The Scarlet Letter
By: Nathaniel Hawthorne Modernised and edited by Jim McGuiggan (2004)
By: Nathaniel Hawthorne Modernised and edited by Jim McGuiggan (2004)
back to Questions Readers Asked
A reader wonders about pre-Christ salvation and forgiveness.
Christ didn’t come to bring a new way of forgiveness. At the bottom, life with God—which includes forgiveness and the other things that are an essential part of "life" with God—is a gift of grace. It never was anything else! It has always been a gift of grace!
The NT is plain on this matter: Without the life, death, resurrection and glorification of Jesus Christ there can be no life for the world. Without Jesus Christ the reconciliation of the world with God wasn’t possible. So to speak of forgiveness and life with God, no matter when or where they were experienced, we must look to Jesus Christ as the instrument of God’s pleasure (see Acts 4:12). [How that works out I’ve tried to say in a little book called The Dragon Slayer.]
OT people experienced forgiveness and that forgiveness was just as real as it is today! But because God’s dealing with sin wasn’t fully revealed until it is revealed in Jesus Christ there is something left hanging until Jesus comes. I don’t mean by that that people like Abraham and David (see Romans 4:1-8) were not forgiven-—they were! I do mean that the ground on which they were granted forgiveness was not historically revealed. The forgiveness that takes place since Christ is a demonstrated once-for-all forgiveness. (See Hebrews 10:11-14.) That kind of forgiveness could only occur with the appearance of the Christ in this consummation of the ages.
The terminology of forgiveness is not often seen in the OT but it is everywhere taken for granted (see Leviticus 4, Psalm 32:1, 85:2, 130:3-4 as examples where it occurs). Moses asks God to forgive Israel (Exodus 32) and Israel sings their prayers for forgiveness as well as singing their thanks for forgiveness received.
The remarks of the Hebrew writer in 9:9-10 and 10:1-4 are more complex than they appear. But when we’re done reading what he has to say we understand that despite the fact that atonement was made by animals sacrifices (Leviticus 4—6 and elsewhere) there is always something left hanging, something untouched, something that isn’t fully dealt with until it’s dealt with in Jesus (compare Hebrews 9:15). We’re not to think that the OT sacrifices were the last word on atonement but we’re not to deny that forgiveness was granted when they were offered. They were the means by which God mediated forgiveness in light of the coming Chist.
We'd do well not to isolate OT sacrifices completely from Christ--that's a mistake, even though it’s certainly true that with the coming of Christ and his sacrifice they became eternally redundant. They are inextricably connected with Christ as shadow is with substance. He doesn’t simply dismiss them as worthless—he gives them more honour than that (read the gospels and see this). Rather than despising them he brings them to their full meaning by being what they ultimately pointed to.
So sins really were forgiven before Christ and they were forgiven on the basis of God’s free grace. Still, the coming cross of Christ vindicated God's extending grace to sinners. The cross showed that ancient sins were not simply glossed over. How could God forgive their sins and take them seriously at the same time? The late cross of Christ showed how. They were forgiven on the basis of God's grace, which was fully expressed in the coming Christ (see Romans 3:21-26).
The notion that people were not forgiven prior to the coming of Christ is clearly not correct. That Jesus Christ vindicated God’s forgiving sin in ancient times is certainly correct. But the cross of Jesus Christ did not buy grace from God! It expressed the always-existing free grace of God. The cross did not make God gracious—it disclosed his eternal character as gracious in holiness and holy in graciousness.
