This Yes is to God’s grace, as it is itself grace. But it is to God’s total grace, i.e., not just to the gospel, but with the gospel to the law of God too. The grace of God is total in this way. The claim of God goes out with this totality. As we believe that God claims us, we accept the gospel. In all circumstances, even though our sin were as scarlet [cf. Isa. 1:18] and his law condemned us to hell, it is peace, joy, and blessedness to be claimed by God. But how can we believe without obeying, without affirming the law, without affirming that this God of the gospel claims us, that that grasp at us is made, that that hand is laid on us? I formulated this final meaning of sanctification as follows: “God establishes our sinful action as the work of obedience.”13 Two statements are needed to elucidate this. According to what we said in subsections 3 and 4, sanctification means the knowledge and forgiveness of sin: knowledge obviously by the law and forgiveness by the gospel of one and the same Word of God. What does it now mean that our sanctification takes place in our own Yes to this whole Word of God, to this total grace? What does this affirmation mean? At root it obviously means that we affirm our forgiven sin as known and our known sin as forgiven. In this respect the meaning of the concept “affirmation,” i.e., “obedience,” obviously shows itself to be a two-sided one. As we believe in the concrete unity of the divine judgment, i.e., as we see our life under the divine judgment in this unity; as, seeing it, we live it; as, placed under the divine judgment in this unity we proceed from the decision of this moment to that of the next, we obey, we are sanctified.
a. Our forgiven sin is known. Only of my forgiven sin do I know that it is known, that it is sin. As it is forgiven me I know it. To be justified by God is to be awakened from the sleep of the view that my act is or can be justified by itself. To have peace by and in God’s grace is to have no peace in self. It is God’s goodness that calls us to repentance (Rom. 2:4). Far from making the knowledge of sin an outdated or less serious matter, the gospel is the very thing that makes it serious. We have seen that sin takes place when, loved by God, we do not love him in return. The gospel is the confirmation of God’s love even in the midst of our corrupt decision. If I hear that in my sin and treason I am the child God loves, I then come to realize what an apostate and traitor I am. How could I know that I sin without knowing against whom I sin? I know this, however, only as God’s Word is gospel, as my sin is forgiven me. Then I do know it, however, and I do so with the qualified knowledge in which I know my own reality, so that my knowledge of sin is also the confession of my guilt and need; the confession that I see myself accused and mortally imperilled by my transgression of the command; the confession that my sin pains me in the double sense that I repent of it as my guilt and bewail it as my need. And beyond both these things the confession that I cannot myself remove it, that there is in me no Archimedian point from which I can master it, that I have no resources with which to escape the disquiet into which it plunges, not something in me but myself, that I am referred instead—kyrie eleison—to the mercy of God. In other words, that I know that I need the forgiveness that is given to me, that in face of the corruptness of my decision I have no option but forgiveness if the corruptness and its consequences are not to take their course. When it is truly heard, the gospel forces me to take my transgression seriously as guilt and need, and also to take myself seriously as a transgressor, i.e., as one who of himself can be only a transgressor. To take sin, and myself as a sinner, seriously, is not something that I achieve of myself but something that is thrust upon me by the gospel. It is one side of the determination of my existence by God’s Word, of the characterization of my sinful act by the command that encounters me, of my own movement as this is started by the divine judgment in which I say Yes to the grace of God. This Yes means taking the place that is proper to one who can be helped only by mercy, who has a choice only between condemnation and forgiveness, and who then comes to realize that it is not his own choice if he is forgiven. The peace of God creates, not an idle and futile lack of peace in us, but one that is necessary and salutary, the whole distress that Paul depicted in Romans 7. It sees to it that we are not released from it, that we are plunged into this disquiet, that we move forward to the decision of the very next moment. As it thus sets us in repentance, my sinful action is established as the work of sanctification. A good work is always a work of penitence, a work that is done in that repentance and distress and with that cry for mercy. The work of my very next moment is a sanctified work when it is a work of penitence in this sense, when it is the work of one who, just because he has received forgiveness, has accepted the verdict passed on him.
b. Our known sin is forgiven. Only of known sin do I know that it is forgiven me. As it is seen, I know it. Real condemnation by conscience takes place when there is real pardon by God. Real lack of peace in self takes place when there is peace through God’s grace. Through God’s total grace, we must emphasize. Peace through grace cannot mean the abolition, but only the establishment of the law, of the law that judges us by holding out before us what God wills from us. That we are forgiven does not mean that it ceases to hold this out before us, but rather begins to do so. To be set in penitence, as happens precisely through forgiveness, is thus again to be awakened out of the sleep of a false opinion, this time the opinion that the corruption of my decision is a kind of final necessity. Though my self-knowledge knows no word that can lead me beyond the fact that I failed, and fail, and will fail, the gospel tells me of a knowledge beyond the limits of my self-knowledge by which what the law holds out before me has another aim than that of forcing me into repentance. The forgiveness without which there is no penitence is God’s denial, his nonacknowledgement, of sin. We accept this divine No when we really accept the judgment passed on us by God’s command. God’s nonacknowledgment of sin means positively the establishment of his good will. God affirms this will by not imputing our sin to us [cf. 2 Cor. 5:19]. If my sin is forgiven me, this means that I am recognized and acknowledged as one who is free, and summoned to do God’s will. |
Our acceptance, then, is more than acceptance of God’s judgment. It denotes a movement of our existence that is not adequately covered by the word “penitence.” The Greek word metanoia expresses the missing second aspect. Because only forgiven sin can really be recognized and confessed sin, the recognition and confession, if they are to be serious, are not possible without conversion. We have understood the law badly if we have not understood that, as it humbles us, it summons us to change from a corrupt decision to a correct one, to readiness to do better next time. It really humbles us only through the gospel. But the gospel, which in spite of our corruption calls us to fellowship with God, tells us about God’s antithesis to our corruption, about the miracle of the holy one who comes down to the unholy. In face of this miracle, if we truly grasp it as such, in face of the mercy shown us if we have understood it as such, in face of the very different place which is obviously that of the God of the gospel who calls us to himself by the gospel, we cannot possibly be content with our known sin but are set in conflict with it, i.e, in conflict with ourselves, since we always find ourselves to be sinners, in conflict for God against ourselves. However it may be with us and whatever may be the limits of our self-knowledge, the law comes into force as a demand that we satisfy God’s will, as an order to make a better decision, to deny ourselves as we have been, to put to death—mortification—the old man, ourselves as we know ourselves, in order—vivification—that the new man that I am in Christ, not in myself, may live. Contrition of heart and oral confession would undoubtedly not