I have heard people mention the concept of forgiving God a few times and it always makes me cringe. Sam Storms, who is much smarter than I, has addressed this issue in a useful essay today.
He wrote, "My primary concern, however, is with the idea of humans forgiving God. What are we to make of this?"
and then later,
"But my struggle is with the language of 'forgiving God.' For one
thing, I don’t find it ever used in Scripture. That alone ought to give
us pause before we incorporate such language into our Christian
vocabulary or allow it to shape our theology or our understanding of
spiritual formation.
"Also, a person can only be truly forgiven if that person has truly
committed a sin or some wrong. Forgiveness assumes guilt on the part of
the person being forgiven. If there is no sin, there is no guilt, and if
there is no guilt, there is no need to be forgiven. Typically we say, 'I forgive ______ for having gossiped about me,' or 'I forgive ______
for having broken a confidence,' etc.
"But God never has, cannot, and never will sin against us. Nothing he
does is wrong or misguided or ill-informed or unwise or unloving. That
doesn’t mean we will always see it that way! Far from it. We often think
that God has missed a step or failed us in some way, but he hasn’t. If
he had, he wouldn’t be God!
Read the rest here.
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