Have I Gone Too Far To Be Forgiven?
A lot of us believe we have gone too far to be forgiven, but the Bible tells a different story.
From my own experiences and from the experiences of people I know personally, as well as the experiences of the many people I have encountered over the years, it is apparent that many people don’t try to follow God because they are sure they have gone much too far to ever be forgiven or they are afraid they have crossed the threshold from whence there is no return and that they have squandered their chance at heaven. when people have such a mindset they have already consigned themselves to hell and don’t see any reason to follow God since they don’t see how anything they could ever do at this point could make up for all of the bad things they have done or make any real difference in their eternal destiny. To a person to who feels they have lost their salvation, trying to serve God is like continuing to compete in a challenge after they have been disqualified or lost so completely that their disgrace is assured.
Before I move on I want to make sure you know that, regardless of what you have done, God is able and willing to forgive you and wipe the slate clean if you will but repent and accept Jesus Christ as your Lord and Savior.
“If we confess our sins, [God] is faithful and just and will forgive us our sins and purify us from all unrighteousness.
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Like many other people before me, there was a time in my life when I feared that I had lost my salvation and the only thing all of my struggle in life had earned me was a one way ticket to hell. I wanted to be part of God’s kingdom, I was not sure that I would be accepted by God, and in fact, I was certain that I would not be accepted after what I had done. Because I considered my soul to be forfeit, I did not see much point in serving God if he was going to send me to hell anyway. I hoped and prayed that it was not too late and that I had not gone too far, and knowing whether or not God would ever forgive one such as I was extremely important and it kept me up at night, and in my despair, I started searching the internet for answers, and judging by the fact that you are reading this right now, I have to assume that you can relate.
When I was growing up I had unshaken faith in the existence of God, but my faith in his goodness wavered considerably. I never doubted the existence of God because of my childhood innocence, because believing in God just made sense to me and I thought anyone who did not believe in God was silly, and because I was raised in an extremely religious home and was taught about God on a daily basis. Even though I never doubted the existence of God while growing up, I thought that God hated me, and I took the horrible things that happened to me as proof of that.
Later in life, as a young adult, in an attempt to distance myself from my abusive father, I joined a religion I thought was the epitome of Christianity and was God’s one true church on the face of the entire earth, and I gave my all to it. This religion taught that I could please God by participating in a series of rituals, ordinances and by performing good works and that successfully completing the specific rituals and works was the only way to earn salvation and get to heaven. I have always been good at following rules so I thought that I could earn the approval of God, and in a way, buy my way into heaven. Of course, I was neglecting the fact that the Bible says that our good works are nothing more than filthy rags (Isaiah 64:6).
I have always had a good work ethic and I have always been driven to work hard, so I was not satisfied with meting the minimum standard, and I did all I could to improve my status in the Church and falsely thought I was pleasing God in the process. However, regardless of how much money, time or effort I dedicated to the Church, I could not silence the voice in my head that told me that something was not right. At first I thought there was just something wrong with me, and I was told as much by the church leaders. I thought that by learning more about the church, its history and its doctrine, that I would grow my faith and silence my doubt, but instead of in-depth study increasing my faith it destroyed I it. I learned that the Church was a cult that was started by a conman with a dubious character and that the entire organization was based on a massive lie, and as a result, all of their doctrine was false. I also learned that, despite its very Christian sounding name and it outwardly appearing Christian, the religion had about as much to do with Christianity as a Vietnamese meat market has to do with pet adoption. Looking back I am reminded of what Jesus said that there would be wolves in sheep’s clothing (Matthew 7:15).
I had always felt like God had let me down by allowing such horrid things to happen to me as a child, and the realization that I had devoted ten years of my life to a complete and utter lie made me angry with God for allowing me to believe the deception of the cult and dedicate so much of my time to it, all the while thinking it was his will. The more I thought about it the more I thought that everything bad that had ever happened to me was caused by religion, and by extension, God. I did all I could to distance myself from anything religious, and it was not long before I identified as an atheist because it was easier to believe there was no God than to believe a perfect God had made me so so defective that he couldn’t love me.
When I stopped believing in God I basically stopped caring about everything, including how I looked.
I was not happy to just be left alone in my unbelief, despite my constant claims to the contrary, and in fact I was not happy at all, and I insisted on destroying the faith that others had and making them as miserable as I was. At the time I viewed my “liberation” from religion as freedom, but I was more in bondage than I ever was, and I knew it. I knew that more than anything else, the way I was living my life, was the cause of my unhappiness and my depression, but still found a way to blame it on religion.
I made it a point to say that religious people were not content to let me live my life the way I wanted, but most religious people would have just left me alone and let me not believe, but I went out of my way to offend people and to start arguments with the religiously inclined. Every chance I got I told people what I thought of their religions and everything they held sacred, and if I didn’t see a chance I made one, but when in response people told me what they thought of my life I said they were intolerant or bigoted and accused them of being brainwashed. The truth was, I had willingly allowed myself to be brainwashed by the so called “free thinkers” but that line of thought does not allow for the freedom to see anything other than their point of view. I tried to convince myself and others that I was happy and did not need religion or God, but the anti-depressants I was on and the constant thoughts of suicide proved otherwise.
The more time that went by the more angry and bitter I became and I set out on a one man crusade to destroy all things religious, especially Christianity, but the ironic thing is that the religion that had caused me so much pain and caused to doubt and made me angry and bitter was not Christian at all, but anger doesn’t usually leave room for reason.
I had a YouTube channel that I started to post fly fishing videos, and it was even named after my favorite fly at the time, the bead head brassie, but I repurposed it as an anti-religious channel and I spent practically all of my free time researching anti-religious material and making videos. I was intentionally offensive and disrespectful to religion and went out of my way to be blasphemous. Whenever anyone would take up for Christianity and would take offense at my intentionally offensive material I would chalk it up to “religious intolerance.”
I am not proud of the way I acted at that point in my, and in fact I am profoundly ashamed of it, and if I were able to go back in time and do a portion of my life over that is the era I would go back and improve on, not because of the pain I was in but because of the pain I caused others and because of my blatant disrespect for all things holy.
I was on my anti-religious rampage for over three years, and let me tell you, it takes a lot of energy to be so angry all the time. I was almost consumed with anger from the day I gave up on God to the day I cried out in anguish and said, “God, help me, I can’t do this anymore. I can’t live a life without you.” By the way, I was far from being the only angry atheist, and without exception, every atheist I have ever known suffers from depression and is almost always angry and offended at things that were not meant as offenses. More than anything, I wanted someone to love me, but when people tried to love me I hated them for it because I judged their motives to be less than pure, because they were Christian.
There are a number of people I still need to find and apologize to for my behavior during that period in my life, and while I can never take back the mean spirited things I said to them, I can let them know that I have changed and that I am deeply sorry for any pain that I caused them. I used to say that I was only attacking religion and wanted to free everyone else from its grasp, but I was also intentionally attacking anyone who held any religious belief.
Eventually God would save me from myself and I would regain my faith in him, but even after I believed in the existence of God again I did not go out of my way to serve him because I was afraid that I had squandered the chance he had given me and was certain I was bound for hell, and the worst part is, I knew without a doubt that it was what I deserved. I was right that I deserved hell, and I still do, as does everyone else on earth, But God is full of love and mercy and that is why Jesus died in our place on the cross so that we can be forgiven.
When I regained my faith, I cringed to think about some of the flippant and blasphemous things I said about God among my atheist friends, things I would never repeat, and I wished I could take them back, and I still do wish I could take them back. The Bible says that we will give an account of every idle word we have spoken in this life (Matthew 12:36), and that terrified me, sometimes to the point of breaking out into a cold sweat because I had said a lot of idle words. In my mind, I was one of the people who were making fun of Jesus as he died on the cross and shed his precious blood for a salvation that we did not want. I often wondered if I had gone too far to be forgiven, but most of the time I knew that I had. After all, why would God forgive me after the way I treated him and the way I blasphemed his name and the sacrifice he made on my behalf?
When my atheist friends sensed that my sympathies had changed, many of them wanted nothing more to do with me, and over the next few years, all but a few joined them. I still have a few atheist friends, but they never let an opportunity to criticize me for my faith pass by, and I can’t be angry with them because there was a time when I would have done the same, and I would have been more vocal about it than they are with me now.
From studying the Bible I learned that there were a lot of people who God forgave who had gone to a lot farther extremes than I had and burned more bridges than I did, and that gave me hope. When I was younger I often wondered why it was important to list the genealogy of Jesus in the Bible, but I have come to realize that it was not just to establish that Jesus came from the line of David and fulfilled the prophecy, but also to point out that even the best of them were deeply flawed, and God was still able to use them.
Among the worst offenders in the genealogy of Jesus was actually King David himself who not only had an inappropriate relationship with another man’s wife, but when he failed at his attempt to cover up the affair he had the man killed and married his wife. Not only are the sins of David immortalized in scripture, but also his guilt and sorrow and the the eventual forgiveness from God when David repented. After David was forgiven, he never ceased praising God for his mercy.
I have a few family members that I somethings don’t like to admit that I am related to as they have done and are doing horrible and despicable things, but the worst people in my family pales in comparison to the worst people in the family tree of Jesus, and the worst among them was arguably Manasseh whose biography (see 2 KIngs 21:1-18 and 2 Chronicles 33:1-20) begins with the words, “Manasseh did evil in the eyes of the Lord.”
Manasseh’s sins were not petty sins, and you have to do some pretty vile things for the Bible to say that you did evil in the eyes of the Lord. Among the multitude of sins committed by Manasseh was sorcery, divination, consulting with mediums and spiritist, worshiping other gods and the shedding of innocent blood, all of which are grievous sins in the eyes of God. Manasseh even went so far as to sacrifice his own son as a burned offering to a false god! How far past feeling and how far past anything resembling morality must a person get to sacrifice their own child to a dead idol?
In the Bible we read some of the accounts of Manasseh where it says, “Moreover, Manasseh also shed so much innocent blood, that he filled Jerusalem from end to end—besides the sin that he had caused [the nation of] Judah to commit, so that they did evil in Nineveh the eyes of the Lord.” If there was ever a person in human history who God could not forgive, Manasseh seams to have been a prime candidate.
Manasseh’s sins were so vile that God brought disaster on him, and rightly so. The King of Assyria took Manasseh, the King of Israel, a prisoner and “put a hook in his nose, bound him with a bronze shackle and took him to Babylon” (2 Chronicles 33:11).
We might think the story would have ended there, and if God were just and fair, by human standards, it would have, but instead the story takes a dramatic turn. Manasseh realized the gravity of his sins and begged God for forgiveness and the Bible says that “In his distress [Manasseh sought the favor of the Lord his God and humbled himself greatly before the God of his fathers,” (2 Chronicles 33:12).
By my flawed standards, and those of all humanity, Manasseh should not have been forgiven, but not only did God forgive Manasseh, God gave him another chance to turn his life around. The Bible says, “When [Manasseh] prayed to Him, the Lord was moved by his entreaty and listened to his plea; so He brought him back to Jerusalem and to his kingdom. Then Manasseh knew that the Lord is God” (2 Chronicles 33:13).
“ Even though I was once a blasphemer and a persecutor and a violent man, I was shown mercy because I acted in ignorance and unbelief. ”
The Apostle Paul, the man who wrote most of the New Testament, did not start off as a believer of Jesus, quite the opposite, Paul, formerly known as Saul, expended a great amount of energy, time, money and other resources in his attempt to rid the world of the teachings of Jesus of Nazareth by any means necessary, including putting those who believed it and those who taught it to death. Paul was directly responsible for the death of Stephen, and he was present when Stephen was stoned to death and gave his approval and blessing to the heinous and unjust act.
Out of all of the people in the Bible, I can related to Paul the most because of how he fought against the gospel of Jesus and then when he was converted spent the rest of his life preaching Christianity and trying to undo the evils he had previously done. In 1 Timothy 1:13 Paul says, “Even though I was once a blasphemer and a persecutor and a violent man, I was shown mercy because I acted in ignorance and unbelief.”
My actions against Christianity were definitely ignorant, and they were motivated by unbelief. I thought I knew Christianity was not true, but like John Snow, I knew nothing, and luckily the Almighty God is a God of love and mercy, and like Paul and the others who came before me, he gave me another chance and I am doing all I can to not waste it. I know that I am saved and have a place in heaven, not because I am good, but because Jesus is good. Though my sins were as red as scarlet, Jesus has washed them white as snow, and the goodness and righteousness of Jesus is more than enough to offer forgiveness for every sin ever committed, and all he asks in exchanged for such a marvelous gift is for us to love him and accept him as our Lord and Savior. I now devote much of my time to spreading the good news of Jesus, not because I think it will in any way save me, but because through my efforts I may be the instrument of God in saving others.