Only God can forgive sins.

Psalm 51 sheds a great deal of light on the subject. In this psalm King David, who has committed adultery and murder, addresses God with an astonishing assertion: “4 Against Thee, Thee only, have I sinned, and done that which is evil in Thy sight.” This statement is surprising because of the obvious wrong that David has done. From a human point of view he has sinned not merely against God but against Uriah the Hittite (whom he has murdered) and against Uriah’s wife Bathsheba (whom he has defiled). Saint Augustine, in his comments on this psalm, clearly indicates the problem:

How is it that David’s sin is against God and God only? St. Augustine tells us that it is because God alone is sinless: “Thou alone art without sin. He is a just Punisher that hath nothing in Him to be punished; He is a just Reprover that hath nothing in Him to be reproved.” ² St. Jerome, on the other hand, attributes David’s statement to his own kingship. Only God can forgive the king because only God is above him: “Being a king, David feared no one else.” ³

Any reason one cites for God’s exclusive privilege of forgiving sin - His sinlessness, His omnipotence, whatever - that privilege is clearly asserted. Underlying it is a distinction between interpersonal injury and sin properly so-called. King David is clearly basing his own statement about God on this distinction. He knows that one can surely sin by injuring another human being, but the injury and the sin, even though they subsist in the same act, are not identical. Sin as such is an offense against God, Whom no one is even able to injure.

The idea was deeply imbedded in Scripture and in the theological understanding of Israel, not only in the time of David but in that of the Son of David. Jesus uses the fact that God alone can forgive sins to assert His own divinity. In the Gospel of Mark a man is brought to him for healing:

Christ’s pronouncement of forgiveness is an assertion that He is God. His auditors knew, and He knew that they knew, that only God can forgive sins. That is why they knew He was claiming to be God.

1 Samuel 15 portrays Saul as a man who easily caves in to the whim of the people (verse 24: In my fear of the people, I did what I did . . . ) in disobeying the LORD. He shifts the blame away from himself, just as Adam shifted his to Eve, and Eve shifted hers to the serpent (Genesis 3:12-13) - a common ploy of those who have done wrong. Saul tries to cover up his real intentions by lying from his heart to the LORD, Who cannot be lied to (verse 15: “The men spared the best sheep and oxen to sacrifice to the LORD, your God; but we carried out the rest of the ban already . . .” ). Samuel knows the sin of Saul already, and rebukes him at verses 22-23:

Notice that the Lord does not reject Saul the person. His punishment is the loss of his kingship, not the loss of his Lord. If in the end Saul lost his Lord, might it not be that he harbored resentment in his heart at the just punishment meted out, even though he knew the Lord is merciful and full of forgiveness? The witness to this attitude is that Saul did not abdicate the kingship, even though he knew that this was what the Lord was commanding him to do.

Contrast this with what happened to David, who was humble and accepted his punishment in the death of the son born of his illicit union with Bathsheba and the murder of Uriah, her husband (1 Samuel 11-12). David’s remorse is the subject of Psalm 51, discussed above. The LORD would have killed David but for David’s repentance. Instead, the child born of his union with Bathsheba dies. Moreover, David is to continue to rule Israel, but will never rule his own house again: though a king, he is to be deprived of the joys of a peaceful and contented home life. His reign was marked by the revolt of his own sons against his throne, palace intrigues, and domestic difficulties. The king has clay feet - he is fallible, he sins, he falls short of the mark morally just like any of his own subjects, or like any normal human being for that matter.

Moreover, the episode shows that when we act unjustly toward our neighbor, and thereby sin against God, our psychological makeup drives us to first strip the neighbor of his personhood, his humanity, which God has endowed with a special dignity: “In His own image He created him. Male and female, created He them.” (Genesis 1:27.) David and Bathsheba, in order to commit adultery, first had to make Uriah less human in their own eyes, and to rob him of his God-given dignity. This is the dirty and vicious first stage that permits the rest of the wretched behavior to happen. David and Bathsheba by that point were too intensely wrapped up in themselves to consider anything as an alternative except further crimes against Uriah.

So, what may be said of the assertion often heard of the therapeutic value of “self-forgiveness” which has been unguardedly adopted by so many? Consider, for example, therapy for addiction. Addiction treatment usually includes a constant emphasis upon forgiving oneself as a means of overcoming shame and increasing self-esteem. “Don’t get stuck in the past,” many patients are told. Or consider, for another example, psychological counseling, “If you made a mess of your marriage and alienated your children, don’t dwell on the matter. Whatever you’ve done, let the past go. Remember that you did those horrible things before this present therapy. Don’t worry that nothing can be done about it now. Forgive yourself!”

Shame and guilt are presently viewed as negative attitudes about the self. Yet, even in therapy acknowledgment of guilt is a major tool in the process. The cumulative load of shame felt by the addict for a sorry performance is the main goad toward achieving a cure for the addiction and for maintaining sobriety. Fear of the past is a powerful restraint. The addict is urged to avoid euphoric recall of the attraction of drugs; shame and guilt are the therapists’ tools to achieve this. Just as euphoric recall can lead an addict back to his drugs, alcohol, or sexual perversion, a pleasant refusal to remember our sins and their devastation to ourselves and others can open the door to repeating them. Our true joy, our blessedness, lies in the fact that God has forgiven us - something that we ourselves cannot do. To know this is to move toward honest self-esteem. A sort of dysphoric recall, as one might call it, is of great spiritual benefit and is consonant with the Bible’s view of sin.

What is this view?

The Old Testament uses fifty words in over three-thousand different passages for different nuances of the English term “sin.” ⁴ This is ample evidence that sin and all its aspects was a dominant concern of the Hebrew writers. These passages emphasize and highlight human failures, personality flaws, deficiencies, and offenses. Meanings typically conveyed include, “to miss the goal or mark”, “revolt or rebellion”, and “guilt”. Translation by the term “transgression” does not adequately convey the Hebrew sense of “open rebellion.”

The sense of the terms used for sin comes into play when the offense is committed against God. Sin against God is of utmost seriousness. It is a willful, premeditated, and knowledgeable violation of God’s law, and more than a mere inadvertent or accidental mistake or error of human judgment.

The Old Testament emphasizes the close relationship between sin and its consequences. Often the same word stands for the sin and for its consequence. This conveys a disturbing psychological truth. The darkening of the mind and heart of man by sin is part of its own punishment. Sin widens the gulf of estrangement between man and his highest Good. The deepest Desire of man’s heart becomes increasingly unattainable. Sin is the slippery slope descending into the unplumbable and inescapable abyss - where burgeoning sin lurks in the gloomy shadows. ⁵

The Old Testament concept of original sin bears similarities to that of common Mesopotamian perceptions. Sumerian — “Never has a sinless child been conceived by its mother.” ⁶ Psalm 51:5 — “O see, in guilt I was born, a sinner was I conceived.” All the nations in Israel’s vicinity assumed this was a universal condition. ⁷

Sin is seen to be ubiquitous in all men, emerging in most books of the Hebrew Bible on even the most superficial reading. It is seen by the writers to be an intrinsic character trait of the entire human species: “Who can say, ‘I have made my heart clean; I am pure from my sin?’” (Proverbs 20:9); “Surely there is not a righteous man on earth who does good and never sins.” (Ecclesiastes 7:20); “. . . for there is no man who does not sin . . .” (1 Kings 8:46, 2 Chronicles 6:36); and “Behold, this alone I found, that God made men upright, but they have sought out many devices.” (Ecclesiastes 7:29). This congenital sinful condition of man is appealed to as a mitigation of guilt: “Enter not into judgment with Thy servant; for no man living is righteous before Thee.” (Psalm 143:2); and “Yet He, being compassionate, forgave their iniquity, and did not destroy them; He restrained his anger often, and did not stir up all His wrath. He remembered that they were but flesh, a wind that passes and comes not again.” (Psalm 78:38-39).

Sinfulness and man’s inescapable condition as a mere creature are tied together in the Book of Job, possibly one of the greatest moral dramas ever written:

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The writer of the book of Isaiah places sin squarely at its source: the human heart. The call narrative shows this understanding is key:

Isaiah’s natural sinfulness and frailty is instantly recognized by the heavenly court - the seraph has to remove Isaiah’s sin and guilt with a burning coal from the brazier. The seraph has identified the lips as the locus of sin, because they are the visible and audible gateway of the human heart. It is in the heart that evil originates: “With perverted heart man devises evil, continually sowing discord.” (Proverbs 6:14); “The LORD saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every imagination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually.” (Genesis 6:5); “And when the LORD smelled the pleasing odor, the LORD said in His heart, ‘I will never again curse the ground because of man, for the imagination of man’s heart is evil from his youth; neither will I ever again destroy every living creature as I have done.’” (Genesis 8:21); and “The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately corrupt; who can understand it?” (Jeremiah 17:9). The lips speak (and figuratively, live out in practice) the lies that are in man’s heart. This connection of sin with the crookedness and lies in man’s heart emphasizes once more the important Hebrew insight that freedom from sin necessarily first entails having truth in the heart, echoed by a rabbi of the first century: “He who believes in Me, as the scripture has said, ‘Out of his heart shall flow rivers of living water.’” (John 7:38); “The good man out of the good treasure of his heart produces good . . . for out of the abundance of the heart his mouth speaks.” (Luke 6:45); and “You will know the truth, and the truth will make you free.” (John 8:32).

The other Mesopotamian cultures recognized that lies on the lips are joined to the thoughts of the heart, but place the blame on the gods, not on man: “Narru, king of the gods, who created mankind; and majestic Zulummar who dug out their clay; and mistress Mammi, the queen who fashioned them. These gave perverse speech to the human race; with lies in the heart and not with truth, they endowed them forever.” ⁸ Genesis 3 brings to bear the distinctly Hebrew wisdom that it is man’s own deeds that are sinful, and imposed by himself, not by the Supreme Being. “The devil made me do it!” is not a Hebrew idea but a pagan one. Despite the notion that sin is man’s innate condition, the Old Testament writers do not waver in holding man responsible and accountable for his own sinful conduct.

In the Creation story of Genesis 1, we learn God gave man, among many gifts, the gift of dominion: “And God blessed them, and God said to them, ‘Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it; and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the air and over every living thing that moves upon the earth.’” (Genesis 1:28). This dominion, or mastery, over the Lord’s creation included in a special way man himself: the gift of self-mastery. ⁹ In the beginning, man is familiar with God, and the sign of that familiarity is that God places him in the garden: ¹⁰ “And the LORD God planted a garden in Eden, in the east; and there He put the man whom He had formed.” (Genesis 2:8). God and man, in the beginning, were friends. ¹¹

It so happens that every man is personally acquainted with a type of cause widely different from the scientific and philosophical ones: Man knows himself. This is why the inscription on the front of the temple of Delphi, the most sacred and theologically central temple of the Greeks, read, “Gnothi sauton” or “Know yourself”. Man is self-aware, conscious. Man also knows other things besides himself. Therefore, man can say “They are”. This is a fact of tremendous importance indeed, since it is through human knowledge of things and, as far as can be proven, through it alone, that the universe ever achieves awareness of its own existence. This in turn creates a greater difficulty still. Knowing things, man is able to distinguish each thing as separate from every other thing. Hence, he is able to become acquainted with each thing’s specific nature. Being acquainted with each thing’s nature, he determines his own attitude toward it according to his own knowledge of it. But that is precisely what we mean by freedom: not to be determined by things, but to be regulated by one’s own knowledge of them. Conclusion: there is a necessary linkage between the truth, a knowledge about what is true about things, including a knowledge of the truth about the nature of man himself, and freedom. ¹²

What is the truth about man’s nature? Surely, an account of it must include his status as a creature, utterly contingent and dependent upon his Creator. What must be the fundamental attitude of such a creature? Loving trust in its Creator.

Now we see the prohibition against eating of the fruit of “the tree of the knowledge of good and evil” ¹³ in its true light. It mythologically invokes the insurmountable limits that a man, being a mere creature, must freely recognize and respect with trust. ¹⁴ Man can live in friendship with God only in free submission to God. To eat of the fruit of Good and Evil is to swallow a lie that springs from half-truth: the Good appeals, the Evil is in the shadows, dismissed or ignored until it is too late. The full truth that the half-truth hides is that man’s real freedom lies in seizing the True and Good. Lurking behind his errors and wicked decisions, man glimpses the deep-seated rebellion in his heart that leads him to repudiate the True and Good in order to set up himself as the absolute law and arbiter of that law: “You will be like God.” ¹⁵ (Genesis 3:5).

Tempted by the serpent, man’s loving trust in his Creator shriveled and died in his heart, murdered there by man’s own abuse of his freedom, expressed as disobedience to God’s command. All other sin, from that time onward, is reducible to a lack of trust in God’s goodness expressed as disobedience. ¹⁶

After the first sin, the whole creation was inundated by sin. There is the story of Cain and Abel. ¹⁷ Following this is the curious myth about how the universe became infected with sin. ¹⁸ The story of Noah ¹⁹ is included in the Bible narrative to prove to man that even the destruction of the world is not capable of eradicating sin and its consequences: sin rears its ugly head again in Noah himself ²⁰ and his son, Ham. ²¹ Sin frequently makes its appearance in the history of Israel, especially in the form of infidelity to the God of the Covenant.

What consequences follow from sin? A loss of the original friendship that existed between man and God, and a loss of the self-mastery that was the cornerstone of man’s relationship with himself. As a result, man is divided against God and man is divided against himself. Divided against God and himself, his relationship with the whole of creation, including his fellow men, is likewise best characterized by the word “alienation”. The assault of heaven in the story of the Tower of Babel ²² shows that sin even issues in the alienation of whole cultures, societies, and civilizations from one another: sin has social consequences.

The Old Testament proposes no solution for the problem of sin. It does document, in forty-six canonical books, the fact that obvious solutions based on human efforts inevitably fail to correct a problem that is at the root of our nature as a species. Even the Divine’s destruction of the world is inadequate to the task of eradicating it from a cosmos infected by it in the dim and distant past. Hebrew Scripture proves one thing: sin dominates man’s relationships with God, himself, his fellow men, and the larger society. Death is given as a tentative measure to arrest the proliferating effects of personal sin: “ . . . and now, lest man put forth his hand and take also of the tree of life, and eat, and live for ever . . . He drove out the man; and at the east of the garden of Eden He placed the cherubim, and a flaming sword which turned every way, to guard the way to the tree of life.” (Genesis 3:22-24). Death is a provisional remedy designed for man as individual, because as history attests, not even it can wholly stanch the spread of sin and its insidious consequences through the whole creation.

A solution, more radical than any found in Hebrew Scripture, cries out to be revealed. Only a tantalizing hint that such a solution might one day be unveiled in history is given: The first Gospel - Genesis 3:15 “I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your seed and her seed; He shall bruise your head, and you shall bruise His heel.” ²³

To God and to His Christ, Who was, and Who is, and Who is to come, be all glory, praise, honor, and thanksgiving, now and forever. Amen!