During Easter in the Philippines, parades are held, and in some are Penitents: men naked from the waist up who draw blood from their backs by lashing themselves publicly with whips. They inflict pain on their bodies in remembrance of the sufferings of Jesus Christ at the hands of Roman soldiers.
How awful, you think! But those Christians who commit sins they promised God they would not repeat but did after doing their best may do likewise. Not literally by flagellating themselves with a whip but emotionally. They do so when they make time between the sin they committed and the time when they feel able to ask God for His forgiveness. In between, they flagellate themselves, thinking they are not deserving of God’s forgiveness. In their thoughts, they lash themselves mercilessly.
“Why would God forgive me, when He knows that doing what I did is a personal weakness? One that I’ve done before more times than I wish to admit? One that I thought I might do again when I last asked God to forgive me?”
Such thoughts occur not so much after sinning inadvertently through a slip of the tongue, or after an old thought dead and buried habit resurfaces. A quick “Sorry, Lord, please forgive me” enables them to get on with serving the Lord without further thought.
But a Big Sin? One that took place after I was complicit with an evil thought that allowed temptation? I yielded, sin was conceived, and here I am again, you think. Unworthy. Undeserving! Hypocritical!! Why would God, knowing all this — knowing it all from start to finish — even consider forgiving me?
I’ll punish myself for a while. How long I’ll do so depends on how bad my sin was and how sorry I feel for doing again what I’ve done so many times before. Whip, whip! lash, lash! Self-punishing hurts me emotionally, but I deserve it! The worse I feel and the longer the punishment, the more I’ll be ready to ask God for His forgiveness.
This is really, to put it bluntly, a form of self-masochism. The more the self-chastisement, the better you feel, and the punishment seems to equal the sin committed. Self-justification enables the repeated sinner to ask for God’s mercy and complete forgiveness. God is, after all, long-suffering, isn’t He? Well, I think I’m ready now. Ready to pray for God to forgive me, because of Jesus, who died for my sins on the Cross. What a delusion!
All of the above in spite of the assurance that is so clearly stated in Isaiah, chapter 53, verse 5: “He was wounded for our transgressions, he was bruised for our iniquities: the chastisement of our peace was upon him; and with his stripes [whiplashes] we are healed.”
Isaiah the prophet, looking forward, writes, “we ARE healed.” The apostle Peter, looking back, writes of Jesus, “Who his own self bore our sins in his own body on the tree [cross] that we, being dead to sins, should live unto righteousness; by whose stripes you WERE healed.” (1 Peter 2:24)
Self-punishment and self-chastisement fly in the face of all the pain that Jesus suffered for us before bearing our sins on the Cross. So, no matter how many times we have given in to temptation and sinned, God’s grace in Christ will forgive, time after time. Because when God forgives, He forgets!
Notwithstanding this, we should seek to overcome “the sin that does so easily beset us” — “the popular sin” as one translation puts it; the sin that we succumb to again and again. God’s grace is sufficient! As 1 John 1:9 assures us:” But if we confess our sins, He is faithful and just to forgive us our sins, and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness.”
So put away those self-punishing thoughts and stop thinking that you can it make yourself fit for God’s forgiveness because you simply CANNOT! What a blessed relief!