Yes, God Will Forgive You!

By Neil Earle

George Herbert

We all need to hear these lovely reassuring words.

People struggling with sins and personal or family problems can get so depressed. I know of people who turn to the Bible and run into some of the more robust warning-oriented parts of the Bible and feel doubly-damned. Martin Luther went through that before his deepest conversion. He admitted he even felt he hated the God who “threw the Law book at him” and provoked an even greater crisis of conscience.

Well, here’s good news.

Not so long ago at an English class at UCLA we had to study the poems of the English country parson George Herbert (1593-1633). His thought and words are exquisitely Biblically based, celebrated for connecting “the sublime with the commonplace.” 1

Herbert’s poem Love III is revealing of the most sensitive reflection on something most people wonder about form time to time – forgiveness.

If there is a God, what is he like? Is he as cold, is he as strict, is he as stern as some of his followers seem to say? Just one poem of George Herbert’s puts many of these fears to rest. Herbert, an English aristocrat, a respected leader at Oxford University, an anti-war dissenter from the English Parliament of 1624 communicated as a country parson an unfailingly gentle sense of God’s nature. Note the opening lyric of “Love III” which draws upon the beautiful word picture of Christ knocking at the door of our hard hearts from Revelation 3:20. Notice how he uses personification to introduce the concept of God as a God of loving forgiveness.

Love bade me welcome: yet my soul drew back,

Guilty of dust and sin.

But quick-ey’d Love, observing me grow slack

From my first entrance in,

Drew nearer to me, sweetly questioning,

If I lack’d anything.

In compressed 1600’s style, Herbert opens his fifteen line meditation with an analogy (“God as love”) many have heard about but frames it in terms of being invited to dine with the divine One himself. Yet the long lines alternating with the short conveys the sense of caution, of hesitation, in approaching the offended Deity. However Love (Jesus) spots that hesitation (“quick-eyed Love”) tracing from our guilt.

St. Andrew's Church in Bemerton, where George Herbert worshipped near the end of his life.

Lady Bountiful

Love here is the one Herbert knew as Jesus Christ concealed in poetic guise as the Gracious Host or Lord of a Banquet (that fits – see Luke 14:16; Revelation 3:20). The invited one is hesitant to approach his perfect Master. This is why alert and “quick-eyed Love” spots this discomfort and guilt immediately. Love is intelligent and perceptive and very much in charge as the active agent. Hostess Love will accept no excuses from us for turning away. Love draws near “sweetly questioning,” which introduces an aspect here of Jesus’ feminine side (which all men have), as are the two “my dears” later in the poem.

God as a hostess? God as a woman? You have to admit this is pretty advanced stuff for the 1600s. Yet Herbert knew his Bible well enough to know this was quite within the bounds. (Notice the reference to Wisdom as a lady – Lady Bountiful some call her – in Proverbs 9:1-5).

According to one source it was Parson Herbert’s practice to read Psalm 31 and Psalm 32 daily (“let me never be put to shame/deliver me in your righteousness”). He often joined an ongoing communal group reading of the entire book of Psalms (George N. Wall, George Herbert: The Country Parson, The Temple). Yet we can see from this verse that Herbert was no stranger to “dusty sin,” and he apparently felt them deeply. Every word picture in this verse captures the sense of human unworthiness as we approach the divine conscious of sin hidden or otherwise.

The Gentle Determined One

Herbert moves on. In a sophisticated and compressed piece of dialogue, Herbert has his unworthy guest (you and I, really) protest to the Gracious Hostess. Yet each argument is met with an elegant, gentle, intelligent response. In reply to the clever yet searching and compassionate question whether the guest (you and I) lacked anything, Herbert answers

A guest, I answered, worthy to be here:

Love said, You shall be he.

I the unkind, ungrateful? Ah, my dear,

I cannot look on thee.

Love took my hand, and smiling did reply,

“Who made the eyes but I?”

“Who made the eyes but I?” is a gentle rhyme yet one so powerful in context. For one thing it subtly reveals who the Host really is. Some think Herbert, as an Anglican minister, is implying a double-edged reference here to the Communion wafer, or Host, as some churches call it. That may be so, an example of the elastic suggestiveness of poetry at its best.

“Who made the eyes?”

A major point of this stanza, however, is that there seems to be no good answer a sinner could concoct to Love’s astonishingly gracious reply: “Who made these eyes?” The Host’s tone is unfailingly serene, gentle, courteous, reflecting a strong theme of Christianity at its best – offering reassurance of God’s unfailing favor. Literary scholar Helen Gardner has written of this kind of devotional poetry: “The image…is an image of a soul working out its salvation in fear and trembling. The two poles between which it oscillates are faith in the mercy of God in Christ, and a sense of personal unworthiness that is very near to despair.” 2

This is well said. “Unworthy” is the way many sincerely repentant people feel in the pastor’s office or when confronted with the offer to come forward and drink wine and eat Communion bread. This is beautiful summing up of our sinful psychologizing.

So why do we need another stanza? Ah, this shows Herbert’s deep understanding of the psychology of guilt, of his own struggles against sin perhaps. Just one answer from God may not be enough! As a country parson familiar with ordinary people bemoaning their daily stumblings, Herbert knew that even more assurance was needed. Thus his next four lines are vitally necessary to the argument:

Truth Lord, but I have marr’d them: let my shame

Go where it doth deserve.

And know you not, says Love, who bore the blame?

My dear, then I will serve.

Eyes marred with sin? This is very open and honest isn’t – another quality of great devotional poetry.

Martin Luther

Communion at Last

As we have seen the German Reformer Martin Luther, summarized his pre-conversion battles with guilt:

“I did not love, yes, I hated the righteous God who punishes sinners, and secretly, if not blasphemously, I was angry with God, and said, ‘As if, indeed, it is not enough, that miserable sinners, eternally lost through original sin, are crushed by every kind of calamity by the law…without having God add pain to pain by the gospel threatening us with his righteousness and wrath.’ Thus I raged with a fierce and troubled conscience.”

Herbert’s two souls in communion in Love III is a much kinder, gentler reiteration of Luther’s more belligerent description. Yet both are ultimately and forcefully on the side of the sinner. Herbert’s last two lines end the argument with his conscience…and with God:

You must sit down, says Love, and taste my meat;

So I did sit and eat.

This final word picture depicts almost everything warm, kind and inviting a wounded penitent could wish to hear – true Communion at last. Nothing could be more calculated to spell Assurance than sharing a meal with one’s Creator-Redeemer in the guise of a patient, loving Hostess. The banquet here referenced is very much in the Biblical mode – of Jacob eating a reconciliation meal with Laban, the elders of Israel eating and drinking with the Lord God on Mount Sinai (Exodus 24), Jesus breaking bread at the Lord’s Supper, preparing a barbecue on the beach of Galilee, and the gracious Host knocking at the door in Revelation 3. It represents what a Christian parson such as George Herbert might call the triumph of grace extended to the sincerely grieved and remorseful.

For Herbert, even dusty sinners can expect restitution at the hands of a God who makes provision for human weakness and failing. With Lady Bountiful the guilt-ridden need have no fear. God will forgive you.



1 Joan Bennett, Five Metaphysical Poets (Cambridge: CUP, 1964) page 3.

2 Helen Gardner, John Donne: The Divine Poems (Oxford: Clarendon press, 1952), page xxxi.