay for our sins so that we could receive His forgiveness. God, in Christ, has predetermined to forgive us. He didn’t wait for us to repent. He didn’t even wait for us to sin. And he certainly didn’t wait for us to initiate. Why? Because we never would have.

…as it is written: “There is no righteous person, not even one; there is no one who understands, there is no one who seeks out God; they have all turned aside, together they have become corrupt; there is no one who does good, there is not even one.” Romans 3:10-12

One of the major themes of scripture is that man, having rebelled against God, continually seeks his own way. People run away from God, not towards God. Romans 3:10-12, quoting Psalm 14, make that abundantly clear. No one repents first. The Gospel message is not that man was seeking God and was able to find Him, but rather that God sought us and initiated the redemption plan that would restore us to Him. On our own, none of us turns back to God. Quite the opposite. At our core, we were all like C. S. Lewis described himself in Surprised by Joy;

“You must picture me alone in that room in Magdalen, night after night, feeling, whenever my mind lifted even for a second from my work, the steady, unrelenting approach of Him whom I so earnestly desired not to meet. That which I greatly feared had at last come upon me. In the Trinity Term of 1929 I gave in, and admitted that God was God, and knelt and prayed: perhaps, that night, the most dejected and reluctant convert in all England. I did not then see what is now the most shining and obvious thing; the Divine humility which will accept a convert even on such terms. The Prodigal Son at least walked home on his own feet. But who can duly adore that Love which will open the high gates to a prodigal who is brought in kicking, struggling, resentful, and darting his eyes in every direction for a chance of escape?”

God didn’t wait for us to repent before He chose to send Jesus to pay for our sins. We all come to the redemption party after Him. Every. Single. One. Of. Us! But when we do arrive, we find The Father sitting there at His table with the heaping dish of forgiveness, prepared and paid for by His Son, waiting for us. Our repentance is always in response to His offer of forgiveness. We gain access to that forgiveness through our repentance. That’s how God, in Christ, forgives us.

That’s the model we are to follow in our interpersonal relationships. Forgive, apply the blood of Jesus as payment in full for the wounds we suffered, and then wait for the wounding party to repent.

Forgiveness + Repentance = Reconciliation, in that order!

STORE