Okay, if you have a Bible with you, your iPad, iPhone, whatever it is, please turn to two texts.

One is John 3, 16 through 18, that should sound familiar.

Romans chapter 3, verse 21 through 26.

One of the reasons, and by the way, we're in a series about forgiveness, which is one of the most basic teachings of Jesus and the Scripture, but it's also one of the most difficult things to put into practice.

And part of the reason is...

is we don't have a working theology or basis for understanding what forgiveness actually is, and then we don't have an understanding of the power in us to enable us to do what we ourselves ultimately down deep inside want to do.

So that's why this message is so crucial in the series.

It's dealing with the theology of God and the theology of forgiveness.

And only when we form that basis will we be able to move out in practice.

So let me read John 3, 16 through 18.

For God so loved the world.

that he gave his only begotten son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish, but have everlasting life.

For God did not send his son into the world to condemn the world, but to save the world through him.

Whoever believes in him is not condemned, but whoever does not believe stands condemned already, because they have not believed in the name of God's one and only son.

Now, if you were just to open up the Old Testament and start reading the Bible, let's say for the first time, and you don't have a lot of history in church or with scripture reading, and you're trying to discover who God is, as soon as you open up the Bible and you start to read the Old Testament, it's not very long until you discover that God is a God who promises to show himself holy in righteousness.

That is the story again and again, Isaiah 5, verse 16.

This God is so holy and so righteous.

According to the Exodus, in Exodus 19, 23 and 24, when he descends on the mountain, it becomes so holy that it cannot be touched.

So if you're human and you touch the mountain, you get too close to God, he's so holy, so righteous that you'll die.

You further, and that's all the way in the book of Exodus, you further discover that God's holiness actually moves him to punish sin.

You see this again and again, Leviticus 11, Leviticus 19, 1 Kings 3, I could go on and on.

And you read time and again that God will not let the evildoer go unpunished.

It says again and again, Nehemiah 1, verse 3, Ezekiel 20, verse 7, Ezekiel 7, verse 4, verse 9, Ezekiel 8, verse 18, chapter 9, verse 10, again, on and on.

However, God's wrath is not like our wrath.

God's wrath is not losing his temper.

His wrath is his holiness released judicially against the evil.

His wrath is holiness released judicially against the evil.

So I'm not sure there's anything more clear in the Old Testament than the fact that God is going to do justice and he's not going to shrug or wink at or ignore sin or evil.

That's the point.

Ontological essence, that's the nature of God.

Enric Aeneas was reputed to have said just before he died, God will forgive me, that's his job.

God will forgive me.

That's his job.

But Herman Bobdick said it's a shallow idea that forgiving is natural for God.

The Old Testament teaches that forgiveness is not a given.

The Bible says God will not pardon the offense.

So where forgiveness is obtained, because it is obtained in the Old Testament as well as the New, it is something that is to be regarded with awe and wonder.

Now at the same time, the Old Testament is filled with the holiness of God, the righteousness of God.

the judicial prerogative of God.

At the same time, we're also told again and again about the love of God.

that God is a forgiving God.

Numbers 14, Samuel 25, 1 Kings 8, Psalm 25, 11, it goes on and on.

In fact, when Isaiah meets God, who is high and lifted up in one of the most famous passages in the Old Testament, suddenly he recognizes his sin.

He confesses his radical sinfulness and God immediately doesn't punish him, but offers him forgiveness.

Isaiah chapter 6, verse 7.

So you see repentance and forgiveness again and again, even in the Old Testament.

Therefore, as you read the Old Testament, as you come in contact with the book that is supposed to reveal to you what God is like, suddenly there's this seeming paradox.

And I don't know of a passage of Scripture that communicates that paradox better than Exodus chapter 34, verse 6 through 7, when Moses asked God to see his glory.

Here's what happened.

and he passed in front of moses proclaiming the lord the lord compassionate and gracious god slow to anger abounding in love and faithfulness maintaining love to the thousands and forgiving wickedness rebellion and sin yet he does not leave the guilty unpunished he punishes the children and their children for the sin of the parents to the third and fourth generation The Hebrew is even more emphatic.

It literally says, in no way will God treat the guilty as if they were innocent.

But at the same time, we're told that he's a loving and forgiving God.

Do you see the tension?

Is God a loving God who forgives the guilty?

Or is God a just God who punishes the guilty?

Now, Christian theology, in fact, biblical theology says he's both.

How can we understand that?

In fact, John 3, 16, It's perhaps the most famous verse in the Bible.

And I'm going to show you a photo right now.

Do you remember this guy?

Most Americans will.

The rainbow hair and the colored wig.

His name is Roland Frederick Stewart.

He became an ubiquitous presence on just about every major sporting event, carrying this big sign, John 3.16.

I mean, he was everywhere.

Super Bowl, Wimbledon, the World Series.

But John 3.16 is only a feel-good text.

if you understand or take it out of its context.

Let me say that again.

John 3.16 is only a feel-good text when you take it out of its context, because the very next verse speaks of condemnation.

And later in John 3.36, this word is starkly defined.

It says this, Whoever believes in the Son has eternal life, but whoever rejects the Son will not see life.

For God's wrath remains on them.

So what we're told is God's wrath is on everyone who has ever lived until the moment they receive the Son.

And God's wrath is on them because they are sinners.

Modern people in our world struggle with the idea of a wrathful God who condemns.

And yet the Bible clearly puts condemnation in proximity to the most famous verse in the New Testament on love.

And here's why.

The Bible never sees God's love and anger as being opposed to each other.

Instead, they are meaningless apart from each other.

God is both love and fury.

And if you don't understand that, and this is why we're going to belabor this point, there is no way you'll be able to understand how you can both love and forgive while expecting and demanding justice at the same time.

And the reason...

that we recoil when we hear that God is wrathful and gets angry is because we think he's like us, that his wrath and his anger is just like ours.

You know, it's an amazing thing.

The amount of incidents of road rage in the state of California continue to increase every year.

Did you know that?

And it's becoming more and more violent.

At first, when you heard about road rage, it's just a little fender bender.

Somebody gets out and yells at each other.

Now they get out and shoot each other.

What is the problem here?

Well, the problem is we are so enamored with ourselves that we feel that when we're disrespected, we have the right to lash out even in violence.

Think about the vitriol on social media.

We get angry and we respond in ways that we should not because we feel like somebody's violated our ego or our image or some other God that we've attached ourselves to.

And if you look at discussions on political issues, my goodness, it doesn't remain a logical discussion for very long because somebody feels like that they've been violated.

So then they bring up comments like, oh yeah, well, your mom is ugly and your children are stupid.

I have nothing to do with the conversation.

It's illogical, but they feel like they've been violated.

So that's when we latch out.

However, God's anger is not wounded pride.

God only gets angry.

at the evil that destroys the things he loves, people and his creation.

So when we violate ourselves or others, God does get angry.

Not because of his pride, but because his love for us is so deep.

that it brings him to tears.

He actually weeps as Jesus wept over the city of Jerusalem.

That's why when somebody says, you know what, I can do whatever I want because it's my body.

Well, no, it's not.

It belongs to your creator.

You're not the designer.

God is the designer.

And when you wound somebody that he loves, and by the way, somebody he loves is you.

So when you wound somebody on the outside, or even when you wound yourself, God still weeps.

And God is a just God.

When I would do a lot of discussions at university campuses, I often remind the students that they always want a God where they can have their cake and eat it too, because they would say, how can you believe in God when there's no justice in the world?

And I would explain that there is justice, it's just delayed justice.

The time is going to come where everybody will stand before God and give an account for their lives.

And then they would respond by saying, well, how can you believe in a God who would punish anybody?

So they don't want a God of justice now, or even delayed justice, but at the same time, they say they don't want to believe in a God who would ever punish anybody.

How can you have justice without punishment?

And the idea is you cannot.

It's a logical impossibility.

So as I look out in the world today, I say, you know, I think your God may be all loving, but that's not the God of the Bible.

It's not the God who is, it's just the God you've created in your mind.

Alternatively, there are some people whose God is not love at all.

Their God is a God of wrath, and they're glad that God is angry, and that God is going to get all the people who've offended me, and they can't wait till their enemies face judgment.

The problem is they think they don't deserve any judgment, and they're righteous, and they can stand before God absolutely guiltless.

They too are delusional.

And once again, that is the God they've created in their own minds.

So here's the big question, and this is important as we build this foundation.

Where did the idea of a loving God come from?

Who told us that God was loving?

I asked a young man that question one time, and he said, well, it's inherent, it's intuitive.

Really?

It wasn't inherent or intuitive in the ancient world.

The gods of the ancient world can be described basically by one word that Paul actually borrows in Romans 3.

It's the word we've heard, propitiation.

And that word means a sacrifice that turns away wrath.

So in the ancient world, God was not a God of love.

God was only a God of anger and wrath at the sin of mankind.

It sometimes wasn't even called sin.

It was just called shortcoming.

So the idea was that you would take some kind of sacrifice to the temple.

You would drop it at the altar and you would run for your life hoping that as the gods...

Uh...

gathered up the sacrifice, that their wrath wouldn't somehow have residual impact on you.

That's the God in the ancient world.

There's no example of any kind of loving God in the ancient world.

Did we get the idea that God is loved from other religions?

Most religions teach that any inequality in this life is due to the thoughts, words, and deeds that we've entertained, uttered, and committed in a previous life.

So in the moral world, religions, most of them, except for a couple, we'll get to that, say that the unbreakable law of karma always prevails.

There's no forgiveness ever, just retribution for what you've done in the past.

A loving, forgiving, merciful God does not come from religion anywhere of any kind.

So again, who told you that God was love?

Most religions have a plurality of gods who must constantly be appeased because they're always angry.

And even monotheistic religions like Islam see God as an impersonal, unloving, demanding entity who one day will release his wrath with joy over the heathen.

I could go on and on.

We definitely don't get the idea that God is loving from nature.

Do you know the modern evolutionary theory, which is so absolutely brutal, doesn't give us any idea of a loving, forgiving, merciful God.

It only tells us about the survival of the fittest.

Nature doesn't know any forgiveness, or at least it doesn't take into account self-humiliation and confession of wrongdoing.

The point is that the concept of a loving God came from one place, folks.

One place, the Bible.

And it was considered odd and strange when it was first communicated.

Human society could understand a God who was mainly a God of wrath, who demanded deference, or he would simply smite people.

but he could not understand a loving, merciful God who made every person in his own image, and then therefore is forgiving people, or will forgive people who have done wrong when they confess their sins.

In fact, as you study, and I go back to Rodney Stark's book, The Rise of Christianity, when the ancient pagans first learned that Christians were preaching a message of mercy and forgiveness by God, they were actually offended by it, because they said society could never really function.

with a forgiveness mentality.

And yet the Christian idea of forgiveness and love permeated and transformed the world.

So historians are thinking, why?

What happened?

Think for a moment.

And again, we're going to labor this point just a bit.

Modern people think of slavery, and they ask a question like this, how is it that people in the past could have ever accepted such a monstrosity?

But that's not the way historians think.

Historians say, considering the fact that it was universally believed and accepted that stronger societies had the right to attack weaker societies and enslave their people, and since it had always been done that way, the real historical question is, why did it ever occur to anybody that this could be wrong?

Who ever first had the idea that maybe slavery is not a good thing?

And the answer is...

The voices who called on the abolition of slavery were all Christian, at least in the beginning.

And the same Christians who called for this justice believed there was a God of love who demanded that we love our neighbors, all of our neighbors, as ourselves.

So historically, Christians have been involved in fighting injustice because God is a just God, and since he's angered at injustice, we too should be angered at injustice.

So listen carefully.

Here we go.

The wrath of God, then, is an expression of a loving God rightfully demanding love from human beings toward one another and toward him.

I've got to say that again.

The wrath of God is an expression of a loving God rightfully demanding love from human beings toward one another and toward him.

So first, the love of God expresses wrath.

The anger of God is ultimately about love.

So the love of God will often express itself in anger.

Let me give you a great example before we move on.

Rebecca Manley Pippert wrote a book called Hope Has Its Reasons.

And she asked this question, she goes, think of how we feel in our human experience when we see someone that we love ravaged by unwise actions or relationships.

Do we respond with benign tolerance?

And she speaks of watching two talented friends of hers sinking deeper and deeper into destruction because of drug abuse.

So she says, and I quote, I feel fury when I'm with them.

I want to say, can't you see?

Don't you know what you're doing to yourself?

You become less and less yourself every time I see you.

Real love stands against deception, the lie, the sin that destroys.

Anger and love are inseparably bound in the human experience.

And if I A flawed, narcissistic, and sinful woman can feel this much pain and anger over someone's condition, how much more a morally perfect God who made them.

Anger, she says, isn't the opposite of love.

Hate is.

And the final form of hate is indifference.

So even in us flawed human beings, love and anger are not opposed to one another, but can be interdependent.

Now, The Bible does not reveal a God simply of fury or simply of love, but a God of both love and fury because, no matter what you've been taught, no matter what you think you know, because God is holy.

Holy love.

Holy wrath.

God is vehemently opposed to all sin.

Full stop.

Yet even though when you and I enter into sin, and there's this horrible cause and effect because of it, at the same time, the holy God, who is a just God, weeps for us because we've chosen to ignore righteousness, and it's destroying people that he loves.

My father gave me a great example of this, although he wasn't perfect in it.

He couldn't be.

He's human.

But my father loved me, but my father had rules.

And if you violated those rules in the home, there were ramifications.

But I never doubted my father's love for me.

There was discipline, but his discipline always had mercy and grace and tears.

Now here's where the problem ultimately lies in Christianity.

Stay with me.

We tend to emphasize one over the other rather than seeing their interdependence, love and justice.

So if we're really, you know, if we belong to a real conservative church, you know, kind of conservative religion, we become harsh and our thoughts and ideas are rooted in a severe God who just wants to punish all evildoers.

But that's it.

Or we become part of a very liberal church or liberal religion that is relativistic and sees God as simply accepting of everyone.

So we either become the Westboro Baptist.

who condemns everything and everyone with no grace for anyone, or we become West Hollywood Church of Christ that affirms everything and everyone with no pursuit of biblical holiness and purity.

How can we escape either of those distortions?

The answer is, and here we go, by going back to the cross.

This is where we must go to heal our understanding and receive an undivided heart, and ultimately, this is going to help us learn how to forgive even the worst of sins.

So I want to do something here.

I want to take you back to Romans 3, verse 21 through 26.

I am going to read this.

Now, we could spend six months sermon series on this one paragraph of scripture alone, I promise you.

But I want to walk you through it so that you get the big idea, and then we can move on to application.

Paul says, speaking of Jesus'death on the cross, But now, apart from the law of righteousness of God, now, apart from the law, The righteousness of God has been made known to which the law and the prophets testify.

Remember that righteousness, you can be right under the law by keeping the law perfectly or by paying the penalty for breaking it.

Either way, you're considered right or righteous under the law of God.

But now Paul tells us that apart from the law, the righteousness of God, so it comes from God, not from you and me.

This righteousness, keep the law perfectly or pay the penalty, is given through faith in Jesus Christ to all who believe.

There is no difference between Jew and Gentile, for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, and all are justified freely by His grace through the redemption that came by Jesus Christ.

So at this point, those who are reading Romans 3 are going to ask, okay, how did it come to us?

How did righteousness come to us?

Okay, I get that it's from God, But how did it get to us?

And he says in verse 25, God presented Christ as a sacrifice of atonement through the shedding of his blood to be received by faith.

He did this to demonstrate his righteousness because in his forbearance, he had left sins committed before and unpunished.

So what he's saying is that you can keep the law perfectly or pay the penalty for breaking it.

Jesus paid our penalty on our behalf, which is why...

His sacrifice atoned for our sins.

Remember, you can be righteous one of two ways.

Keep the law, pay the penalty.

Jesus paid the penalty for us.

Because all of those sacrifices in the past in the Old Testament just roll sins over.

It really didn't forgive them.

But Christ sacrificed himself, God in the flesh, so that you and I could go free.

And then verse 26 is key.

He did it to demonstrate something.

So God sent Jesus to die on the cross to demonstrate something, to demonstrate his righteousness at the present time, so as to be just and the one who justifies.

So the death of Jesus on the cross demonstrates that God is still a holy and righteous and just God.

How?

Because all your sins and mine have been punished.

But at the same time, he shows that he is a loving God, because rather than punishing you and me, he punishes Christ.

Christ takes on our sins.

Behold the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world.

And we're told that to be just and the one who justifies those who have faith in Jesus.

Now listen carefully.

The cross does not merely provide a temporary respite from condemnation.

We're told...

that after the cross of Christ, for those who accept believe him, we're told that Christ now stands before the Father as our legal representative, our advocate.

What this means is that the law that was once our enemy and demanded our punishment now becomes our friend, demanding our acceptance.

Listen, this is so crucial.

This is where I think a lot of conservative Christians miss the boat.

The law has been perfectly fulfilled in our substitute, Jesus Christ.

So, now it would be unjust for God to punish us.

Justice says you can be just or right before God.

by paying the penalty or by keeping the law perfectly christ paid the penalty on our behalf which means our sins have been forgiven and for god to punish us for any sin would be to exact two payments for the same debt so discipline us yes punish us no so jesus stands before the father Claiming justice for us.

Yeah, justice.

Justice, two ways to be righteous.

Keep the law, pay the penalty.

We've met the requirements of justice because Christ met it on our behalf.

Sin has been punished.

Which is why in 1 John we're told if we confess our sins, He is faithful and just and will forgive us our sins and purify us from all unrighteousness.

It is fair and just.

that God now forgives those who are in Christ, because the requirements of justice have been met.

And notice, justice has been upheld as a result of the deep justice, righteousness, and love of God.

Now, how does this all apply to our relationships with one another?

Well, there are two ways to pursue justice when we are wrong.

Stay with me.

One, out of vengeance.

Man, we're going to get you because of what you've done.

Or two, you can still pursue justice, but you do it out of love.

You can pursue justice out of the desire to make the wrongdoer suffer.

But if you do that, this is only going to harden your heart and make you even more capable of hurting people yourself in the future.

Moreover, the perpetrator continues to have some control over you, some power over you, because you can't let it go.

So you can respond, you can pursue justice, motivated out of vengeance to make the other person hurt, or you can still pursue justice, but you do so out of love.

You know, in Galatians, we're told we're supposed to bear each other's burdens.

This is not the burden of tribulation.

This is the burden of sin.

So we're supposed to come alongside each other and help each other to grow, to confess our sins, to repent and move on.

But when we do approach our brother or sister and confront them with their sin, my demeanor should not be anger, because I too am a sinner, but it should be love.

Because we love both the individual and the community, we're supposed to spare future victims by confronting the wrongdoer now.

It's justice, but it's motivated out of love.

So Christians seeking justice must be guided by the cross.

We know that God has not given us what we deserve.

Jesus receives the full penalty of our sins.

But the doctrine of justification, here we go now, we're moving to that next corridor.

The doctrine of justification by faith is a two-edged sword.

On the one side, we see how God supremely upholds justice on the cross.

Think about it.

God could have just said, you know, you guys tried real hard.

I'm going to forgive you.

Let's move on.

No.

Sin and justice has to be dealt with.

He didn't just wave a hand to the human race and say, okay, I forgive you for all the evil you've done.

Let's go.

He took justice so seriously that the second person of the Trinity took on human nature, lived the life of a servant, died on the cross, paying the debt to justice.

to himself.

Therefore, we too must be passionate about justice, because God is passionate about justice.

But we do so from the vantage point and motivation of love.

That's why on the other side, the doctrine of justification reminds us that we too have done wrong.

We are also perpetrators of injustice and God has forgiven us.

So while we remain deeply committed to justice, because God is, we don't go out into the world with a condescending attitude towards the unjust.

We don't demonize or deal harshly with anyone created in God's image.

As individuals, we pursue justice tirelessly, but with humility.

Okay?

Now, let's get real.

We've said a lot.

Let's get real, because unless we apply all that into a given situation, I think it'll go right over our heads, and we've got two more weeks of this.

So be patient.

Remember, we're boiling the frog slowly.

How can we then harmonize this idea that we find in the nature of God on the cross, that God is just, sin must be punished, but God is loving?

and merciful and kind.

Rachel Denhollander is a former gymnast who was sexually assaulted multiple times by USA gymnastic physician Larry Nassar.

I don't know if you remember this, it was in the headlines in 2018.

In 2018, Rachel broke through the wall of official denial and was the first woman to publicly accuse him.

And of course that opened the door for hundreds of other women that he had also abused to come forward who previously were afraid to speak.

Now Den Hollander is a Christian.

In her work as an advocate, she saw some churches, not all of them, but some routinely mishandling sexual assault allegations, actually counseling victims of sexual abuse to forgive and forget and not say a word about it, not listening to the alarm bells when they went off or were about to be sounded, and even some of them obstructing criminal investigations.

She even learned of women who were told to forgive and not report their husbands who were abusing their daughters.

And she says at the bottom of all, this was the church's teaching on unity, forgiveness and grace that resulted in the abusers being forgiven while the victims were silenced by being characterized as bitter.

In her memoir entitled, What is a Girl Worth?

And you're seeing that on the screen right now.

Rachel Denhollander.

recounts her extensive inner wrestling when she became aware of what had been done to her by Larry Nassar.

Here's what she says, and I quote, I did want to forgive Larry.

Remember, Rachel's a Christian.

I did want to forgive Larry, but I didn't want my forgiveness to be used as an excuse to act as if something terrible wasn't really that bad.

Prominent Christian teachers had implied, you haven't really forgiven and trusted until you can be thankful for the evil done to you.

Is that really what forgiveness is?

It wasn't right, but I'd heard it from authority figures so often I felt alone in my grief.

Some of her friends, because of the advice she had gotten from her pastor in churches, told her she should just leave God in the church.

And she says, for a while I thought about it.

What kind of God is this?

But then as she started studying scripture, she realized that's not the kind of God God is.

In fact, we can't even define what evil and good are without God.

You've heard me say this numerous times.

The only reason you know the difference between evil and good in the first place is through an absolute moral law that can only be given by an absolute moral being, which is God.

She says, and I quote, Every other religion outside of Christianity relied on some form of doing enough good things to outweigh the bad, as if life were just a balancing scale, and the damage from evil would go away if someone did enough charity work, said the right prayers, or took pilgrimages.

But that's not justice, she says.

I knew Larry had helped create an autism foundation, which was great, but that good deed did not stop my nightmares.

The evil he did was there.

The damage was done.

Nothing could make that disappear.

How did Rachel harmonize justice and forgiveness?

Through the classic doctrine of substitutionary atonement.

She believes the Christian doctrine discovered in the Bible and on the cross can provide both comfort and vindication for victims, and also serve as the overarching guiding principle for Christian communities as they seek to act righteously in the face of abuse.

You say, well, how?

She says, first, a victim's sense of injustice and desire for vindication is actually upheld on the cross.

The cross shows that God, too, hates injustice and unrighteousness.

The wrath of God against such things is poured out on Jesus.

And then she's...

I've got to tell you, Rachel Denhollander is pretty sharp.

She obviously has a great understanding of the holiness of God.

She quotes Fleming Rutledge when she says, It makes many people queasy nowadays to talk about the wrath of God, but there can be no turning away from this prominent biblical theme.

Oppressed peoples around the world would have been empowered by the scriptural principle of a God who is angered by injustice and unrighteousness.

And on the cross, we see not merely the love of God, but the justice of God as well, she says.

This means that justice is part of God, and therefore, you and I, having been created in God's image, justice should be part of the human experience as well.

Second, she says, the cross shows that God is committed to both justice and forgiveness.

There is no pitting one against the other.

So when Jesus died on the cross, it meant in a single stroke, justice was done on sin, and the door for forgiveness was open.

So God couples his forgiveness with the satisfaction of the requirements of justice at the same time.

We must pursue together justice and love, because God did.

Now, how is the cross quickly equally committed to both?

Stay with me for a moment, because if we're going to do justice, no pun intended, to this topic, we've got to think about how culture is thinking today.

And culture today sees God.

One of the reasons they're rejecting Christianity is because the modern world rejects Christian forgiveness.

Because it rejects the goodness of any idea where a father abuses the son.

So when they think of Jesus on the cross, they're thinking, well, I'm not going to follow this God.

He's abusing his own son.

I don't care for what reason it is.

But they believe that only because they don't understand the doctrine of the Trinity, that there is one God who exists in three persons, not three different gods.

The father is distinct from the son.

But the Father and the Spirit are in the Son.

All possess one divine nature.

So it's inaccurate to say that on the cross, the Father abuses the Son.

Listen to how Miroslav Volf puts it.

He says the Father would be abusing the Son on the cross if Christ were a third party, beyond God who was wronged and humanity who wronged God.

But he isn't.

In Christ, wrote the Apostle Paul, God was reconciling the world to himself, not Christ was reconciling an angry God to a sinful world.

Not Christ was reconciling the sinful world to a loving God.

Rather, God in Christ was reconciling the world to himself.

So that the doctrine of the Trinity means that on the cross, as John Stott puts it in his great work, we see the self-substitution of God.

God himself, Emmanuel, comes down, takes the punishment you and I deserve, pays the debt we should have paid.

God is not abusing his son.

God himself takes on flesh, the second person of the Trinity, all the same essence, and ends up paying the price of our sin.

Think about it for a minute.

A banker cannot be said to have forgiven a loan.

So I'm the banker.

You owe me $10,000.

I can't say that I forgave the loan if a third party comes along and pays the loan for you.

I didn't forgive the loan.

Someone else did.

On the cross, we see the reality.

of evil and the need for justice to be upheld, but what we do is we see that taken up by God himself.

That's why it's so important to understand that Jesus is God in the flesh, Emmanuel with us, or Emmanuel, God with us.

Okay, I got it, Jeff, but what does all this truly mean?

Well, it means that the only possibility of healed relationships is if both justice and forgiveness now this is the transitional statement here that'll clear this up the only possibility of healing relationships is if both justice and forgiveness are pursued concomitantly using the model of the cross so the cross shows the victim as i look at the cross and i see what's happening there i realize oh man My sin required this kind of punishment.

I need forgiveness.

So the cross shows the victim his or her own need for forgiveness.

But the cross also helps Christians to refrain from viewing other criminals and abusers as some kind of other people, different from ourselves, because evil lies in the hearts of everyone.

And you never know what you're going to do given any situation.

And that kind of humbling prevents us from going beyond desire for justice, a restoration that protects future victims, to a vengefulness and a desire for the perpetrator's permanent destruction.

You say, okay, Jeff, I heard that, but I'm not sure I got it.

Okay, let me give you a quick illustration.

So when I was in New Zealand, one of my best friends, my golfing buddy, Colin Spear, was also a teacher.

In one of our prominent high schools, we were playing golf one day and he said, you know, Jeff, I don't know what I'm going to do.

I said, well, what do you mean?

He goes, well, there's a bully at school and he's big.

He's a big boy.

In fact, most of the teachers are afraid of him and you never know who's going to show up at school if he's going to be in a good mood or a bad mood.

And he's got a pretty tough home life.

His father's an alcoholic.

You know, his mother's estranged, absent.

And the problem is, because we know his background, none of the teachers want to expel him.

And I said, well, what's your problem?

He said, well, that means that 257 young boys in his class live in constant fear and trepidation, not knowing if they're going to live to see another day.

Now, this is a good example right here.

Yes, the background of this bully has made it difficult for him to be successful.

But you still need to expel the bully.

so that justice can be attributed.

He needs to be aware of what he's doing or it'll never stop.

But you're also expelling him out of love for the other 258 students who live in constant fear.

So both justice and love occur.

The best chance the perpetrator has to see his or her sin or self-deception, and the only way he's going to change is if he's confronted with consequences.

And...

Not only that, but you have a responsibility to the victims, the people that he is offending.

Again, back to Miroslav Volf.

The temporal nature of human justice serves as a picture of God's final justice.

It presents the abuser the opportunity to come face to face with the reality and severity of his sin.

It is a call to the abuser to repent, to side with both God and their victim, and condemn the evil they have perpetrated.

It is only in this scenario that the possibility of reconstructing a relationship is possible.

Truly repentant abusers who have come to side with God and their victims do not use their repentance as an excuse to escape human justice or make demands of their victims.

True repentance involves acknowledging the harm they've done and the rightness of the punishment they're receiving.

This is biblical theology.

Rachel Denhollander put this work of theology and the justice and love of God at work in the courtroom when she looked at her abuser and said this, and I quote, I pray you experience the soul-crushing weight of guilt so that you may someday experience true repentance and true forgiveness from God, which you need far more than forgiveness from me, though I do extend that to you as well.

Notice justice is upheld.

There's a penalty to be paid.

Love is upheld because individually she is forgiving.

Now we're almost done.

What does that mean?

It means that you and I, when we're offended, we need to first of all embrace forgiveness.

And if you'll remember, we said how to do that last week.

You name the trespass, you identify, confront the perpetrator.

And while you do that, you deliberately do the internal work of understanding the background or situation so that you come at them not with anger, anger against injustice, but love for the individual.

Nevertheless, you identify with the perpetrator.

You identify the sin, you name the trespass, you then forgive the debt.

And forgiving the debt is going to cost you something.

It means that you're going to bear the weight of the transgression.

But you're going to have the power of Jesus to do it, which we're going to talk about later.

And fourth, you reconcile.

You seek to restore the goodwill.

So you embrace forgiveness.

And second, you seek justice.

Yes, you do both at the same time.

Letting the criminal go is not justice.

Do you know you and I as Christians have a responsibility to make sure that the perpetrator doesn't offend other brothers and sisters?

And that offensive can be stopped if there is confrontation, naming the sin.

Yes, motivated out of love for restoration, but there has to be a confrontation and there has to be a transformation of the transgression.

So letting the criminal go is not justice.

You do forgive personally, but you expect justice corporately and judicially.

You forgive personally and individually, but you expect justice judicially, corporately.

So here's what I'm saying to you.

And we can't cover everything in this message.

And we're taking it stage by stage.

You are no less a Christian when you stand in a court of law and expect the perpetrator to do the time for the crime.

You're no less...

In fact, I would say that if you are loving without the expectation of justice, you don't understand the cross.

But if all you want is justice without love and forgiveness, you don't understand the cross either.

It's when these two things come together that you start to become transformed in your relationships and how you deal with other people.

One more example, then I'm going to end.

So, someone that I know, and this is in years past, pastor of a pretty large church, his son was accused of sexual abuse.

Now, the church came together and tried to deal with this, and churches don't always get this right.

In fact, probably still have a lot to learn.

But at the end of the day, there was a confession.

Yes, this is what I've done.

And she was even willing and able to forgive him.

Okay?

But he did lose his job.

Why?

Because there has to be ramifications to the transgression and the protection of future victims.

So yes, he can forgive as an individual.

Yes, he can repent as an individual.

But you don't put that person back in a place of authority until healing has been accomplished, until counseling has been experienced, until we are sure that we can place or replace this person into a position of authority.

Both love and holiness are taking place at the same time.

As an individual, she loves and forgives.

As a citizen, as a member of her church, she expects justice to occur where this person is taken out of authority, where more sexual abuse can occur.

You know what the conclusion of all this is, folks?

Number one, you are a sinner, and justice demands that you be held accountable, and it's no laughing matter.

You must pay the debt you owe.

unless someone pays it for you, and someone did, and they paid it because they love you.

For God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son that whoever believes in him should not perish, but should have everlasting life.

And Jesus stands before the Father, not only as a loving Savior, but one of justice, and says to the Father, I have fulfilled the requirements of justice because I have paid the penalty on their behalf.

Let me say it one more time in case you missed it.

For God to punish us for any sin after we've become believers in Christ would be to exact two payments for the same debt.

That's different than discipline.

He will discipline us to get us back on the right path.

But the punishment for our sin, the wages of sin is death.

The punishment for our sin, past, present, and future, were all met in the righteous requirements of the law fulfilled on the cross.

Second, when justice comes to us, God's motivation is always love and repentance.

Oh, what a sermon in and of itself.

Sometimes you think your life is falling apart and you're thinking, man, God is getting me because I know I'm not living the way I should.

And you start getting angry at God because, you know, who does God think he is coming down and...

Wrecking havoc in my life just because I'm not walking with Him.

Well, that's because you don't understand the love and justice of God.

Because when God puts a roadblock up, or when God is disciplining you for something that you're doing in your life, He's not coming after you out of holiness.

He's coming after you out of love.

He's coming after you because He loves you so much that He knows if you continue down this road, you're going to destroy your life.

So getting angry with Him is going to do you no good.

How about humbling yourself and thinking, wow, God is only God, and I'm not walking in the right direction, but he's also a loving God, and he's desperately trying to get my attention to save me.

That's the thing about the justice of God.

It doesn't exact its revenge for the sake of revenge.

It exacts its punishment for the sake of repentance and love to restore, to heal, and to make whole.

Three.

Because you have been forgiven, you too can forgive when justice runs its course.

Now, as we move into the next few weeks, we're going to talk about, okay, how can I do this?

I see that I should.

I see the biblical foundation.

How can I?

In the meantime, my simple message to you is that God does love you.

He's shown that on the cross.

God himself came and did for you what you could not do for yourself.

met the requirements of His holiness and justice and righteousness, and He did so because He loves you and wants to save you.

But you have to believe on the One whom He has sent.

For God so loved the world, He gave His only begotten Son, that whoever believes on Him shall not perish.

If there is no belief and confession, and there's no admission of His holiness and His love, and you think you've just found a loophole, which we're going to talk about in the future, you think, oh well, if He's forgiven me of past, present, and future, I'll just go out and live the way I want, then you don't get the love, the mercy, and justice of God.

And as a result, you are not saved.

You are not saved.

All those who believe on him shall not perish, but have everlasting life.

Father, I thank you for your love and your justice.

I thank you that you remind us that as Christ followers, who are citizens under authority, whether it be the church or the government, we have every right, and it is righteous, to expect justice when the strong have oppressed the weak.

and to even fight for that justice, while at the same time expressing love for the individual violator, hoping that through our love and forgiveness individually, and through ramifications and justice corporately, that that person will see the error of their ways, repent, be restored, and because of the love of the one who forgives, and the justice that is exhibited corporately in our world, restoration and reconciliation can occur between victim, those who have been abused, and perpetrators, the abuser, and things change, and the healings come.

In Christ's name, amen.

We're so glad you could join us for today's message.

If you would like to talk to someone about following Jesus or what that even would look like in your life, we would love to connect with you.

And you can do that by going to oneandall.church.com.

And if you're looking for more ways to grow and maybe get into the word a little bit every day, we have a great resource for you.

It is our One and All daily podcast.

You can get that on the One and All app or wherever you get your podcasts.

And it's a quick, short, daily devotional designed to help you get into the Word, reflect on God and His goodness before you start your busy day, and just a little bit of Jesus throughout your week.

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Well, let's go as we always do, with one hope, one life in Christ.