YOUR SINS ARE FORGIVEN (Luke 7:47)

The Need for Forgiveness from God. First, there is the need to be forgiven by God.
Relativism Maximizes the Absoluteness of Self
One of the saddest things about the relativism of our day is that it undermines God's forgiveness. Here's what I mean. Relativism constantly minimizes or denies the absoluteness of God. It functions implicitly as if God had no clear and unchanging character—as though there were no divine measure for human character. Relativism does not get along well with biblical statements like, "Be holy for I am holy" ( 1 Peter 1:16), or, "Be perfect as your father in heaven is perfect" ( Matthew 5:48). So relativism minimizes the absoluteness of God and his will.
But relativism maximizes the absoluteness of self. It says that the way to healing and wholeness is to stop measuring yourself by external standards or expectations, even God's. Instead, without reference to God or his Word, be yourself. Make yourself the measure of what is good and acceptable. Give yourself an unconditional positive self-regard. The only role that God has to play in this relativism is to be the divine endorsement of your own self-affirmation. God functions as a kind of booster for the absoluteness of self. If he presents himself as one with standards or commandments, then he is part of the problem, not part of the solution.

 Relativism Destroys Forgiveness
I say the saddest thing about this relativism is that it undermines the glory of God's grace in forgiveness. It sounds gracious on the surface—to say that God has no law, no standards, no expectations, no commandments, no threats—that he is simply there to affirm me in whatever I happen to be. That sounds like grace and freedom. But there is one massive glitch. It destroys forgiveness.
Where there is no law, no just standard, no legitimate expectation, no normative way of relating to God and man, there can be no forgiveness. Because forgiveness is the letting go of real offenses, real transgressions, real violations, real faults. But if there is no law to transgress, or no standard to offend against, or no expectation to violate, or no commandment to disobey, then there can be no forgiveness. What looked like grace turns out to be the undermining of grace by the undermining of forgiveness.

The Biblical Hope of Forgiveness
So I offer you a biblical hope —not a relativistic one. These people in verse 37 were cut to the heart because they saw that God had made Jesus Lord and Christ, but they had killed him. In other words they were utterly at odds with God. They were living against his will. They were out of step with his character. They were in violation of his Word and his Son. God was one way. They were another way. And they did not have his affirmation. Nor should they have had their own.
What they desperately needed (and what we need), and what God, in amazing grace was ready to give, was forgiveness. They had offended God. They had violated God. They had disobeyed God. And there was only one hope—that God might find a way to be the holy God that he is and yet let it go, and forgive. Which is exactly what he found in the death of his Son.
So I take the words at the end of verse 40 and apply them to all of us with all the urgency that I can: "Be saved from this crooked generation." And the most crooked thing about this generation is that we have created ways of salvation without God and therefore without law and therefore without forgiveness—and therefore utterly without hope.
 

ELD. BRO. ADEOLA ADEOYE (DR.GP)
Alabaster Convener
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