There is a moment in almost every person’s life when the weight of a specific wrong they have done becomes almost unbearable. The memory surfaces at night, in quiet moments, in the middle of ordinary conversations. We reach instinctively for something that can lift it—an apology accepted, a relationship restored, a verdict reversed. But the deepest human longing is not merely for social reconciliation. It is for the kind of forgiveness that reaches all the way down to the root of who we are and what we have done before a holy God. The Gospel of Matthew, it turns out, was written precisely for that longing.
New Testament scholar Jonathan T. Pennington has written a careful and illuminating study of Matthew’s theology in his book Becoming a Disciple of the King, and a recent excerpt published by Crossway invites readers to see how forgiveness—though rarely named explicitly in the middle of Matthew’s narrative—is actually the spine around which the entire Gospel is built. Read the source article for Pennington’s full treatment. What follows is a reflection on what his insights mean for those of us who are not just students of Scripture but people who desperately need what Matthew is proclaiming.
The Human Condition: We Are People Who Need Saving
Matthew begins not with a miracle or a sermon but with a genealogy and a name. The angel instructs Joseph:
