The Breach You Are Not Permitted to Leave Open

A breach between two brothers can stand for years while both of them keep their Bibles open. Christ speaks to that condition twice, and both times He assigns the first move.

“Therefore if you are presenting your offering at the altar, and there remember that your brother has something against you, leave your offering there before the altar and go; first be reconciled to your brother, and then come and present your offering” (Matthew 5:23-24 LSB).

The grievance in that scene belongs to the brother. The man holding the sacrifice is the one who wronged him, and he is the one told to set the offering down and go. Christ interrupts an act of worship to send him.

“Now if your brother sins, go and show him his fault, between you and him alone; if he listens to you, you have won your brother” (Matthew 18:15 LSB).

Now the grievance is his, and he is the one told to go.

Whichever end of an offense a man stands on, the errand is his. Neither text gives him leave to wait for the other man to come to him. That is how a breach lasts for years between two men who each believe he is being patient.

The command has lawful limits. A man whose elders have told him to wait is waiting under authority. A man under discipline himself has an order of business set for him. What Scripture nowhere supplies is the posture of a man who could go and will not.

Three obligations we have run together

Most of the confusion in our churches comes from calling three different things by one word.

The first is what a man owes his offender immediately. He lays down the desire for revenge. He seeks the man’s good and prays for it. He returns kindness in place of the injury. He stands ready. Christ commands this much toward enemies (Matthew 5:44), so no offense by a brother can fall beneath it. Calvin called this forgiving, in the first of two senses he distinguished, and described it this way: “If a man shall do me an injury, and I, laying aside the desire of revenge, do not cease to love him, but even repay kindness in place of injury.”

The naming deserves care, because Scripture does not obviously settle it. Mark places an act of forgiving inside a man’s prayer with no mention of repentance (Mark 11:25), and in the Lord’s Prayer a man says he has already forgiven his debtors (Matthew 6:12). Those may be read as the release of the heart rather than the granting of pardon, and a man may hold the word “forgiveness” for the second thing. The question is which acts Scripture’s own word covers, and it deserves an answer. The obligation does not wait on the answer.

The second is the reception. It is fellowship restored, the offender received back, and the matter closed between them. This one waits on repentance. “If your brother sins, rebuke him; and if he repents, forgive him” (Luke 17:3 LSB). Some read that sentence as naming a sufficient occasion rather than an exclusive condition, and the clause by itself does not decide the question. Read alongside Matthew 18, where the offender is pursued until he listens, the condition is the plain sense, and our confession states the practice that follows from it: a man who has scandalized his brother ought to declare his repentance to those he offended, who are thereupon to be reconciled to him and in love to receive him (WCF XV.6). A man who announces a breach healed while the sin stands has told a lie about the state of things and has taken away the pressure God was using.

The third is the pursuit, and it is the one we have lost. Both texts above lay it on both men with no condition attached.

A man learns that he owes his brother no reconciliation until repentance comes, which is true, and he treats it as warrant to keep the hostility and stay home. The first obligation was never conditioned on the other man. Neither was the third. He is using what Scripture says about receiving his brother back to excuse disobedience to what Scripture says about going to him.

The test is plain enough to apply to yourself. A man who refuses revenge, seeks his offender’s good, stays open to repentance, and honors the discipline of his church is obeying, and many who do this believe they have forgiven and that the account is closed. They have obeyed one command with another still standing in front of them, because the reception is a further work and it comes due the moment the offender turns. A man who reserves the right to nurse hostility, or to collect a personal debt until an apology arrives, has not begun either one. He is withholding what Christ requires of him today, and no doctrine of conditional pardon covers it.

What God does with the man who leaves it open

“For if you forgive others for their transgressions, your heavenly Father will also forgive you. But if you do not forgive others, then your Father will not forgive your transgressions” (Matthew 6:14-15 LSB).

The parable of the unforgiving slave ends in the same place, and harder.

“Should you not also have had mercy on your fellow slave, in the same way that I had mercy on you?’ And his lord, moved with anger, handed him over to the torturers until he should repay all that was owed him. My heavenly Father will also do the same to you, if each of you does not forgive his brother from your hearts” (Matthew 18:33-35 LSB).

Both passages say what a man would rather not hear. The Father withholds. The debt the king had already cancelled is collected. Scripture softens neither, and no man should soften them on its behalf.

The parable presses hardest on those of us who hold that a justified man cannot fall away, because the first remission is real in the story and the second scene revokes it. Careful readers have answered in more than one way. Some take that remission as the pardon a man appears to have and never truly received. Some take the torturers as a Father’s temporal chastening of a son. Both leave the warning standing, which is the point of it.

What no reading can do is make a man’s mercy the price of his pardon. Justification is not for anything wrought in a man or done by him, and rests on Christ’s obedience and satisfaction alone. Faith is the only instrument that lays hold of it, and that faith is never alone in the man who has it. Mercy toward a brother is the fruit and evidence of a living faith, and evidence is what Christ speaks of when He makes forgiving the mark of a forgiven man.

That leaves the warning where He put it. A true son who holds a grudge keeps his justification and falls under his Father’s displeasure, and he walks without the light of His countenance until he humbles himself, confesses his sin, and renews his repentance. A man who holds one for years, warned and unmoved, has been told plainly what to make of himself.

The warning does not stand alone. God ties a man’s access to Him to the way that man treats the people nearest him. A husband who refuses to live with his wife in an understanding way finds his prayers hindered (1 Peter 3:7). “If I see wickedness in my heart, the Lord will not hear” (Psalm 66:18 LSB). Scripture says the same of the man who turns his ear from listening to the law (Proverbs 28:9). A hard man may keep every hour of prayer he ever kept and receive no hearing.

Covering, receiving, and discipline

Not every wound requires a proceeding. “A man’s insight makes him slow to anger, and it is his honor to overlook a transgression” (Proverbs 19:11 LSB). Some offenses are covered and never raised again. Some must be named and answered between the two men. Some are sin the church must pursue, and that pursuit aims at once at recovering the man, at purging the leaven, and at the honor of Christ among His people. A man who escalates a slight into a proceeding has made discipline a weapon. A man who hides behind forbearance to avoid a hard conversation has made mercy an excuse. Both leave the breach standing.

The charge that gets turned around

Amaziah heard Amos and answered by reporting him to the king and ordering him out of the country. The charge the prophet carried was never engaged on its merits. His presence became the question instead.

Men still do this. A brother brings an offense, and before the offense is answered the conversation turns to his tone, his timing, or his spirit. The wrong he came to report is never weighed. I do not know what is in the heart of a man who does this, and Scripture forbids me that verdict until the Lord comes and brings to light the things hidden in darkness. Naming the move and refusing it is a different matter. A brother’s manner may be genuinely wrong, and Scripture does rebuke the manner of a rebuke, and Christ tells a man to take the beam out of his own eye before he works on his brother’s. Manner can therefore come first. It still does not answer the offense, and the offense does not dissolve because the manner was faulty.

The thirteenth chapter of First Corinthians gets quoted for this, at the man who named an injury, as though love would never have counted it. Grant the serious form of the objection. A man can catalogue his wounds, publish them, and demand a hearing while resentment does the driving, and Paul’s line about not taking a wrong into account speaks against him. Look at what Paul says in the next verse. Love “rejoices with the truth” (1 Corinthians 13:6 LSB). The man who wrote it named Peter to his face at Antioch, named Euodia and Syntyche in a letter to their congregation, and named Alexander to Timothy. His practice licenses no publication of every injury, and it defeats any reading of that chapter which forbids a man to name a wrong at all.

Love has been made soft in our generation because we let the world define it. Christ defined it. “If you love Me, you will keep My commandments” (John 14:15 LSB). Love is commanded, and what is commanded is rendered by the will. God commands the affections as well, and orders a man to rejoice and to weep with those who weep, so a cold heart is no exemption and no excuse. Love keeps covenant and obeys. It says hard things, it bears hard things, and it goes to the man it loves.

Examine yourself

“We know that we have passed out of death into life, because we love the brothers. The one who does not love abides in death” (1 John 3:14 LSB).

John writes so that the children of God and the children of the devil become manifest (1 John 3:10), so this is a test with public use, and a church may have to apply it. Every man’s first use of it is on himself. What John names is settled and culpable lovelessness proved in conduct, and not the bare fact that a relationship is cold today. A man who knows his duty, has the opportunity to do it, and will not, has something to fear in that verse. Let him look, and let the looking reach his own harshness and his own demands, and not only the other man’s refusal.

The limit and the ground

“If possible, so far as it depends on you, being at peace with all men” (Romans 12:18 LSB). Paul sets two limits in one clause and both of them are mercies. A man answers for whether he went, and for whether the hostility in him is truly laid down. He does not answer for a door another man bolts. Obedience carries no promise that every relationship survives it.

What carries the errand is what was done at the cross. “But God demonstrates His own love toward us, in that while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us” (Romans 5:8 LSB). Peace with God was accomplished there and is applied when a man is brought to repentance and faith, which is the order this piece has been describing throughout. The initiative was God’s, taken toward enemies, at a cost no man will be asked to pay. A man who walks toward a brother who wronged him, holding no leverage and no guarantee of the outcome, imitates that initiative in small measure.

Christ is building one body out of people who injure each other. He chose them knowing it, He bore their offenses in His own flesh, and He has not left the holding of them together to their goodwill. A man who goes to his brother is doing the work the Head of the body is already doing, and Christ will finish in them both what He began.