GOD’S HOLINESS AND FORGIVENESS

—
RADICAL CONDEMNATION AND
RADICAL AFFIRMATION
—

If you, Lord, should keep account of sins,

who could hold his ground?
But with you is forgiveness,
so that you may be revered.

Reading in Psalm 130—

[Revised English Bible]

These verses point toward two fundamentals of God’s dealings

with us in this existence: radical condemnation; and radical
affirmation.

In the first two lines of these verses we see radical

condemnation. Because of our sinfulness, we cannot possibly
stand before the holy Lord. We stand utterly guilty before God in
his holiness, and we have no hope. At root we are condemned.

In the second two lines of these verses we see radical

affirmation. With God is forgiveness. Amid our sinfulness, we
experience God’s inestimable grace, embracing and enlivening
us. At root we are affirmed.

There is a great mystery in the conjunction of these verses. It is

the compound mystery at the core of the Gospel—the mystery
of the divine amalgam of holy judgment and loving forgiveness.
In the heart of the Gospel, neither holiness nor love is minimized
or lost. They are met and held together not abstractly, not
theoretically, but concretely, personally, in the being and acting
of God. For, at once and in completeness, God encompasses and
employs both holiness and love.

Thus, in the heart of the Gospel, we come to the cross. For in

our sinful world, the divine amalgam of holiness and love leads
to the cross. The cross unveils the God who exists and acts in
holiness and love conjoined. This is the God who, in Jesus,
exacts the cross in judgment and suffers the cross in love. The
cross roots in and stems from the divine amalgamation of
holiness and love, for it transacts the judgment of God’s
holiness through the suffering of God’s son, thereby tendering
forgiveness.

Were holiness and love not amalgamated in the divine being

and acting, there would be no cross. Without holiness, there is
no condemnation of sin. Hence, there is no cross. Without love,
there is only condemnation, and hence, no cross.

Were there no cross, with its conjunction of holiness and love,

we would have no good news. If God should act solely in
holiness, it would necessitate absolute and terrible rejection of
us, leaving us only utter despair and annihilation. If God should
act only in love, it would require his self-denying self-deception,
glossing over the ruptured and rupturing realities of our lives
and our world with a cruelly unrealistic sentimentalism.

Yet there was a cross, and it shows us that God is absolutely

holy and mercifully forgiving at once and in completeness. God
is a sheer holiness that brooks no evil and terrifies us to
oblivion. At the same time, with God is a tender, merciful
forgiveness that rends the divine heart even as it touches and
heals our own hearts. Jointed in the heart of God then are
absolute judgment and inestimable forgiveness, for God is
utterly holy, utterly realistic, and utterly merciful—at one and
the same time, each in fullness. Hence, the crux of God’s
presence in our sinful world consists in and reveals itself in this
conjunction of holiness and love.

We must therefore let the cross inform—in the strongest and

deepest sense of that verb—the core of our lives and our
theology. Apart from the cross, we might think that sometimes
God acts in holiness and sometimes in love. We might even
conclude that holiness and love are disjunct. Thus we are
tempted to think and act in the cross-denying distortions of
either self-righteous jeremiads or soft-headed sentimentalism.
The cross however, truly understood and submitted to, frames
and holds us in the conjunction of God’s holiness and love in our
sinful world. We must not sunder this conjunction in our religious
experience or in our theological construction.

We must, in other words, truly and deeply live in and proclaim

the mystery of the cross, the amalgam of God’s holiness and
love. We must not live in or proclaim only holiness and
judgment, or only mercy and forgiveness. We must know that, in
God’s presence, we live under radical condemnation and radical
affirmation at one and the same time. For this is the God who
both condemns and forgives us, at each and every moment of
our lives, in the mysterious, re-creating intersection of
condemnation and acquittal, which was Jesus on the cross.

One critical implication of these verses and the mystery of the

cross for our lives and for our proclamation is this. Namely, we
must realize that moral achievement and integrity do not
constitute the chief foundation, mode, standard, or goal of our
relationship with God, or of God’s relationship with us.

This point is not meant to subvert our utmost striving to act

rightly. Nor is it meant to ease our conscience and excuse us
when we do not act rightly. Clearly God calls us to an absolute
standard, to perfection. We should seek it wholeheartedly. Still,
we fail and sin; and clearly God laments, abhors, and condemns
our moral failure, our sinful transgression.

Yet, just as clearly, God forgives. We must note this truth well.
What God does with us in our failure and transgression is forgive
us. He does not instantly refashion us in this existence so that
we do not, indeed cannot, sin from that moment on. Painfully,
sorrowfully, we find that we who know new life and follow the
way of Jesus continue to sin.

Precisely here—in the call to perfection, in the striving for

perfection, and in the inevitable failure to live it consistently—
we must find and live in the mystery of the cross, where God
both judges and forgives. In and through the cross, God acts to
re-create us, to make us new people, no longer bound to sin.
Yet, as we will certainly sin again before we physically die, we
also find in and through the cross that God’s re-creating
movement toward us and our life in God subsist in and through,
not our moral attainment and integrity, but his forgiveness,
always and everywhere.

Again, let it be clear that this forgiveness of the cross is no

ignoring or forgetting of sin, by God or by us. It is no excuse for
sin. This cruciform forgiveness confronts and judges sin directly
and realistically for exactly what sin is. God’s severe forgiveness
fully accounts for, reckons with, and overcomes sin, because
God forges forgiveness in the crucible of Jesus’ condemnation
and death.

Thus, by his forgiveness and not by our moral achievement,

does God always and everywhere re-create and sustain us in
new existence. In other words, it is God’s forgiveness that re-
creates and holds us in life, life that begins and ends in cross-
stamped grace, or we have no life at all. God’s forgiveness
baptizes us into death and resurrection; and that forgiveness
alone is life for us, from the point we receive it through all
moments and conditions of this life, until we wake in the age to
come.

Hence, in God’s forgiveness we find it utterly true that our life

begins, continues, and ends—not in ourselves nor in any
pretense of our holiness or our moral achievement and integrity
—but completely and finally in the gracious power of God—in
God’s holiness, in God’s love, in God’s crucible of condemnation
and affirmation, which is Jesus, our savior and lord.

Gregory Strong