With His Stripes

A few weeks ago, I was teaching a lesson on repentance in Elders’ Quorum when one of the class members asked an interesting question: “What is the difference between sinning and repenting and not sinning at all.” In thirty-five years of learning and teaching about repentance, I don’t think I’d ever quite thought about that specific question before. As I stood in front of the class and pondered how to respond, thinking about what I knew and had just taught about the Atonement, I came to one inescapable conclusion: there is no difference. I was unprepared, though, for how controversial that statement would prove to be.

The class members’ comments in response to my answer seemed to center around one objection: if there is no difference between, on one hand, sinning and repenting and, on the other, not sinning at all, then why do we try not to sin? Isn’t that a license to sin? Isn’t it the same as saying “Eat, drink, and be merry; ... and if it so be that we are guilty, God will beat us with a few stripes, and at last we shall be saved in the kingdom of God” (2 Nephi 28:8)? 

You may have heard the analogy of the nail in the board. Some church leaders have compared sexual sin to driving a nail into a board. You may be able to pull out the nail, they say, but the hole will still be there.

This may be a good scare tactic to get people, especially young people, to avoid sexual sin, but the underlying message here is a gross misunderstanding of the Atonement. What this analogy says is that we can’t be fully forgiven for our sins, or at least certain sins. That notion is completely contradicted in scripture. The scriptures repeatedly state that if we would but repent, God will forgive us for our sins (Acts 3:19, Heb 8:12, Mos 26:29-30, 3 Ne 9:22, D&C 1:31-33). They don’t say that he’ll forgive some of them, or even most of them, but all of them (with the noted exception of sinning against the Holy Ghost, which, I think, is rare enough that we can put it aside for this discussion).

And God is able to forgive sins because Christ paid for them. That payment didn’t come cheap. The suffering of the Atonement was so great, Christ tells us, that it “caused myself, even God, the greatest of all, to tremble because of pain, and to bleed at every pore, and to suffer both body and spirit—and would that I might not drink the bitter cup, and shrink—Nevertheless, glory be to the Father, and I partook and finished my preparations unto the children of men” (D&C 19:18–19). 

And why did Christ endure such suffering? So that we “might not suffer if [we] would repent” (v. 16). 

President Boyd K. Packer taught about the perfect forgiveness that the Atonement offers:

Nowhere is the generosity and mercy of God more manifest than in repentance.  

Our physical bodies, when harmed, are able to repair themselves, sometimes with the help of a physician. If the damage is extensive, however, often a scar will remain as a reminder of the injury. 

With our spiritual bodies, it is another matter. Our spirits are damaged when we make mistakes and commit sins. But unlike the case of our mortal bodies, when the repentance process is complete, no scars remain because of the Atonement of Jesus Christ. The promise is: “Behold, he who has repented of his sins, the same is forgiven, and I, the Lord, remember them no more” (D&C 58:42).

Isaiah taught the same principle anciently: “...he was wounded for our transgressions, he was bruised for our iniquities: the chastisement of our peace was upon him; and with his stripes we are healed” (Isaiah 53:5). 

Christ’s atonement doesn’t just allow us to pull out the nail, leaving a gaping hole. What kind of forgiveness is that? And it doesn’t just allow us to putty up the hole, hiding it from most people’s view. What kind of healing is that? No, it heals the board completely, making it the same as it would be if no nail had been driven into it in the first place. That is the miracle of the atonement. Thinking anything less is shortchanging the infinite sacrifice that our Savior made for us.

So why try to avoid sin? To continue with the nail analogy, why not drive in nails willy nilly with the expectation that all the holes will magically go away? 

Anyone who has ever repented would never ask that question. Forgiveness is a miracle, but it is by no means magic. It requires changing our natures, no small feat. I, for one, am inexpressibly grateful that I can be totally, completely, one hundred percent forgiven for my sins. And I wish that I never committed any of them. It wouldn’t be true repentance if I felt any other way.

Now, it is true that some sins may lead to temporal consequences that repentance won’t resolve. Extramarital sex can lead to sexually transmitted diseases or extramarital children. Abuse of alcohol, tobacco, drugs, or pornography can lead to lifelong addiction. Gambling away your life’s savings can lead to poverty. Repentance won’t make these issues go away. 

But repentance will completely heal the spiritual wounds that these sins inflict in our souls. Completely. Leaving no scar tissue. That is the promise of the atonement. Whether we have never been wounded or we have been wounded or healed, it is, spiritually speaking, exactly the same. That isn't a license to sin. It's the whole point of the Savior’s atonement.