June 9

Forgive All Our Sins

Return, O Israel, to the Lord your God. Your sins have been your downfall! Take words with you and return to the Lord. Say to him: “Forgive all our sins and receive us graciously, that we may offer the fruit of our lips.”

Hosea 14:1-2

“Take words with you and return to the Lord,” Hosea admonished Israel, because “your sins have been your downfall!” What were the words? “Forgive all our sins.” But how can people bring those words to God, if they have no words to bring?

This was true with the Bine people of Papua New Guinea, as Lillian Fleischmann and her partner discovered after they began breaking down the language as Wycliffe Bible Translators. It was frustrating for them. How could they explain the gospel without a word for “forgiveness”?

“At first we tried using phrases explaining how a forgiving person does not pay back when he is wronged, but just forgets the offense. That didn’t work, however, because in the Bine culture, only a coward forgets an offense. We had to find some way of saying that God was a forgiving God without implying that He was a coward.

“Then one day we were invited to a funeral feast. After everyone had eaten, the headman in the clan of the one who had died took a coconut shell full of water. Dipping certain leaves in the water, he sprinkled the water into the air saying the name of each village that had people in attendance at the feast. He pronounced each village ‘kalya’—released from blame concerning the death of the one who had died. There it was! A Bine word for forgiveness!

“We asked some questions, however, because we thought it might simply mean ‘innocent.’ We learned that a person doesn’t need to be innocent to be pronounced ‘kalya.’ ‘Kalya’ simply means he will not be punished; he is released from blame. Does this describe God’s forgiveness? Yes, God says we are Kalya from our sins because Jesus has already paid for them.”

The Bine people were no different than the people of Israel. Their sins had been their downfall. Now they had a word to use in their own language by which they could ask God to forgive their sins. What would forgiveness mean to them? Hosea went on to express God’s response to Israel—the same response that he offers today to the Bine people: “I will heal their waywardness and love them freely, for my anger has turned away from them.” ⁹