What Does It Mean That God is Just to Forgive?

Mike Leake

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“If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness.” –1 John 1:9

“God I screwed up….”

Do you realize what wonderful glory you are accessing when you utter those words from a penitent heart? Your confession is connected to the character of God and it leads to action from God.

He is faithful…He never fails. He never lets down. He never fails to respond consistently to our confession. He always applies His great and wonderful promises of grace and mercy to our humble confession. Always.

This is where we typically put an emphasis on this verse. We rightly note how God’s loving and merciful character leads to his action of forgiving us and cleansing us of unrighteousness. God is faithful to respond to your confession with His cleansing grace.

But John wants us to connect these actions to another aspect of God’s character; namely, He is just. This means that God is righteous in forgiving a penitent sinner. It is consistent with His character and it is the right thing to do. It is right for God to cleanse the one who asks for cleansing.

He will forgive you, and it’s right for him to do it.

He will cleanse you, and it’s right for him to do it.

Consider the implications of this, though. This means that it would be unjust for God to withhold forgiveness from you when your confess. It also means that the righteous character of God also works to remove the stain which accompanies that which we are confessing.

If you have confessed your sin, live as if it’s been cast into the ocean to be seen no more. If you have confessed your sin, don’t be surprised by the scrubbing that’s coming. God doesn’t just forgive he also cleanses. He undragons us.

But this also means—and you can see the connection here with verse 8—that it would be unjust for God to forgive and cleanse you apart from confession. It would be unrighteous for God to grant forgiveness to someone who desires to continue in rebellion.

I believe understanding this verse helps us to also understand how to faithfully apply Ephesians 4:32. In the same way that God forgives, so also do we. It’s unjust for God to forgive and cleanse apart from confession. So what does this mean for us?

This speaks nothing of our desire or posture of forgiveness. As in 1 John 1:8-9 it appears that God’s faithful character means that He is ready to forgive upon confession. But if we foolishly continue in our lie and say “we have no sin” (or “we have nothing to repent of”) then we are withholding this forgiveness and cleansing from ourselves. This would have massive ramifications for how we evangelicals typically treat those who are caught in sin.

I believe this misunderstanding is connected to our propensity to shame victims and protect perpetrators. We are quick to talk about our need to forgive the wrong-doer and we labor to cleanse them of the consequences of their actions and often this is without any evidence of confession. This is not just.

Let us be bold in confessing. And let us be bold in living in the forgiveness and cleansing purchased for us by the Lord Jesus. Let us lean into the truth that God’s justice executed in the shed blood of Jesus requires that penitent sinners are forgiven and cleansed. And let us fully acknowledge the necessity of a life of repentance*.

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*I realize that some could take these words here to develop a theology which would be contrary to the gospel. What I mean is that some could assume that this verse (or my words here) are teaching that if you have any unconfessed sin upon your deathbed then you will be unable to access forgiveness and cleansing. I don’t believe such a position is defensible. We are united to Christ upon faith and repentance and we are united to the whole of Christ and the whole of His work. I believe what 1 John is talking about here is how to consistently live out this eternal gospel. This is why I chose that phrase “a life of repentance”. That is what is consistent with redemption.

Touching Trauma

Mike Leake

jesusthomasdoubt-300x223I always dreaded taking a shower after playing baseball. It wasn’t because I didn’t desire to get all the dirt and sweat off my body. I was fine with being clean. It was the fact that when I played baseball it was rare for me to leave a game unbloodied. Either my knees, my elbows, or my side would have wounds from sliding or diving for ground balls. A shower is painful on open wounds.

Trauma doesn’t like being touched.

That’s why I’m really taken aback by these words of Jesus to the unfortunately monikered Doubting Thomas: “Then he said to Thomas, ‘Put your finger here, and see my hands; and put out your hand, and place it in my side. Do not disbelieve, but believe.’”

“…place it in my side.” Are you kidding me?!?!?

There has been much made about whether or not Thomas actually did touch Jesus’ body. The text doesn’t tell us that he did. In fact, there is a pretty decent argument made that his belief without touching is an integral part of what is happening here. The point would be that Jesus knew Thomas’ heart, knew his ache, and offered to fulfill that need. This very fact is enough for the doubting Thomas to believe.

This text has also inspired copious amounts of ink on the relationship between doubt and belief. Should Thomas be rebuked? Is he a model for us all? How does Jesus respond to such doubt? Is he rebuking Thomas or is he inviting him into faith? Such questions are important but I think they cause us to miss one really important part of the story. Trauma.

“Unless I see the nail marks in his hands and put my finger where the nails were, and put my hand into his side, I will not believe.”

This is trauma talking. It’s disappointment. It’s the pain of dashed hopes. “You idiots can believe what you want, but I’m not about to trust again unless I can see with my own eyes and feel with my own hands.I won’t be fooled again. I’m not hoping back on this little merry-go-round.”

Thomas asks for the impossible. And he sits with it for eight days. Eight days where the other disciples are filled with hope and possibility. Eight days where all of his questions and all of his pain rise to overwhelm his bitter palate. Eight days, not for his wounds to heal but eight days for them to fester. Thomas hurts to the touch. 

Then Jesus appears. His hands still bearing the marks of trauma. Barely closed. His body split open. His wounds still raw. It’s certainly not a sanitary scene. It maybe an overstatement at this point to say that it’s a bloody mess. But that’s actually where trauma is the most pernicious. It’s often not in the moment itself, it’s in the eight days later. It’s when scabs are starting to form. It’s when others around us are moving on to a new normal but we still bear the pain in our bodies.

For Jesus this isn’t merely the marks of a spear piercing his side. This isn’t only the physical wound of having a nail driven through your hand. These wounds, this trauma, holds with it a message. His body would remember the mocking crown of thorns. That hole in hand is a symbol of rejection—crucified as a would be King. The whole world assuming that He is an imposter. His own beloved disciples having abandoned him. His side absorbing the blow of Thomas’ doubt.

And what does Jesus do?

Touch my trauma.

The son of God wounded. Betrayed. Shamed. Mocked. Scorned. All of those horrendous things we read of in Deuteronomy 28. The cursedness of being hanged upon a tree. Crucified outside the city. He bore it all. And now he invites Thomas to touch the wound.

Something about this heals Thomas’ own doubt—his own trauma—his own cynicism. All the bitterness seems to be washed away in that one moment as hot tears fall down upon his cheeks and he realizes that the resurrection is true. It’s so true that you can touch it. But now he doesn’t need to touch it.

I don’t know if he actually touched the wound or not. But that’s kind of the point. There is something in this where Jesus became more human than any of us have ever been. And he took upon himself more pain, more trauma, more shame, more of all the yuck and muck and grime of being human. And somehow in this moment when he says, “touch my trauma” it’s healing. We don’t have to touch the gaping side with our own fingers because the presence of those holy wounds does something within us. By inviting us into the trauma of His own resurrected body we taste not only our sorrow but also His resurrection and our own. 

Jesus isn’t inviting Thomas only into the purulent, the blood, the germs, the savagery of the thing. He’s also inviting Thomas into the healing. He’s inviting him to touch a resurrected wound. This truth transforms all of our trauma. Gaping wounds are not the climax of the story when the resurrected son of God comes to town.

When Jesus is telling us to “touch his trauma” he’s inviting us to do so with our own wounded fingers. He doesn’t tell Thomas to wash his hands, put on sterilized gloves, and touch him from a distance. He invites him to really feel. Examine the wound with your own dirt covered appendages. Take your trauma to My trauma.

In all of this Jesus is not only owning his own wounds but somehow those of Thomas as well. Here, and only here, in this wounded side of Jesus will we find ultimate rest and healing for our own trauma. This invitation of Jesus tells me that His trauma invites our own trauma. He’s big enough for our dirty hands to touch His wounds. And he calls us into His wounds with our own.

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I’m indebted to my buddy, Matt, for inspiring these thoughts. 

The Freedom Of God Knowing You’re Full of It

Mike Leake

making-it-up-funny-birthday-card-root-349zzb2220_1470_1“It’s a stick-out”, that’s what my wife and I say to one another whenever one of us (usually me….okay, always me) is trying to sound smarter than we really are. I’m thinking of that card when I read 1 John 1:6-7.

6 If we say we have fellowship with him while we walk in darkness, we lie and do not practice the truth. 7 But if we walk in the light, as he is in the light, we have fellowship with one another, and the blood of Jesus his Son cleanses us from all sin.

When John talks about walking in darkness he means more than morality. We would be missing the full thrust of this verse if we tried to paraphrase this as, “if we say we have fellowship with God but we are living in sin, then we are lying and are not walking in truth.” Darkness points to more than just a sinful lifestyle, it’s really about sincerity. To say that “God is light” not only means that he is morally pure it also means that He isn’t hiding any of His character. A paraphrase such as this would get closer to John’s original meaning:

“If we say we have fellowship with the self-revealing God while we are hiding our sin behind fig leaves, we are lying and not walking in truth.”

I say this because the false teachers of John’s day had developed a rather deceptive theology that separated their physical bodies from their spiritual bodies. If you caught them with a prostitute at the temple they’d respond by saying, “this isn’t who I really am. This is just my flesh. My spirit remains pure.” That’s a fig leaf.

I don’t think it’s an accident that it’s a fig-tree which receives the curse from Jesus in the gospels. A fig tree—filled with fruit—was a sign of prosperity. But fig leaves on a barren tree is a lie, just as fig leaves on a naked Adam is an act of deception. The temple system of Jesus’ day was claiming fellowship with God but inwardly was a rotting corpse. It was a barren fig-tree with beautiful leaves to cover its nakedness.

But notice the beauty of verse 7. “If we walk in the light…” This is why I say it’s important for understanding John that we don’t simply conflate the meaning of darkness in verse 6 to mean “sinfulness”. Because if we do this then we’ll treat verse 7 as if it’s saying, “if we live a life apart from sin…” But that’s most certainly not John’s argument. It wouldn’t make sense to say, “live a life apart from sin…if you do…Jesus’ blood will cleanse you from all sin”. But what if it’s saying something like this:

But if we put down the fig leaves and come naked as we really are, just as God Himself reveals Himself authentically, we will have real fellowship with others, and the blood of Jesus his Son will cleanse us from all sin.

This is incredibly good news. It means that God knows that you are full of it. Just as with Adam in the Garden he knows all the shame that is hiding under that fig leaf. He knows the guilt. He knows the stain. He knows all those places where you and I are inconsistent and where we don’t square up. And he’s calling us here in 1 John to just be honest.

Don’t hide behind a theology that denies your real being. Don’t cover your twisted desires to visit a cult prostitute with some complicated theology of the body. And don’t pretend like it was the hand of God that moved Charismatic Pastor Dude from one location to another when in reality it was because he was about to be charged with fraud. God sees through all this.

This is meant to be freeing. God loves YOU. You as you really are and not some dolled up version that has perfected the art of making fig leaves look like the work of the Creator. You and I probably feel as if we have to hide because of all the other humans around us who are trying to perfect the art of hiding. But God sees. He sees you. And he’s calling you out of the darkness and into the light.

It’s here in the light where we can experience real authentic Christian fellowship. And it’s only here that we can have real fellowship. Because if you come wearing your fig leaves then you aren’t really coming at all. And if we try to relate to Jesus out of our fake selves then we’re really not much different than those heretics in the first century who split their flesh and their spirit. Walk in the light.

I’d be remiss here if I failed to note that God does cover our nakedness. He strips the fig leaves but he doesn’t leave us naked. He gives us new clothes. He cleanses us of all sin. The light is transformative. He may love us naked but He doesn’t leave us there. His love clothes us and cleanses us. His provision means that even though we might define ourselves by our brokenness or the shipwreck we’ve made of things—He doesn’t. His calling us into light isn’t all there is to the story. The gospel calls us out of darkness and transforms us by His light.

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I don’t know if you call that land mass a peninsula, or what. But it certainly isn’t a “stick-out”.

A New Kind of Biblical Hero

Mike Leake

photo-1590363763899-f0b78a7bb968I think I have a new biblical hero. I just wish I knew his name. He appears in Matthew, Mark, and Luke. He’s the leper whom Jesus touched. And I want to be like him.

I’m going to tell you a story today that’s one of about a dozen stories that I’ve never really shared. A few months ago I stumbled upon an old stack of papers from my childhood. It was a little notebook filled with the names of basketball players with tally marks underneath them. Judging from the tally marks Shawn Kemp had dominated Charles Barkley in a one-on-one matchup.

As I poured through the pages I felt incredible shame and sadness. I had entire basketball leagues that I’d invented. Tournaments played out in my imagination. Just me. A hoop. And a basketball. That part isn’t incredibly sad. It’s that these seasons were played out on one end of the court, while my classmates played against each other on the other end. I didn’t get to play. For some reason my short stature made me repulsive. So, I became Shawn Kemp dominating Charles Barkley.

That notebook had seasons of these names and tally marks. Meticulous stats. And I remember when somebody discovered my secret stat book. I endured even more mockery. What a weird little kid I was, playing out basketball seasons by myself when all the other kids were playing together.

And each tally mark carried a message. “They’ve rejected you, Mike. They are going to reject you. You are less than.” I’m realizing more and more these days how much I carry those messages around with me. I’m realizing that it causes me to keep others at a safe distance. It keeps me from pursuing things as well. And, I even try to keep Jesus at arms length (though he doesn’t seem to cooperate, thankfully).

This is what shame does. I’ve found Ed Welch to be correct:

Shame has a natural affinity with self-protection and unbelief. It hides form others, feels undeserving of anything good, and believes it will contaminate whatever comes close. (Welch, 137)

“They are always going to reject you….eventually.” This is the message my shame tells me. I’m fighting against that message these days. I’m trying to believe the gospel enough to pursue unguarded relationships with others. I’m trying to trust in Jesus enough to be authentic; authentic with others, myself, and ultimately with Him. The leper in Luke 5 helps me with this.

Jesus wasn’t doing ministry in a leper colony. That leper broke the Law in order to get to Jesus. He shouldn’t have pursued him. He shouldn’t have left his leper colony. He shouldn’t have been so close to Jesus. He shouldn’t have had the audacity to ask the Teacher to heal him. Leprosy doesn’t get healed—it was compared to raising the dead.

You can still hear shame in this guys voice when he says, “If you will, you can…” He doesn’t doubt for one moment Jesus’ ability. But does he want to?

But I think he knew the answer already. That’s why he left the leper colony. I say that not because this leper had some unheard of confidence. I say this because this is the type of response that Jesus brings about. Again I find Ed Welch insightful:

But look at what happened when Jesus came. Unclean people suddenly were filled with hope. Instead of hiding from the world, they became indifferent to the derision of the relatively clean townspeople and boldly went out to see Jesus. When they saw him, they felt compelled to touch him because they understood that their salvation was near. They came alive! (137)

I want to learn from this leper. “They will reject you”, is not a message that is definitive to that leper. He knew that Jesus was different. He left his shame and went boldly to Jesus. That’s a huge step, too. It’s much easier to believe the message, accept the rejection, and create a fantasy world where you can dunk on Charles Barkley.

We weren’t made for leper colonies or fantasy worlds. We were made for reality. Even if at times painful. 

I would also note that even still Jesus had to “stretch out his arm” in order to touch the guy. He was still keeping himself at arms length. But Jesus crossed that barrier. And that touch carried so many words. “I’m not going to reject you” was chief among them.

Let’s follow this leper into the touch of Christ.

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