For the Lord your God is gracious and compassionate, and will not turn His face away from you if you return to Him. – II Chronicles 30:9

Where is forgiveness rooted and grounded? What is the foundation stone of true biblical forgiveness? Well, there are two parts to this coin: the absolute sovereignty of God and the eternal purposes of God. If you do not begin to wrestle with, glory in, hold to, and treasure the great sovereignty of God, and specifically the eternal purposes of God for His elect, you will never come to joy in your salvation, particularly in the full forgiveness that has been wrought by Christ in your salvation.

You must understand that God, for His own glory and for His own purposes, marked out for Himself a people before the foundation of the world. Now, there are mysteries in this that we cannot grasp, but the scripture bears these things out exhaustively. God says that He will have Himself a people. But how is this going to happen? All of these people, by their very nature, demand just retribution. They demand absolute wrath and judgment. But God sends His Son, because He is the only one adequate and qualified. He will go to the cross and be the vicarious atonement. He will take the place of God’s children and there He will receive the crushing blow of God’s justice and judgment. He will provide for His children a full and complete redemption and salvation.

Listen, God is going to forgive you and keep you because His name’s sake is on the line. He could not decide to make you His, decide to make you righteous like His Son, decide to make you glorious in heaven like His Son and fail somewhere in the process. He would not be the God He claims to be. He could not accomplish what He set out to accomplish.