Sometime this week, the Council of State granted
pardons to several Nigerians; some were pardoned post-humously, other people
who were pardoned are alive and well. One of the people pardoned is the Former
Governor of Bayelsa State who was convicted on corruption charges.
This has led to serious outcry from the populace;
the most prevalent view being that a Government that says it is currently
fighting corruption should not go around pardoning people who have been
convicted of corruption.
While I don’t intend to delve too much into the propriety
of the issue (whether or not I favour this particular pardon is something I’ll
keep to myself. It is irrelevant. What is done is done and the Council of State
was well within its rights to do so), I do intend to draw parallels with the
nature of man to the extravagant nature of God’s grace.
One of my favorite verses in the Bible is the
following in Romans 5:8:
“But
God shows and clearly
proves His [own] love for us by the fact that while we were still sinners,
Christ (the Messiah, the Anointed One) died for us.”(Amp)
At first glance, this seems like a harmless sentence.
But a closer investigation reveals a truth that is repulsive to our natural
senses; God has forgiven the sins of every man, woman and child on planet
earth. He didn’t just do this by sweeping it under the table or overlooking it.
He did it by coming in the human flesh and taking the punishment for sins of
the past, present and future upon himself and dying for it.
This means one simple thing; God is not punishing
the sins of anybody. That is such good news to me. It frees me to be me and let
God work in me to become the person he has made me to be. However, those who
oppose this presentation of the Gospel oppose it on many grounds the two most prominent grounds are
1. We are giving people a license to sin
This to me is ludicrous because
nobody needs a license to sin in the first place. People sin because they want
to. They don’t need anybody to tell them they can sin. At any rate, telling a
person that God has forgiven all his past, present and future sins is not
invariably telling them to just live anyhow. The motivation for living a Godly,
Christ exalting life should not be the fear of punishment, it should be love.
God is love and anything done without love is useless. God took out the fear aspect
of Sin in order to insert his love into our hearts (Romans
5:5) now we love because he first loved us (1
John 4:18-19)
2. We want people to get away with their
wrongful actions
This really reflects most of the
controversy trailing the recent pardon. Let’s be honest, we all have someone we
think should go to hell. We all have someone that we think should not be
forgiven due to the gravity of their actions. At least we can all agree that we
don’t want Adolf Hitler in heaven. Yet, it seems to me that God is not
concerned with all of that. He does not deal with us based on the enormity of our
sin. He says though our sins be as red as scarlet, he would make us as white as
snow. There is no sin too great for the blood of Jesus. There is no sin that he
did not die for. No hurt that he did not redeem in order to give birth to the
new creation. It is funny that most people are quick to pass judgement on
others when it is not them or their friends and relatives that committed the
crime, when it’s us, most of us will not hesitate to seek mercy. This is not to
say that God does not appreciate the evil and destructiveness of sin. He is
more aware of it than we can ever imagine; which is why he redeemed us in order
to heal us
It is important
to note that the Former Governor of Bayelsa State had already served his sentence.
The pardon just gives him back his right to vote and be voted for and to serve
in public office. In other words, it takes away all the disadvantages of being
an ex-convict. The same can be said of us. The bible tells us that when Christ,
all died (2
Corinthians 5:14-15). His death was our death and his resurrection our resurrection.
Therefore when he took the fire of God’s judgement for our sin on our behalf,
we were there with him being punished in him. He died because of our sins and
rose because of our justification (Romans
4:25). Some will read this and immediately conclude that I'm saying all are
saved and all will go to Heaven (so to speak). Well, I’m not. To quote Andre
Rabe “romance anticipates a response”. Faith is our positive response to God’s
act of love and it is faith that leads to eternal life.
God’s grace
violates our sense of justice. Sometimes we can’t even accept it for ourselves.
We want to receive some sort of torment for our acts in order to ease our
conscience. In this season of lent, I think it is fitting for us to explore
this topic of the atonement some more. May God help us to understand and bask
in the indiscriminate, vulgar and extremely scandalous grace of God.
