What Are Forgiveness, Repentance, and Reconciliation, and Why Are They Important?

(avg. read time: 7–14 mins.)

(This post and the next two are modified from what I presented for a Discipleship Now at First Baptist Church of Shawnee, OK in 2017.)

Easter, the most important day on our calendar, has passed, but it is itself the start of the Easter season. In that light, I think it is appropriate to present a series of messages that are theological-ethical in nature to talk about what it means to embody the gospel that came to fruition on Easter. Theological ethics looks at the facts of who God is, what God has done, and who we are in relation to God in order to draw ethical guidance. Our themes are all about articulating the gospel and living in a way that is “gospeling,” so as to show that the gospel is the story within which we live, move, and have our being. My first concerns are answering the following questions: What are forgiveness, repentance, and reconciliation? Why are they important?

To start, what we are talking about, most fundamentally, are practical means of destroying the power of sin. On God’s level, these actions are part of one side of God’s means of utterly destroying the power of sin, which began with Jesus and will be consummated at the time of new creation. On the human level, these actions are temporary micro-implementations of God’s victory for individuals or corporately; hence why it is appropriate to address these actions in Easter season. But we can only appropriately articulate what these actions are if we have a good understanding of what sin is.

Most basically, sin is that which denies or defies that God is God. Consequently, at the human level, sin is that which denies or defies that human beings are bearers of God’s image. You see, the way the world is supposed to be—whether the Bible calls it “shalom,” “the kingdom of God,” “eternal life,” or whatever else—all forms around the proper ordering and harmony that comes from first acknowledging that God is God and, secondly, from acknowledging that humans bear God’s image. We cannot go into this matter in great depth here, but Jesus states that the two chief commandments are to love the Lord your God with all of your heart, soul, strength, and mind and to love your neighbor as yourself precisely because the logic that underlies those commands is the logic of the kingdom in which all things are properly ordered and properly relate. To love God is to know God, to believe that God is the one to whom all things properly submit, to obey God’s will and purpose, and to live as ones who exist to bear God’s image. To bear God’s image is to represent God, to have dominion over the world in reflection of God and God’s purpose. Humans were made for life-giving, loving, reigning union with God. Sin disrupts that union by working to usurp God’s place. It is fundamentally idolatry in putting something else more highly valued in the place of the Creator. Sin leads to death because in this opposition to God sin creates separation between the Creator and God of life and his creation that depends on him for life.

Sin disrupts reality and convinces us that the sinful state is just the way things are or even how they should be. Yet it wreaks destruction precisely because of its denial of reality. Idolatry is when we treat that which is not God as if it is God. Murder is when we treat one made in the image of God as if he or she is not by taking away their life and causing all the misery that follows. Adultery is when you treat your spouse as if she or he is not your spouse (as well as when you treat others who are not as if they are). Coveting and theft happen when we treat what is not ours as if it is. Betrayal is when we treat a loved one as if he or she is not a loved one. We also sin when we lie about what we are and sin has become so ingrained in us that it has made the process of determining which parts of us are what God made us to be and which parts are not difficult. Sin threatens to deceive our every step from the cradle to the grave so that we might die the death that is separation from the true God. Sin’s violation of God’s creative intention thus leads to never-ending cycles of interpersonal debt as offenses pile up, the breaking of relationships and the consequent loss of position that people used to have in those relationships, and to death.

This is where forgiveness, repentance, and reconciliation come in. If sin leads to death, then forgiveness, repentance, and reconciliation are tools of new life, the means by which the God who raises the dead foreshadows the resurrection. While there is significant overlap between forgiveness and reconciliation in the Bible (precisely because God is the chief forgiver), for our purposes we focus on “forgiveness” as the action taken by the one offended by sin and “reconciliation” as the result of the reunion of the offended and the offender.

Forgiveness is the act and process of granting a costly pardon, no longer holding an offending action against someone, releasing the hold on interpersonal debt, and extending the offer of reunion if the person should repent. Repentance is the act and process of turning away from the current direction in one’s life, confessing and apologizing for action taken in that direction, and accepting a new direction and agenda for one’s life. Reconciliation is the process of two or more parties meeting repentance with forgiveness. The outcome of the process of reconciliation thus has at least four components: 1) the offended releases the offender from debt; 2) the offended removes the source of the debt by expunging the violation from memory; 3) the offended and offender are thus restored to their proper relationship; 4) the two or more parties enable the forging of new life between them. These actions stem from God and if we are looking for a paradigm of what they mean, how they work, and how we should enact them, we must look to God’s precedents.

That brings us first to Hos 2. The imagery is vivid and graphic. God’s not pulling punches in how he describes Israel. He uses the language of divorce to describe what he has done with his adulterous wife. This is not the only time that the relationship of God and Israel is framed in marital terms and each time it is to emphasize the intended harmony, the exclusivity of the relationship, the obligation of faithfulness, the waywardness of Israel chasing after idols (which is described as adultery), the dysfunction and disconnection that happens as a result of adultery, and God’s restorative action after the act of adultery. All at once, Hosea shows us that God is terrible in wrath and stubborn in loving devotion. God has handed over Israel to the natural outcomes of her actions in treating her husband as if he is not her husband and treating those who are not as if they are. God has handed them over to chasing after lies about who has provided for her and loved her so and this chase will lead her into exile. It is only when she reaches rock-bottom and finds herself lost in the wilderness far from home that the years of memories she has neglected will return to her, prompting her to return to her husband. The word translated as “return” or “go back” in v. 7 is the most common word used for repentance in the Old Testament because repentance involves turning back from a course of action and, in the context of Israel’s history, returning to God’s course. And only now, when she cannot see any other course does Israel repent and turn back to God. Without this remembrance and repentance, Israel would have wasted away in the wilderness and died in divorce.

However, the text does not immediately rush into God’s response to repentance. Israel’s basic problem was that they did not remember their history, the history by which God showed that they were his people and that he was their God. He does a quick summary of Israel’s history, God’s provision in that history, and how Israel had benefited from it. He does this because repentance is not simply a decision you make once; it signifies that you are accepting a new direction for your life that will lead you to overcome the sin of which you have repented. Thus, it is necessary to know what led to the death of sin and what leads to the new life out the other side of it.

It is not until v. 14 that God issues his response to the repentance rather than the sin. In spite of all that Israel has done to scorn her divine husband, God is never willing to say once and for all, “good riddance to bad rubbish.” Israel rightly owes an unpayable debt to God for this deep disrespect, but God abounds in mercy and prefers to forgive rather than to destroy. God’s offer of restoration takes the form of going back to the beginning, thereby removing the history of offenses, and starting at the “honeymoon” phase. God will make Israel new again and she will no longer call her husband “Baal” (a word that could be translated “lord,” but is also the name of the Canaanite god most often worshiped by Israel), meaning that she will no longer evoke her history of adulterous idolatry. But God will make it so that she returns to a new life of harmony, so that the weapons and engines of war will no longer be necessary. And this new life will be perpetual, as God says he will make her his wife forever. This reconciliation will lead to them being properly related, as they should have always been. God signifies this by saying that the one who is named as “not pitied” will be pitied (that is, treated with mercy) and that the one who is named “not my people” will be declared as “my people.” This is the fulfillment of God’s forgiveness. Israel in turn fulfills its repentance by calling the one who to them was “not God” “my God.”

That is the gospel according to Hosea, the good news God spoke through the prophets long before he made the promises actual. In the fullness of time, God brought this gospel to fruition and made it the gospel as we know it today, the gospel of Jesus Christ. Jesus is the gospel-in-person, in part because Jesus is the one through whom God’s forgiveness is poured out, by whom repentance is made eternally effective, and in whom God reconciles all things to himself. Paul describes this reality well in 2 Cor 5.

Jesus as God in human flesh was the true image-bearer of God in a way that no human had ever been before. In Jesus, God and human were united like never before and the human identity of “image and likeness-bearer” was fulfilled like never before, which is to say that Jesus was more human than anyone else who has ever lived. This one who was fully God and fully human expressed God’s love most clearly in giving himself over to death on a cross so that in rising to new eternal life he could both begin the new creation in himself and open up the way to God’s promised future to others. In order for humans to become the image-bearers God created us to be, we must be shaped according to the image of Jesus. The new life we have when we are united with Jesus is the life of Jesus, hence why we live “for” the one who died and was raised for us. Jesus’s life was the start of the new creation and so those who share in his life are to be previews of the new creation, as Paul describes in v. 17.

Jesus’s death and resurrection, as the proper goal of his entire life, was the means of inaugurating the new creation, or as Jesus referred to it, “the kingdom of God.” In order for people to inhabit this new creation, God extends his offer of forgiveness for sin in Jesus. Humans should thus respond with repentance. Since repentance is accepting a new direction for one’s life, a life of repentance directed to God means living for Jesus. And this process is how God reconciles the world to himself. He offers to forgive sins, no longer counting them against the forgiven, to restore people as image-bearers, and to make them new creations. When humans meet that offer with repentance, there is reconciliation and there God actualizes what he has offered to all.

Living for Jesus includes carrying the gospel story to others and sharing it. This is one way that we show that we no longer regard Jesus from a human point of view, but from the point of view of him as Lord of our lives. When you think of Jesus that way, it affects how you think of everything else because God in Jesus has overcome the disorder and distortion of idolatry in which we have all lived. As God makes us part of the new creation, he calls us to regard everything from the perspective of that new creation because it fulfills God’s purpose for creation. God does this by a great exchange in which, in Jesus, our sinless representative bore our sins and became our costly sin offering so that we might become God’s righteousness. In this text, God’s righteousness is his reconciling action, which we embody not only by experiencing it for ourselves, but by speaking and living the gospel with others.

Before I finish, I want to return to the central questions I mentioned earlier to provide answers based on these texts. What is forgiveness? It is the act and process of granting a costly pardon, no longer holding an offending action against someone, releasing the hold on interpersonal debt, and extending the offer of reunion if the person should repent. It is important because without it there could never be new life for broken relationships, no life on the other side of the death that sin brings. It is God’s offer of a new life and a new relationship.

What is repentance? It is the act and process of turning away from the current direction in one’s life, confessing and apologizing for action taken in that direction, and accepting a new direction and agenda for one’s life. It is important because without it there could never be a way of concretely overcoming the ways of sin in one’s life by accepting God’s offer of forgiveness.

What is reconciliation? It is the process of two or more parties meeting repentance with forgiveness. If one wanted to express it in a tidy equation form (which is obviously tidier than what it takes to work out the process in real life), it would be: forgiveness + repentance = reconciliation. It is important because without it relationships could never be renewed, including our relationship with God from which comes life. Reconciliation is to our relationships what resurrection is to our bodies. In Jesus, we have permanent reconciliation, permanent resurrection, and permanent life.

I will get more into the takeaways from these grand, deep theological realities next time, but for now I will leave you with some thoughts on what it looks like to embody these cosmic realities on an individual level. The contrast to 2 Cor 5 is actually 1 Cor 5. In that text, Paul chastises the Corinthians for tolerating a level of sexual immorality in their midst that even the pagans would find repulsive. The one unnamed person that Paul singles out in this letter as needing communal discipline was a man in a sexual relationship with his stepmother. Since bad company corrupts good character and unrepentant sin has no place in a repentant community, Paul tells the community to banish him until he should repent. There was no doubt a great deal of conflict within the community about this matter between the times of 1 Corinthians and 2 Corinthians, but I find the arguments convincing that this man is the one referred to in 2 Cor 2:5–11. This text is the meeting-point between 1 Cor 5 and 2 Cor 5, where the gospel meets grievous sin. At this point, the man has repented and seeks re-entry into the community that has banished him. In such a situation, what does it look like when the people of the Church fulfill their function as people who are the embodiment of God’s righteousness? Read 2 Cor 2:5–11 to find out. Now what does it look like for you in your situation to embody God’s righteousness?