Is forgiveness sufficient to enter the new heavens and earth, to spend eternity in peace and fellowship with the triune God and the future he has prepared for his people? What, exactly, is the connection between forgiveness and new creation? It is not like a damaged part, which once it is repaired, may properly perform its function. Forgiveness is for more than function and sin more costly than the time and energy of repair. Forgiveness is required because Someone has been offended. Forgiveness reminds us that salvation is not merely a theo-logical process where by the ordo salutis is executed. Instead, it is intensely personal.
It is offered from a Person (three persons to be exact) to a person. It also assumes something about its recipient, that this person has wronged another. My wife extends forgiveness to me for foolish words because I have offended her and sought reconciliation. For peace and healing in our relationship, the wrong must be put right, which begins with me admitting the wrong!
In the context of salvation, it is the most important Person in the universe that has been wronged—the Creator of all persons and things. In this case, the wrong is high treason, a betrayal of all that is holy, righteous and good. The infinite God of the universe has been traded out, displaced from his rightful place in the center of our lives. Instead of worshipping and serving our benevolent Creator we rip him off. We rip off his idea about worship and devotion and, instead of exalting and enjoying Him, we choose to exalt and excessively enjoy His things.
Like marrying a man or woman for what they own, not who they are, we find ourselves actually married to sex, culture, power, fame, all things that belong to God, but not God himself. Instead of proclaiming and practicing unswerving devotion and affection for the most attractive and benevolent of Spouses, we settle for things that can not love us back. It is this heinous crime, this grievous error that we need forgiveness for.
Worse, when given the opportunity in Jesus to love and honor God, we choose to murder him, to kill him off for cheap imitations of true religion. The crime of sin is compounded by the fact that we not only reject the Creator, but also murder the Redeemer. When introduced to the kindest of the kind, the truest of the true, the noblest of the noble, Jesus the Christ, we are repulsed, finding more satisfaction in our own gods and ways of worship. As a result, forgiveness is needed on at least two counts, rejection of our Creator and slaughter of our Savior.
For ripping off God, we get judgment or forgiveness, depending on the posture of our souls. If we humbly bow before the Creator-Redeemer with arms extended in faith, we receive not only a generous pardon, but an entirely new life. And thus, enters the Consummator. Jesus the Just, who will pass final judgment on all mankind and wrap up the creation project of the Trinity. Heaven and earth will merge into one blessed, multi-cultural, multi-ethnic existence where sin and sorrow no longer exist. But will we enter into this glorious consummation?
If we are not without sin, we will find ourselves outside the new creation (Rev 21.27). If we are not new, as are all things, we will be out of place in our old, tattered and tarnished ways and bodies. Forgiveness alone will not fit us for the new creation, the world to come. We need more. We need new creation now, the breaking of our future state into the present. Men and women, parents and teens, artists and engineers who live out an ethic of the eternal future, where justice, goodness, beauty, and truth flourish. We will need a new ethic and new bodies to comport with the new reign and world in which the Trinity is central and his glory refracted through the people of God.
Jesus forgives and fits us for the world to come. We are not only cleaned up; we are cleaned out. The Consummator does not abandon the body for a perfect spirit; he renews and reforms the entire person, flesh and spirit. The power of blood-bought forgiveness releases us into a Spirit-renewing reality; one that is the result of the reign of God breaking into this present world. The result is a people who, free from guilt and opposed to godlessness, redemptively engage other people and cultures, bringing heaven to earth in art, science, education, family, government, and neighborhoods. Real forgiveness is accompanied by new creation, making saints out of sinners. It forgives us for our cosmic rip-offs, and releases us into a redemptive agenda of cosmic renewal.