God Without Religion_ Can It Really Be This Simple_ - Andrew Farley [51]
Christ was sacrificed once to take away the sins of many people. (Heb. 9:28)
Religion says get right with God—daily, weekly, yearly. Whether it’s the tribal religion where they’re marching around the fire once a season; or the Jewish religion where they’re marching their way to the temple once a year; or a Catholic religion where they march their way to the weekly Mass; or a Protestant religion in which they march down the aisle, again and again, to ask for forgiveness and “get right”—it’s all the same. They’re marching, over and over, to get right and stay right.
And that’s religion.
But God adheres to a blood-based economy. Because Jesus Christ shed his blood only once, we Christians are forgiven people. This means we can refuse to join in the religious parade. We can step out of that marching line. We can stand firm, knowing that “it is finished” (John 19:30).
God says Jesus is the one and only satisfying sacrifice (1 John 2:2). God is completely satisfied with the sacrifice of his Son. If God himself is satisfied, who are we to argue with him?
No Second Thoughts
Because God is satisfied, Jesus won’t come swooping down out of heaven to die again. Nor is Jesus up in heaven being crucified over and over:
Nor did he enter heaven to offer himself again and again, the way the high priest enters the Most Holy Place every year with blood that is not his own. Then Christ would have had to suffer many times since the creation of the world. But now he has appeared once for all at the end of the ages to do away with sin by the sacrifice of himself. (Heb. 9:25–26)
If God isn’t planning any repeat sacrifices on earth or in heaven, it can only mean one thing: our past, present, and future sins have been completely obliterated! We are not being forgiven progressively and in danger of God having some second thoughts. No, we’ve already been forgiven, past tense:
Be kind and compassionate to one another, forgiving each other, just as in Christ God forgave you. (Eph. 4:32)
God made you alive with Christ. He forgave us all our sins, having canceled the written code, with its regulations, that was against us and that stood opposed to us; he took it away, nailing it to the cross. (Col. 2:13–14)
And where these have been forgiven, there is no longer any sacrifice for sin. (Heb. 10:18)
Passages like these, written in past tense, show that our forgiveness is an accomplished fact. It’s not something ongoing or in progress. It’s done.
Just stop and think about it for a minute. How many of your sins were in the future when Christ died? All of them! The sins you committed prior to salvation, the sins you committed after salvation, and the sins you’ll commit tomorrow were all in the future when Jesus died and took them away. God made no distinction with regard to time of occurrence. This means we have been forgiven—past tense—of all our sins.
We are forgiven people.
23
I’d like you to think of two numbers. The first is the number of sins you’ve committed in your life. Okay, just make a rough guess. Got it? Now, the second number is the number of those sins that you’ve confessed or asked forgiveness for.
See the problem? One of those numbers is a lot smaller than the other. It seems we can only remember and confess a fraction of the sins we’ve committed. But the Bible tells us that God is a holy God who can’t tolerate sin. So how could we enter heaven with any sins—forgotten or remembered—that haven’t been entirely dealt with? For this very reason, our forgiveness is not contingent upon any act of our own (our confession, our repentance, or our asking for forgiveness).
No, our forgiveness is solely based on the blood of Christ.
Confession or asking for forgiveness cannot possibly be a condition for becoming forgiven. We’ve already forgotten about thousands of sins in our lives. God’s redeeming work through the cross isn’t contingent upon our memory, the listing of our