#794 Does God Forgive Future Sins?

Dr. craig’s response

Well, think about it. If you are a born-again Christian, and God forgives your future sins, as your Pastor says, that logically implies that you will sin. If you could no longer sin, then there would be no future sins for God to forgive! So if God forgives your future sins, then obviously you both can and will sin.

But is your Pastor right? Does God forgive your future sins? This, it seems to me, is the really interesting question. Although it is often said that God has forgiven all our sins, past, present, and future, it seems to me problematic to affirm that God has forgiven sins that you have not yet committed. This is especially the case if you adopt, as I think you should, a view of time according to which temporal becoming is a real and objective feature of the world. If it is, then your future sins simply do not exist; it is not as though they are out there, up ahead of us on the timeline. You in fact have no future sins, for you have not yet done the sinful deeds.

But if that is the case, it is very difficult to see how you could be guilty for something that you have not done! But if you’re not guilty for that act, then how can God forgive you for that act if you are not guilty of that act? It might be said that God, foreknowing that you will do the act, forgives you in advance for the sin that He knows you will commit. But while I think we can make sense of God’s anticipating your sin and not holding it against you, nevertheless it seems to make no sense to say that you can be guilty of a deed that you have never done and that God can pardon you for that undone deed and absolve your non-existent guilt.

So it seems to me to make better sense to say that God forgives our sins as we commit them and confess them to Him. When we commit sins, we become guilty of them, and when we confess them, God pardons us and absolves us of guilt. What, you may ask, of Christ’s atoning death? Doesn’t it cover all our sins? I would say that while Christ’s atoning death is sufficient for the absolution of all our sins, it does not actually remove our sins until we exist and commit them. Christ’s death is thus sufficient for the forgiveness of all sins, past, present, and future, but it becomes efficacious as the historical process unfolds.