We can start to understand what the Bible teaches about forgiveness with the concept of something owed. Something that is owed must be paid. To be clear, we are not just talking about money when we talk about what the Bible says about the concept of debt. In the Bible, debt is not even primarily a money matter. It is primarily a matter of owing care. If something owed is not paid, whether it is a debt of care, or of money, or something else, the Bible teaches that it is possible to forgive this debt. To understand what a debt of care and the possibility to forgive this debt means, we must first begin by understanding the corporate design of Humanity and the world.

Humanity Was Made To Be One Organic Entity

God has designed Humanity in such a way that every person owes every other person something just by being alive. From its very beginnings life is not simply a free gift without obligations, nor can we speak of deserving to be created. But the creature’s debt for having been given life is not simply to the Creator. Every creature’s debt for having been given life is designed by the Creator to be a debt that is owed to and to be paid to every other creature. This is the foundational meaning of Humanity’s corporate nature. The primary debt of human beings owed to God is to be paid, with love to God, to every other human being. More than this, simply by being alive, people owe something not only to every other person, and corporately to all Humanity, but also to everything in creation that God has created.

Simply put, because of the way God made us, we owe it to others to be good to them. All the care we owe to others is because of what we owe to God directly. This debt to God comes before all else and includes all else. We owe it to all of God’s creations to do good to them because we owe God for having created the world. This is the reason for the commandment: Love God with all you are and your fellow beings accordingly. This means we cannot say that we owe something to one person and not to

another person. And so we come to the issue of forgiveness. The Bible teaches that it is precisely because of this nature of being created with a debt that forgiveness is possible.

Forgiveness is to be understood in terms of remitting debt that exists in terms of what we owe to others simply by being alive. We have been taught to think of sin as involving a decision to actively do something wrong, a transgression. This is called a sin of commission. We are told that there are also sins of omission but these are not so common, maybe not as critical. In order to properly understand forgiveness, we need to relearn and learn correctly to understand the relationship of sins of omission and sins of commission. For in truth, sins of omission always come before sins of commission. Before sin is defined as a transgression it has already been defined as a failure to pay a debt of care. If we see someone in need and do not care, or show care, it is sin, because God created us to care for one another and for every created being.

We Have A Debt Of Love From The Day We Are Born

People usually think today of whether or not there will be forgiveness in terms of hurtful words or hurtful actions having taken place. So let’s look at this. How should forgiveness in relation to such hurtful words or actions be understood? These kind of acts, of saying hurtful things to people or doing violent things that hurt people, involve sins of commission. How are we to put these things into the light of sins of omission and the debt we owe to all people from the day we are born?

We must teach ourselves, emphatically, if we will be disciples of the Bible, that all such aggressive acts and expressions of negative action toward others are done, in all cases, in situations where positive action is required simply because of our being alive. Damage and harm done to other is prohibited by the commandment of love - as it is written in Romans 13:8-10.

Romans 13:8 Let no debt remain outstanding, except the continuing debt to love one another, for whoever loves others has fulfilled the Torah, that is, the law. 9 The commandments, “You shall not commit adultery,” “You shall not murder,” “You shall not steal,” “You shall not covet,”and whatever other command there may be, are summed up in this one command:

“Love your neighbor as yourself.”10 Love does no harm to a neighbor. Therefore love is the fulfillment of the Torah, the law.”

Failure to love and actively care for others is defined by God as sin. It is because the failure to love is sin that doing or saying things that hurt others is sin. What this means is that, if there will be forgiveness, it is the failure to love that must always be forgiven as a debt that is owed.

Because the obligation of doing good to one another that we have just by being alive is created by God, only God can ultimately remit any debt we have through our failure to love, our failure to do good to others. And all failure to love, to do good to others does harm, because this is the way God created corporate Humanity and the entire creation. Therefore if we have need to forgive each other, because we harm each other, we can only do so n the name of God. We cannot do so in our own name.

Forgiveness And The Sense Of Responsibility

If we say that we can forgive in our own name, with no acknowledgement of God, because we alone can take responsibility for a given act of violence or transgression which we have committed, we are then defining what we owe the victim only in terms of not doing them harm by a violent or invasive act. For it is only God can define moral debt and the right to forgive moral debt in terms of our owing love to everyone. So, if this is our position that we can forgive or ask for forgiveness without any acknowledgement of God, we simply do not accept the judgment of the Bible; instead, we show ourselves to have a hardened conscience to this degree. If we will retain a knowledge of God that knowledge does not allow us to think this way, that we can forgive in our own name.

Perhaps if we are deaf to the Bible about this and if we have not desired to keep God in our knowledge regarding this it is because we do not want to face the truth that we have this much moral debt to all other people, not some other people, not just friends and family, but all other people. Even if this is the case, we would see strong evidence from our own experience that we do have a debt to others, no matter who they are or where they are, even where we have done them no intentional harm, if we were to stop to think about it.

First, what person will say that a parent owes the infant that they have brought into the world nothing? Or who will say that the child owes nothing to the parent who gives them birth? Who will disagree that parents and children owe as a debt to one another to fulfill toward one another what is their duty by nature to do for one another?

It is common, however, for us to divorce ourselves from responsibility for others who are not our immediate family. We are inconsistent in regard to this however. When it comes to owing others to do good to them by nature, we know, for instance that if someone were to fall from a cliff and all we needed to do to save them was to reach out a hand to them - if we did not do so we could be held to be guilty of their death, and would almost certainly hold ourselves guilty. If we will allow our conscience to tell us so, we know that we owe it to one another to do good to one another.

Still, we quickly become very unclear about how far this reaching out a hand to others goes. Nevertheless, we have strong evidence from our own experience that we have an obligation to do good to others simply by being alive. Since this is so, it should be possible for us to consider that we should always be doing good to others, whether we define ourselves as being related to them or not - and that we owe this to one another.

To What Do We Attribute The Goodness of Nature?

In summary, it is God to whom we owe all debt, both to him directly and, because of his design, we all have a debt to one another, and if we will forgive one another, we need to forgive one another in his name, for we are indebted to God for our relationship with one another, which is good by nature, and this good design of God is the basis of our responsibility to one another. If we do not want to acknowledge this, then we must attribute the nature of the condition in which we find ourselves - where by our nature we owe it to one another to do good to one another - to some other power, whether the power of chance or some other power.

If it is your choice to attribute our nature of owing it to one another to do good to one another to chance, or to some other power that is not volitional, that is to say, not to God, or the will of God or the design of God, then you will, most likely, end up either with the idea of a power where things are as they are by necessity or with the idea that they evolved this way through complete randomness. If by complete randomness then there is no use thinking about it any further for the condition of things could be changing randomly at this very moment and no sooner will we have described them than our description will be irrelevant. In an existence based on randomness a critical change in human nature must be evolving and could be changing fundamentally as we speak. A person who ultimately believes in randomness, if they say to someone, “I forgive you!” should probably add, “For what its worth!” For in an existence based ultimately on randomness there is no permanent truth and reality could shift at any time. Stability is a bubble, maybe a large bubble but bubbles can pop.

But if one thinks the fundamental nature of our condition is stable then, if they dismiss both God and mere chance from their consideration, the final idea that they will often come to adhere to is the principle of necessity. To be clear, then, I repeat, if you agree even to accept as a theory, (because there is good evidence that it is so), that by nature we owe it to one another to do good to one another, then because you reject that this is because of God, and that it is meaningless to say it is due to randomness, you will have to hold that this is due to some ultimate law of nature, some law of necessity.

Where We Begin To Run Into Trouble

I have repeated this because it is at this point that you will run into trouble. When you think or feel that someone owes you something or owes those close to you, (someone who you include within your own identity), you will consider it a matter of necessity that justice is done and that payment is made for what is owed to you. According to the principle of necessity justice must be done. You will see this clearly. Logically, you will agree that justice is a matter of necessity even if it is you who owes the debt.

In the Bible, forgiveness means the cancelling out of what is owed. It is the cancelling of a debt, whether a moral debt or a financial debt. In all cases, it is based on the debt that we all have being the debt of love, of caring for one another. And it is because all debt is a debt of love that love can forgive debt. The power of love to do this is that God is love and is the one who has given love to all, so that all owe love and can give love either because they owe it or can give love also freely, beyond what they owe. In other words, according to the Bible, there is a necessity to love but it does not rule over love. According to the Bible, necessity is not even the ultimate base of love, which is God.

If one does not acknowledge God but still believes that loving others is a necessity, then they will be logically forced to believe that the debt that is owed is always going to be paid, one way or the other. This hollows out the meaning of forgiveness itself. It means the forgiveness never cancels out what is owed. We can ourselves choose to forgive, to cancel out what is owed, but if we do so — if we believe in necessity as a cause of our nature — then we are going directly against the law of necessity when we choose to forgive. Either that or forgiveness doesn’t really mean much. It is just subjective, a matter of feelings. It has no legal meaning, no substantive power. This subjective idea of forgiveness is very common in our society, even though it is not often thought through very clearly. In the Bible, forgiveness is not just a matter of feelings.

You Will Be Like Gods

Demanding justice out of necessity makes us very powerful, like gods, or else it makes us morally wrong. Acting and thinking like necessity is the reason for our nature, means that theoretically we could mathematically program ourselves so as to become perfectly loving families in a perfectly morally responsible society. With our present moral atheism we seem to be well advanced on our way toward trying to do that. The alternative is that there is a God who both made us to love and do good to one another and who has provided a way to forgive one another, without it destroying justice between us to do so. And this is the true basis of our conscience and our ability to know that God has, by the way that he has created us corporately in love, provided for himself a way that he could both be just and able to forgive our debt of love.

There is still a third possibility, beyond either randomness or necessity, that some people have thought of as to why we should do good to one another, and be held accountable for doing that good. For those who do not want to know such a God as the Bible reveals, or else do not want to trust that there is such a God. This third possibility is that the evidence is wrong that we have a nature where we owe one another to do good to one another simply by being. Instead there is another way of looking at it.

This third idea is one that more and more people want to turn to in our new age. There is neither God nor necessity, nor mere randomness when it comes to human responsibility, or perhaps there is randomness but it does not really matter. All that is necessary is that we try to do our best. We make it all up as we go. The only thing that matters is our own dreams, or own truths and our own contracts with one another. According to this way of thinking, this is not moral negligence. It is the highest form of courage. But here the meaning of conscience has been completely re-written.

Not only God but also necessity in morality has been dismissed. No longer is good, as opposed to evil, based on necessity. But also, no longer is it based on love for others. Conscience that is only based on doing your best (and doing your best is only what you make up as you go) is invented conscience. Its only reference is what you happen to love, what you want to love. It has rejected the need to answer for what it should love, due either to necessity or due to God. It owes no one anything, not even to love one another. If it has anything to pay it is only what it has agreed to pay in some kind of contract. If it has anything to forgive it is only what it sees as in its own interest to forgive.

The Seared Conscience

The conscience of one who dismisses the thought of God and embraces the rule of necessity becomes seared and scarred by the iron of necessity. The one who goes on to dismiss even necessity then finds their conscience seared by the hot iron of an ever constricting, ever hotter wall of isolation inside of which they have put themselves refusing to answer to anyone but themselves.

And this is the alternative that we face as those who know God and his forgiveness, to obey him and love one another, from birth unto death, to fall and to rise up again, or else to fall away from him and first embrace necessity and then when we can no longer endure necessity to put ourselves even above law and simply do whatever we can to manipulate others into letting us get away with whatever we like for better or worse.

Surely such a fall is into hell. And no one but God could ever rescue those who are falling there. Therefore I have prayed that he rescues me. For the world in which I have lived has in many ways pressed me into the neglect of love. And I have not always resisted this. I have not always kept God in my knowledge. I have not always resisted the temptation to an easy submission to the idea of necessity.

My Prayer To Be Saved From The Hell Of Sin

I have even felt the draw of the forbidden fruit of a self-defined knowledge of good and evil. Oh wretched man that I am, who will deliver me from the body of this death. I only pray that God will save me from that hell that exists in lies about love! Indeed, I pray that he will continue to save me from such weakness that might be found in me. For he has begun to save me, showing me the Messiah of Israel, who lived from birth to death doing good to all in truth and love, with all kindness, laying down his life for the nation that God gave unto him, in order to cancel all its debt, that the sin of Adam might be judged and rectified and that through the mercy of God Adam, Humanity, might be raised from the dead.

Finding ourselves in death we may not feel good about having been created or about being alive in death, or about owing our being to God, and our love to one another…

Nevertheless - even in this life in death we can know something of God and his goodness — which can lead us to repentance — so we know that the hell that we preview through sin is only the result of our own thoughts and actions — which can be forgiven — we can return to life in God. We can return to the goodness of love and of owing love.