Punishment can't reconcile
Listen, punishment as punishment can not
reconcile a person to a person, a society or a God. Many have taught us
this down the years but no one I know has taught it more clearly than
Walter Moberly. Rightly understood and rightly administered punishment
is many things but punishment simply as punishment cannot reconcile.
Punishment as a quantity of administered unpleasantness administered to a
transgressor does not reconcile the transgressor to the desire
expressed via the law.
If you punish a spiteful child (whatever form the punishment takes)
no one with sense believes that he is no longer a spiteful child simply because he’s been sent to his room or is deprived of television rights.
If the little rascal is unchanged in his heart why, then, he’s still a
little rascal at heart that has been punished. The serial killer that
continues to glory in his crimes is not reconciled to society even
though he has spent forty years in prison. (Here in the UK, just weeks
ago, a murderer sentenced to jail taunted the parents on his way out of
the courtroom. "You shoulda seen your son when I put the bullet in his
head. He looked like a big doughnut.")
Punishment does not equal forgiveness. Sentence a criminal for his
crimes, have him serve twenty years and when he comes out tell him we
"forgive" him and he’ll be indignant. He’d tell you he paid the
debt he owed to society. Forgiveness is redundant! Besides, if he comes
out boasting of his crimes and holding society in threatening contempt
any talk of "forgiveness" is nonsense. He may be legally free because he
has endured punishment to the full but forgiveness is a whole different
matter. If punishment can’t equate with forgiveness—or even guarantee
it—then it can’t equal reconciliation. Forgiveness is an aspect of a
renewed relationship, which is reconciliation.
If adequate punishment meant accomplished forgiveness then no one
would ever remain unforgiven. It would mean that when God punished a
sinner for a sin that forgiveness would follow automatically. If it’s
insisted that only eternal punishment is adequate punishment for sin
then we’d have the anomaly of someone being forgiven while eternally
punished. Forgiveness is not about adequate punishment! This
has ramifications for any doctrine of the atonement. Penal substitution
says a certain number of people are forgiven because someone (Jesus)
suffered the full amount of punishment due their sins. If you wanted to,
you might say that they were debt free, or beyond punishment or
whatever else you might choose as an equivalent but you can’t possibly
reduce reconciliation to raw acquittal, pardon or punishment-free
existence. That’s not forgiveness and it certainly isn’t reconciliation.
And then there’s this. What kind of grace is grace that will only
express itself when exhaustive punishment is administered? Can God offer
gracious reconciliation if he can only offer it because he has punished
the sinners (by proxy, in Christ) exhaustively?
©2004 Jim McGuiggan. All materials are free to be copied and used as long as money is not being made.
Many thanks to brother Ed Healy, for allowing me to publish from his website, the abiding word.com.
Note from Gary... This is one post that I am going to have to think about (after I have read it a couple more times).