Pardon with Punishment
Psalm xcix. 8
Fhou wast a God that forgavest them, though thou tookest ven- & ance of their inventions.
VXfHEN the Prophet Isaiah saw his great vision of the King in his beauty, “sitting upon a throne, high, and lifted up,” and his train filling the temple, he heard from the voices of the encompassing Seraphim the triple ascription of praise, “Holy, Holy, Holy, Lord God Almighty.”
And this Psalm may be called the earthly echo of that celestial doxology. For, if you will notice, you will find that it is divided into three great sections, at the close of each of which it comes like a recurring thunder peal — “/or it is holy; “for He is holy;” “for the Lord our God is holy.”
And these three sections, which thus celebrate the different sides of the Divine nature, and climb up to the one climactic thought — the holiness of God, — stand related to each other in a regular progress and sequence; The fint of them magnifies His universal dominion, is sitting between the Cherubim, and being high above all people, and calls for praise to the name which is great and terrible. The second of them hymns the praises of that dominion which is as just as it is strong, which establishes equity and gives ordinances and statutes to Jacob. And the third of them sets forth the close relation of love and fellowship and mutual converse which is possible between sinful men and this mighty God. “They call upon the Lord, and he answers them: he speaks to them in the cloudy pillar; they keep his testimonies.” “Thou wast a God that forgavest them, though thou tookest vengeance of their inventions.”
And on this loftiest of all the thoughts — that God talks with men and listens to them, that He gives them His mind and will, and strengthens them to keep it, that He smites them in order that they may be good, and pardons them even whilst He smites, there is piled a third call for praise: “Exalt the Lord our God, and worship at his holy hill; for the Lord our God is holy.”
Two other remarks must be made by way of introduction. “Thou wast a God that forgavest them, though thou tookest vengeance on their inventions.” That implies that God’s pardon and God’s retribution are either really or apparently so far opposite — if I may so say — or at least unlike to each other, as to make it remarkable that they should be joined together. That is the ordinary notion of their mutual relations that people have. They think that God’s pardon comes from His love, and God’s penalties come from His judgment, yjul that the two never coincide and fall on the same head, but that they have a double source, and a double
object
Now, a very great and grave mistake about the whole relations of forgiveness and retribution, and about the whole character of that Divine nature from which they both flow, is implied and concentrated, as it were, in that little word “though.” It is no part of the original Psalm, and the rendering is a case of interpretation, rather than of translation. What the Psalm says is this: “Thou wast a God that forgavest them, and thou tookest vengeance of their inventions.” If anybody choose to say that the vague Hebrew copula must necessarily stand here for “though,” that is another thing. What the Psalm says is, Thou didst this and Thou didst that The two are, as it were, in one length; they run into each other. They are continuous parts of one process. They both come from the same root. There is no apparent antagonism here even hinted at between pardon and retribution, forgiveness and punishment, but they are both regarded as parts of one great whole, and as flowing from the holy love of God, which the whole Psalm celebrates.
Then, one more observation will clear the ground sufficiently for what I have to say. Making this alteration, there still remains a word in the verse at which some people may stumble, “Thou tookest vengeance of their inventions.”
“Vengeance!” Well, it is scarcely worth while saying, and yet it may be as well to say, that the modern notion attached to revenge is by no means to be found in the word which is here employed. Our notion of vengeance is harm, or loss, or pain of some sort inflicted at the bidding of private and passionate resentment and hate, in opposition to the calm and unhating course of public justice. We set up “the wild justice of revenge,” as the phrase goes, against the course of sovereign and authoritative retribution and punitive action. But what the Old Testament meant by vengeance is prec;sely that public justice to which the modern notion of revenge is diametrically opposed. And what this verse says is, “Thou wast a God that didst forgive,” and in the very act of for giving., moved by no personal animosity, moved by no passionate resentment, but in the calm sovereign righteous process of that law, which is only the manifestation and the form of expression of Thine infinite love, didst at one and the same time forgive the man, and smite and punish him because of his eviL
The truths that lie in the whole are these: pardon and retribution are ever united; they spring from one source of holy love, and they ought to become to us the occasions of solemn and thankful praise, “Exalt the Lord our God ... for He is Holy.” Thou forgavest them, and didst punish their inventions.
These truths, of prime importance as they are, are but partially apprehended by many of us, and may well be come the subject of a few remarks now. If we think of the connection of our text, as thus explained, it seems to involve these ideas — that forgiveness is essentially the unhindered communication of the Divine Love to sinful men; that being so, it necessarily involves the removal of the real penalty of Sin; that there are, however, other consequences — punitive consequences of sin — which God loves us too well to remove when He pardons; and that these consequences, not removed by forgiveness, are so modified by it as to be turned into tokens of His loving discipline, to be received with thankfulness and celebrated with praise.
I. Notice, then, that Forgiveness is, at bottom, the undisturbed communication of the Love of God to sinful men.
We are far too apt to think that God pardons men in the fashion in which the sovereign pardons a culprit who has been sentenced to be hanged. Such pardon implies nothing as to the feelings of either the criminal or the monarch. There need neither be pity on the one side nor penitence on the other. Such inadequate notions of the Divine forgiveness arise, among other reasons, because so many of us have false notions of the true punishment of sin. People think that the worst consequences of a man’s sin are some external consequences which can be done away by sovereignty, by the bare expression of a sovereign will; which need to be inflicted, and may there fore, be removed. The worst consequences of sin, as I shall presently have to show, do not need to be inflicted. They come automatically, by themselves, with the certainty of fate.
And still further, the true idea of forgiveness is to be found, not in the region of law only, but in the region of love and Fatherhood. The forgiveness of God is over and over again set forth in Scripture as being — a father’s forgiveness. However we may illustrate it from the analogy of legal pardon, it is worth noticing that it is the other analogy — the paternal one, which the Bible expresses. Indeed, I do not remember that we ever read of the pardon of our Judge or of our King, but we read “Your heavenly Father will forgive you your trespasses.” And while I do not mean to say that the blessed assurance of remission of penalty is not in the idea, still it seems to me to be in harmony with these distinct statements to look deeper — even to the removal of all hindrances to the outflow of our Heavenly Father’s love, and to the actual communication of that love, as being the very heart of His forgiveness of us.
“Our father forgives us.” Let us keep fast by that. And then, let us remember pur own childhood, our children, if we have any, and how we do with them. What makes the little face fall, and the tears come to the eyes? Is it your taking down the rod from behind the door, or the grave disapprobation in your face, and the trouble and rebuke in your eyes? It is not only the buffet from the father’s hand that makes the punishment, but still more the disturbance and the displeasure of the father’s heart that makes the child’s punishment. And forgiveness is not complete when the father says, “Well, go away, I will not hurt you,” but when he says, “Well, come, I am not angry with you, and I love you still.” Not putting up the rod, but taking your child to your heart is your forgiveness. So long as the faintest trace of disturbance of the father’s love by pain or disapprobation remains, so long as one fragment of the fault stands like the broken timbers of a dam to block the stream, so long the child is not pardoned. He is forgiven when the
XIV.] PARDON WITH PUNISHMENT. I
last thin film of mist between him and his father has faded away. And the Heavenly Father seals His pardon to us when he declares, “I have blotted out, as a cloud, thy sins.”
The blessing of forgiveness is not fully comprehended when it is thought of as shutting up some outward hell or the quenching of its flames. It goes much deeper than this, and means the untroubled communion of love and delight between the reconciled father and the repent ant child.
Surely, though we do not take that Divine parable of the prodigal son as containing the whole statement of the method of forgiveness, we have a right to take it as containing the most pathetic and the truest statement of the contents of forgiveness. And what were these? It was something to have the fatted calf, and the shoes on the feet, and the rings on the finger, and the lighted house, and the music and the dancing; but the pardon had been passed and sealed long before that “And when he came he had compassion on him, and fell on his neck and kissed him.”
The slave may dread the rod, but the child dreads the father’s closed heart And pardon is the open heart of God, full of love, unaverted by any consequences of my sin, unclosed by any of my departure from Him. “Thou wilt cast all my sins behind thy back into the depths of the sea.”
The same deep conception of the nature of forgiveness is implied in the other words of our Lord, where He makes our pardon of our fellows a condition of God’s aiJ PARDON WITH PUNISHMENT. [SERM.
pardon of us, and speaks of that human forgiveness, which is at once the shadow and the condition of the Divine, as being our forgiving of our brethren from our hearts — a phrase which plainly implies that it is an alteration of mind, not merely of conduct to the tres passing brother which He means. Pardon is but apparent unless the crime be swept out of our thoughts and hearts altogether — and no more suffered to influence either our deeds or our feelings. All true forgiveness forgets the guilt which it pardons. So, that wretched excuse for perennial malice which you often hear on people’s lips, “I may forgive but I cannot forget,” is a false distinction. The sin that is remembered is not forgiven. The sin that is pardoned is forgotten, and the forgetting is the ceasing to regard it as determining the relation between man and God. Notwithstanding the black barrier which we have flung across the stream by our sin, the pure and deep flood of the love of God shall rise and surge over the impediment, and fill our souls.
II. But still farther, this being so, let me remind you that Such pardon does necessarily sweep away the one true penalty of fin. I have been maintaining that the proper notion of pardon is not the removal of penalty, and that is absolutely true if you think of penalty only as being external and arbitrarily inflicted. But it is not true when we come into the spiritual region.
You may say to me you have been talking about parental forgiveness, do not you remember that there is another class of metaphors by which God is set forth in Scripture in His relations to man — that of king and sovereign?
Yes, I remember; and I am not going to replp - what I think people have no business to say, though it is a common statement nowadays — that the parental relation is deeper than the rectoraL I do not see that I believe that the one and the other in the same sense are metaphors, and in the same sense are realities. We are not to go picking and choosing among the relations which God bears to men, and say one is more fundamental than the other. My Father is my King and my King is my Father, and I cannot see that we have any right to say — the one statement is a reality in a profounder fashion than the other. Both are the hallowing of earthly relations to the adumbration of the heavenly, which are still more real and sacred than the earthly.
Giving, then, full weight to the kinghood of our Heavenly Father as a reality, even as the fatherhood is, does that conflict with what we have been saying about pardon? Surely not A king’s forgiveness assuredly includes the remission of penalty; and God’s forgiveness, because it is a Father’s, includes the remission of penalty.
What is the penalty of sin? “The wages of sin is death.” What is “death.” The wrenching away of a dependent soul from God. How is that penalty ended? When the soul is united to God in the threefold bond of trust, love, and obedience. The communication of the love is the barring of the helL And i, it were not for that wretched vulgarizing of all the ideas connected with the consequences of sin which sensual-bound natures are so prone to fall into, it would have been plain to men that the one true penalty of sin is to be torn asunder from God by our own evil desires, and that, therefore, the outflow of His love to us sinners is really the cancelling of the sorest penalty and true wages of unrighteousness. The two statements that forgiveness is the communication of the love of God unhindered by man’s sin, and that forgiveness is the removal of the punishment of sin, are really but two ways of saying the same thing.
If we rightly understand what is the death of death, what is the consequence of transgression, how it comes, and in what sense it is that every man, by every sinful act, carries a coal to the hell-fire that may have to consume him; if we understand that the real misery and punishment is what the old Prophet proclaimed it to be — “Your sins have separated between you and your God,” then we shall understand how the two representations coincide and flow together, and how the real penalty passes away where the love is welcomed and received.
III. Then there comes a third thought, viz., the one which is most prominently expressed in the text, that the pardoning mercy of God leaves many penalties unremoved.
“Thou forgavest them, and thou tookest vengeance of their inventions.” Forgiveness and punishment both come from the same source, and generally go together. As I said at the beginning of these remarks, people fancy that the fountain of living waters pours out “sweet waters and bitter.” They are apt to think of that Divine mind as acting, like ours, from impulses which are each partial. They think that forgiveness comes from love, and from righteousness flows retribution and chastisement. It is not so. They are both parts of one process, they both come from one source, the one heart which is all holiness and all love.
And then, let me remind you of historical illustrations that may help to bring this idea out a little more clearly.
Remember the men of whom the Psalm speaks, “Moses and Aaron among his priests.” Well, what about these men? Do you remember that both received penalties, chastisements. Each died because of his sin the one upon Hor and the other upon Pisgah. They were sent up there to die in the presence only of the stars, and in the silence, because they had transgressed against God. Thou forgavest them, and yet “Aaron shall be gathered unto his people, for he shall not enter into the land — because ye rebelled against my word at the water of Meribah;” and to Moses he said, “Get thee up into this mountain — and die in the mount whither thou goest up, as Aaron thy brother died, because ye trespassed against me.”
And remember the other instance — the classical instance — for this whole set of considerations: “Nathan came to David and said, Thou art the man. And David said unto Nathan, I have sinned against the Lord. And Nathan said unto David, The Lord also hath put away thy sin; thou shalt not die. Howbeit, because thou hast given by this deed great occasion to the enemies of the Lord to blaspheme, the child shall surely die.”
And thus, in historical instances, in the lives of the foremost men of old, who towered up like mountain peaks in the land of the Past, — the Psalmist sees the illustrations of his principle, and recognizes the great truth — “Whom the Lord loveth he chasteneth, and scourgeth every son whom he receiveth.” “Thou forgavest them, and Thou tookest vengeance of their inventions.”
My friends, the old statement, “Whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap,” is absolutely true, universally true. The Gospel is not its abrogation. It modifies it, it gives it a new aspect; in some respects it gives it a new incidence; but be sure of this, that the harvest has to be gathered. For our worst sins there is plenteous redemption. My sin may become white as snow, and pass away altogether, in as far as it has power to disturb or sadden my relation to God. Yet our least sins leave in our lives, in our characters, in our memories, in our consciences, sometimes in our weakness, often in our worldly position, in our reputation, in our success, in our health, in a thousand other ways, — leave their traces and consequences. God will not put out His little finger to remove these, but lets them stop.
Let no man fancy, then, that the Gospel which proclaims forgiveness can be vulgarized into a mere proclamation of impunity. Not so. It was to Christian men that Paul said, “Be not deceived, God is not mocked; whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap.” God loves us too well, not to punish His children when they sin, and He loves us too well to annihilate, were it possible, the secondary consequences of our transgressions. The two sides of the one truth must both be recognized — that the deepest and, as we may call them, the primary, penalties of our evil, which are separation from God and the painful consciousness of guilt, are swept away; and, also, that other results are allowed to remain, which, being allowed, may be blessed and salutary for the transgressors.
If you waste your youth, no repentance will send the shadow back upon the dial, or recover the ground lost by idleness, or restore the constitution shattered by dissipation, or give again the resources wasted upon vice, or bring back the fleeting opportunities. If you forget God and live without Him in the world, fancying that it is time enough to become “religious “when you” have had your fling * — even were you to come back at last — and remember how few do — you could not obliterate the remembrance of misused years, nor the deep marks which they had left upon imagination and thought, and taste, and habit The wounds can all be healed indeed; for the good Physician, blessed be His name, has lancets and bandages, and balm and anodynes for the deadliest, but scars remain even when the gash is closed.
There is an aspect in which it is true that the very greatness of the previous sin may become the occasion for the loftiest devotion and the lowliest trust in a pardoned man. The effects may be so modified as to contribute to the depth and power of his Christian character.
But even when the grace of God so modifies them, they remain. And though in some sense it be true th*t
2i8 PARDON WITH PUNISHMENT. [SERM.
Pardon is better than Innocence, the converse is true, that Innocence is better than Pardon. “I would have you simple concerning evil” — for even when forgiven, it leaves on character and memory many a trace of weakness, many a painful record.
IV. There is a final thought on which a word may be said, that Pardoning Love so modifies the punishment that it becomes an occasion for solemn thank/illness.
The outward act remaining the same, its whole aspect to us, the objects of it, is changed, when we think of it as flowing from the same love which pardons. The stroke has now ceased to be a mere natural result of our eviL We see that it is no sign of anger, but of love. Whatever painful consequences of past sin may still linger about our lives, or haunt our hearts, we may be sure of two things about them all — that they come from Forgiving Mercy, that they come for our profit. It is no rigid impersonal law which is smiting us, no mere natural evolution of results which blindly and impassively inflicts the pain. It is no harsh — no, nor even only a righteous Judge, who deals with us. We are not crushed between the insensate wheels of a dead machine, nor smitten by the blow of an inflexible fate, but we are chastened by a Father’s hand, who loves us too well to do by us that which He forbids us to do by one another, — suffer sin upon our brother.
“When we are judged, we are chastened of the Lord, that we should not be condemned.” The stroke of condemnation will never fall upon our pardoned hearts. That it may not, the loving strokes of His discipline must needs accompany the embrace of His forgiveness.
And so the pains change their character, and become things to be desired, to be humbly welcomed, to be patiently borne and used, and even to be woven into our hymns of praise. If we rightly understand whence they come, and what they intend, we shall see beneath the dark robes of these veiled messengers of His love, the bright apparel and the radiant faces of the angels of God sent to strengthen us. And even while we feel the smart of the scourge and the tingle of the rod, we shall “exalt the Lord our God,” and set this on the summit of our thankful songs, “Thou art a God that forgivest us, and takest vengeance of our inventions.”
Brethren, you know where and how the pardon is to be found. In Christ is all the Divine Forgiveness treasured. “The chastisement of our peace was upon him, and with his stripes we are healed.” What He has borne for us, we have not to bear. His sufferings, His separation in His hour of great darkness from God, His death, have once and for ever absorbed the true penalty of a world’s sins. Trust in Him, and there is no condemnation for you.
And remember that you have before you an alternative — either you will be separated from your sins by God’s pardon in Christ and God’s chastisement of love; or, clutching your sins, refusing to let Him cast them all away, you will be separated by them utterly from God, and so fall into the death which is the wages and real punishment of sin.