In order to get a clear vision of any one of God’s blessed perfections, we need to go through His own Book, and gather up all the historical and biographical incidents, and all the proof texts bearing on the subject. A collection of all the instances in Scripture of how God pardons, spreads before our eyes a marvelous field of mercy and compassion and of the promptness and impartiality of loving grace, which is simply amazing.  

Notice all the instances of His forgiveness of sinners, whether of individuals or of nations, as in the case of the Ninevites. Then notice the instances of forgiving the sins of His own people, and we have but a picture of the extravagance of Infinite love, seeking to put away sin, and bury it out of sight as quickly as possible, as the deep blue sea buries the trash thrown into it.  

All of God’s dealings in every direction are characterized by an immensity and majesty and a kingliness of conduct, inconceivably beyond the ideas of men, even beyond imaginations of the best of men. He always acts like a God and it taxes the faith of us poor creatures to believe in the infiniteness of the statements that God is love.  

1. He arranges to forgive us in such a way as to humble us. He pours His mercy on us with such abundance and with such repetition that it sinks us into the dust and makes us feel our unworthiness. The overflow of God’s compassion for us, when rightly apprehended, intensifies the sense of our inferiority, and kindles afresh the feeling of hatred for ourselves. If He forgave us as men do, even as the best of saints do, we should detect in it a scantiness and a limitation which would leave some room for us to have a little self esteem. But when He forgives us with such an unspeakable and exhaustless stream of mercy, our sense of self-worth is utterly drowned by floods of pardon. And so it is the very infiniteness of His forgiveness that sinks us lower and lower in our own nothingness.  

2. He forgives in such a way as to win us into a fathomless sorrow for sins. Instead of denouncing us and treating us as creatures foreign to Himself, He actually incorporates our interests with His own, and takes our sins upon Himself. He goes with a bowed head and weeping eye, and a sad face, as if His heart would break with our manifold sins and meannesses. He takes the form of a servant and walks with a crushed heart and submits to innumerable indignities, as if He were the sinner.  

It is this uttermost humiliation on His part that reveals to us how a sinful creature ought to feel towards his own sins. The ever blessed God acts the part of a poor, frail creature to show us how a creature ought to behave. He weeps to teach us how to weep. He is saddened with the unspeakable wretchedness of sin, to reveal to us how to feel towards it. The very God Who made us out of nothing comes down from His inconceivable glory and clothes Himself with our grief and disgrace, to teach us how to repent and how to despise our sins and our sinfulness of nature which could so oppress the very heart of infinite pity and love.  

Oftentimes a child can be led to loathe its disobedience, and sob with a broken heart when it sees how its loving parent weeps and grieves over the child’s disobedience. Did any mother ever yearn over her child and weep over its sins, or has any human father ever made his children’s sorrows his own, as the infinitely loving God has done for us? It is an instance of the unimaginable wisdom of God, that His love has invented a way, not only to forgive us, but to forgive us in such a way as to send us to the ocean depths of sorrow for sin. The very manner of His forgiveness softens our stony hearts and draws us in the very act of pardon to His knees with a double love.  

3. He forgives us without boasting over it. In this respect it is so far beyond human forgiveness. If one man shows any favor to another, or forgives him, or lends him assistance, it seems a part of the very frailty of his nature to frequently allude to it, or else in some indirect way, to boast of it, or to secretly gloat over it in the mind as a stroke of magnanimity. But God swallows us in a boundless sea of compassion, and inundates us within and without with limitless grace, without priding Himself on it or gloating over it. If a dew drop should stretch itself to fill a thimble, it would indeed be a great feat, but the ocean will fill the thimble and never think of boasting over the act. In like manner God’s facility in forgiving offences is beyond all example of created minds. There is such a vast dignity in His love, and a liberality in His compassion, that our minds have to be inspired to get even the faintest conception of it.  

This very narrowness in our conceptions of God’s love hinders our salvation. We judge of Him through the glass of our own hardness and bitterness of nature and it stretches our faith to the uttermost to believe that God will forgive us with the readiness and thoroughness, and limitless love, which the Bible teaches. He forgives us without a reprimand, or a scolding rebuke, or a harsh and mortifying reminder, but with such ease and sweetness, and gracefulness and liberality as to make us feel that our welfare is His own, and that we could bruise His own majesty as soon as unnecessarily humiliate His penitent, trusting creature.  

4. He forgives us far beyond our own vision, both of our own sins and of the effects of them. We never can see the real depths and extent of all our guilt for committing even one sin. And then when we come to estimate all the multiplied consequences of our own sins upon others, they stretch away beyond all our imaginations. Yet our Heavenly Father, through Jesus, has taken a minute account of every scintilla of our guilt, and of the million-fold effects of our sins, and charges His grace with the complete settlement of all these innumerable and far-reaching evils with a magnanimity of favor which simply bewilders a real devout mind.  

5. He forgives us speedily. His love yearns to blot out all our sins and all remembrance of them from His administration. He forgives just as soon as He possibly can, and, as in many Scripture instances, even before the penitent has half-way finished his confession. A loving Omniscience reads the thoughts and intents of the heart, and before the penitent has had time to put his confession into words or to even begin repairing the damages of his wrongs, God forestalls the penitential prayer with a lightning-winged pardon. Read the account of how God forgave David, and how the Father forgave the prodigal, before his pitiful confession was half uttered. Infinite love seems to tremble with intense eagerness to rush into our hearts, and as a crevice in the heart is opened by real contrition, pardoning grace flows in with the swift ease of electricity. God has made nothing in the universe swifter than Himself, and yet nothing in the Godhead is swifter than forgiving love. Why need any one die unpardoned? Why need any heart be loaded with guilt for an hour? Gravitation does not seize upon a falling body half so quickly as forgiving love seizes upon a soul that falls in the arms of mercy.  

6. He forgives incessantly. God is incessantly pouring a warm gulf stream of forgiving grace over a thousand unknown defects. He not only forgives all the sins of which we consciously repent, but also defects and infirmities and innumerable short-comings which the most thoughtful Christian will recognize and humbly confess. Even when he is aware of nothing in his heart but love, he will have an abiding conviction that every moment he needs the merit of Christ’s blood. And only think, God is doing all this for myriads and myriads of His children through all the generations of mankind. He takes each penitent, each pining, hungering heart to His bosom of love. He forgives each one with a freshness, and sweetness, and generosity as if each one was a special favorite of His eternal choice. Oh, what an infinite Lover of souls God is! Well does the Holy Ghost say through Isaiah, “Let him return unto the Lord and He will have mercy upon him, and to our God for He will multiply forgiveness” (Isaiah 55:7). Only imagine how fathomless that forgiving love must be, which can prescribe to a poor creature that he is to forgive a fellow-creature seventy times seven within the space of one day.  

While forgiving grace is the doorway that admits us into the kingdom of God, it is also a contemporary grace that follows us every step of the journey, and the deeper our knowledge of God becomes, the more lovingly will we adore the way that God forgives us. Think of the thousands of times He has pardoned us since we first cried for mercy, and the more keenly we apprehend all these pardons the more ardently our hearts will love Him, for those who have had much forgiven will love much. The more thoroughly we comprehend forgiving love, the more diligently will we cease from all sin.