Because that is the way Sovereign God has created us as human beings, God's revelations and actions in our lives have to fit into our human nature or they are not helpful. God cannot sing to us in frequencies we cannot hear and expect us to enjoy the music. God cannot simply by fiat declare all human beings saved. Then we are robots and have no freedom and our relationship with God is not freely given. God cannot just say that all humanity is forgiven because righteousness and goodness would be offended. God's forgiveness comes to human beings in ways that we can understand. God comes in Jesus Christ as a human being, the one good human being who exposes the darkness and evil of humanity on the Cross. In the cross of Christ, God endures the suffering of atonement. God is the One being asked to forgive and He endures the suffering of atonement in the death and pain of Jesus. He is willing to continue to suffer so that we may find forgiveness. But that forgiveness offered is only received where there is the pain of repentance and conversion and the acceptance of the new obligations of a life in obedience to Jesus' calling.

Cheap grace makes forgiveness immediate. I find out I hurt your feelings. I say I'm sorry. You say that is O.K. Everything better. Everything like it was. You ask for forgiveness. I think I am supposed to give it to you. I say I give it to you. It is over, done. Costly grace understands that forgiveness may be a journey, a process. It may take awhile. It may involve some steps.

She has finally got enough courage and pain in her to kick him out of the house. She was tired of his physical and verbal abuse, his carelessness, his disregard for her and her stuff. She told him to take a long walk off that short pier. Now he wants back in. He says he is sorry. He asks her to forgive him. He promises he will never hurt her again.

She offers real forgiveness. She says she will date him once a week for lunch at a public restaurant while he attends therapy for his anger and low self-esteem. As they share lunch and talk and as he attends therapy and she sees changes in him, in the way he acts and the way he talks and the things he does, they can move to dinners together, movies, and other outings. If those continue well, more steps towards reconciliation may be taken. She says let's see how that repentance changes you. After all, when you become a new person, when you change, you may not want to be together. But she wants to see what difference the pain of repentance makes before she goes back into a situation which has caused her such physical pain. That sounds like forgiveness to me. She is willing to put it back like it was before all the bad stuff happened. Bad to the time when they were dating. She is willing to act like all the bad stuff has not happened. To go back in time to the point where they can start over. Sounds like forgiveness to me.

We can pretend that we aren't guilty. We can even claim that humiliation is the worse punishment anyone can go through. We can talk about cheap grace and forgiveness, but the good news of Jesus Christ is that He offers us a costly grace and powerful forgiveness. A forgiveness in which God has already suffered the pain of atonement in the cross of Jesus, and invites us to accept the cross of suffering by bearing the pain of repentance and renewals so that we are striving to become more and more like Jesus.

There was a cartoon which suggests, as the Titanic sinks, that the captain was looking at the naval dictionary: "port means left, starboard means right." The cartoon said that most of us keeping looking for simple answers to complex problems. The sins and the moral failures of each of us only find forgiveness in the atoning suffering of God, the suffering of repentance, and picking up the cross of obedience.