The Garden had become a place of death. Two cherubim with flaming swords were stationed at the east gate, ready to strike and put to death anyone who sought access to the Tree of Life in the midst of the Garden.
God never intended to keep man out of the Garden forever. God desired communion with man; for man to draw near to him with no veils in between. But man sinned and was cut off from this nearness to God.
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On Palm Sunday, the anointed but-not-yet-coronated king entered the gates of Jerusalem to the shouts of “Hosanna,” save us, now, we pray, “Blessed is the King who comes in the name of the Lord.” They were echoing the declaration of the Father at Jesus’ baptism and Transfiguration. Jesus is God’s Son, the last Adam, the king of creation, the one to whom the dominion mission was given. Unlike the first Adam, Jesus did not grasp authority ahead of time. He waited on the Father’s timing and the gifts that the Father would give him in order to fulfill his task faithfully. Also unlike the first Adam, Jesus began with a sin-wracked world that lived under the dominion of death without resurrection. The King’s mission was to provide the forgiveness of sins, which would release the world from the dominion of sin and death, granting it life, and then pick up the dominion project to move the world from glory to glory.
Forgiveness of sins is fundamental to the creation moving forward into the glory that God destined for it in the beginning. In order to get right what Adam got wrong, Jesus would have to go back to the two trees in the midst of the Garden of Eden: the Tree of Life and the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. He would have to eat from both of them in the right way and order.
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Our president declared today, March 31, “Transgender Day of Visibility,” honoring and celebrating “the achievements and resiliency of transgender individuals and communities.” The Biden-Harris Administration is pressing the passage of the Equality Act that will “provide long overdue Federal civil rights protections on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity. The Equality Act will deliver legal protections for LGBTQ+ Americans in our housing, education, public services, and lending systems.” You can be sure that if you don’t positively affirm anyone who identifies as any of the various letters of the alphabet, your lack of tolerance will not be tolerated.
So-called “transgender” and those who “identify” as the opposite sex have been around for quite some time. Up until recently, we haven’t really had to take them seriously as a culture. They were always on the fringe. In many ways they still are. However, now our culture is not only tolerating them, but they are being praised for their courage of breaking free from “social constructs” of male and female foisted upon them by the interpretation of their anatomy and becoming the sex they really feel they are on the inside; their courage being recognized by the highest offices in our land. The media that feed our society are pushing the rest of us to sympathize and celebrate these new heroes.
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As Jesus entered Jerusalem upon the colt, people were laying their cloaks on the road and proclaiming “Blessed is the king who comes in the name of the Lord!” (Lk 19.35-38) King. What does that mean? God himself defined this kingship at the beginning of history, and Luke guides us to see just what “king” means.
At his baptism, Jesus is declared to be God’s beloved son. Immediately following the record of Jesus’ baptism, Luke records the genealogy of Jesus that traces Jesus’ lineage all the way back to Adam, “the son of God” (Lk 3.21-38). Jesus is the second and last Adam, a truth that Luke’s apostolic companion, Paul, makes clear in his letters (Rom 5.12-21; 1Cor 15.45-49). Adam was creation’s original son of God. He was the image of God, the one was to live in the fullness of union and communion with God, the representative head of creation, and, as such, the one who had the responsibility as creation’s king to take dominion over the creation, moving it from glory to glory until the earth looked like God’s heaven. Adam was to cultivate the world, from gardens to culture, building houses and cities, being fruitful and multiplying and filling the earth. He was creation’s king (see Ps 8; see also Heb 1–2).
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The goal of forgiveness is peace, the reconciliation of a relationship in some form, removing the enmity between two people, and having a healthy relationship in this new situation. Reconciliation post forgiveness may not restore the relationship to what it was before the sin occurred, but there can be genuine peace between the offender and the offended.
Offenses will continue to occur as long as we live in this mortal flesh. Consequently, forgiveness will always be a craft we must work at to pursue peace. However, pursuing peace is not limited to our actions after someone has sinned against us or we have sinned against someone else. We are taught to sing in Psalm 34 to “seek peace and pursue it,” a command echoed by Peter (1Pt 3.11) and Paul (Rom 14.19). As much as lies within us, we are to maintain peace in relationships by pursuing those things that make for peace.
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The best defense is a good offense. We often hear this in the world of sports, but it is also generally true in all of life. Proactively pursuing positive, productive disciplines is better than defensively sitting around telling yourself not to engage in this sinful activity or not to think about that sin. What happens when I tell you not to think about a horse? The image of a horse comes to mind. The more you tell yourself not to think about it, the more you find yourself dwelling on it. Instead of defensively dwelling upon what we are not supposed to do, we need to be offensively pursuing what is good, true, and beautiful.
This principle holds true in relationships. Being prepared to forgive is necessary because offenses will come (Mt 18.7). But there are ways to take preemptive strikes against the sins that would destroy our relationship. We do this by pursuing peace. In this article and the next, I will give you some ways to do so in contrast with ways to destroy peace.
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“Why must I forgive? He did me wrong. He owes me. I deserve justice! It isn’t right that he sins against me, depriving me of my possessions and dignity, and then I am expected to cancel the debt. That’s not fair.”
These thoughts have probably crossed your mind before when dealing with a painful experience of someone sinning against you. But you are a Christian, and the Lord Jesus commands you to forgive your brother when he comes to you asking for forgiveness. If you don’t forgive him, God will not forgive you. Indeed, he will reinstate the debt against you for not forgiving your brother (Mt 18.21-35).
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Most of us don’t like turmoil. When there is tension in our relationships, we want to resolve it so that we can live joyful and anxiety-free. To do that, there are times that we may be willing to short-circuit the process of reconciliation through not dealing adequately with sin. We have been told that, as Christians, we have the responsibility to forgive. Some trying to take this seriously, believe that this means that you release the person from all responsibility for his actions, the necessity for him to change, let him continue the way he is living, and you, being a good Christian, bear all of the scars and residual pain. Or maybe, because we don’t like the discomfort of the whole situation, we dismissively say, “I forgive you” to paper over the sin in the relationship so that we don’t have to do the uncomfortable work of working through it. However, if the goal of forgiveness is peace in a relationship–a healthy wholeness between individuals–then the process of forgiveness can’t be cheapened in these ways. As disciples of Jesus, Christians are called into a lifestyle of forgiveness which involves dealing appropriately with sin and seeking to restore a communion of peace with others.
There are some misconceptions concerning forgiveness that need to be cleared up.
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Central to the Christian faith stands the images of the cross and an empty tomb, which is the end of our journey during this Lenten season. The breach between God and man created by the sin of the first Adam is remedied through the last Adam taking upon himself the burden of the consequences of sin so that all of creation and especially man himself might be released from sin’s penalty and power. In short, in the cross and resurrection, Jesus accomplished the forgiveness of sins. The message of the apostles was consistent that the forgiveness of sins is proclaimed in Christ because he secured it through his shed blood and resurrection (cf. Ac 5.31; 13.38; 26.18; Rom 4.25; Eph 1.7; Col 1.14). Now, as we are baptized into Christ, Peter says, we are baptized for the forgiveness of our sins (Ac 2.38). Forgiveness of sins is central to the gospel of Christ.
Forgiveness is not only a privilege to enjoy, but, once received, it becomes a calling to be lived. As renewed images of God in Christ, we are to consciously take on the character of our forgiving God, learning how to practice the craft of forgiveness. Only as we live this way will we be able to live together as faithful people of God. In our present cultural climate where there is no forgiveness because of skin color, social status, or a myriad of other things, only perpetual guilt and division, it is incumbent upon Christians to learn of and practice the grace of forgiveness.
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Wisdom is the knowledge of how various things ought to fit together properly and the skill to make them so. Whether you are looking at Bezalel, an artist and master craftsman, who is given the Spirit of wisdom to construct the tabernacle (Ex 31.2-5), or the wise king, Solomon, who knows how to put people back in right relationship with one another–justice–wisdom sees how different parts of the world are to fit properly with one another and has the skill to make them so. Paul himself is a “wise master builder” who is constructing the church upon the foundation of Christ Jesus (1Cor 3.10). He knows how to put people together so that they can live the way that they ought to live. Wisdom takes all the tools of knowledge and logic and artistically works with different materials in diverse situations to make something beautiful even when there are no step-by-step, paint-by-numbers instructions. Life and relationships are not always that simple.
That is why we must become artists; craftsmen who have been trained thoroughly in the fundamentals who can then beautifully riff off of those fundamentals, staying true to them, while also dealing with situations for which there are no sets of rules. Like musicians who have learned scales and harmonies who grow into composers of beautiful music or engineers who have learned the science of structures who grow into designers of beautiful buildings, so all of us as Christians must get down the basics so that we may grow to be skilled craftsman, wise master builders, in relationships.
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Kuyperian Commentary Podcast
