2 x 2 = 1, Jeremiah 3:25

As my friend and former coworker Stacie used to remind me from time to time, “I wasn’t exactly president of the math club.” Frankly, neither was I. The good news about relationships is this—you don’t have to be. You only have to remember one equation to restore and maintain them: 2x2=1.

I never cease to marvel at the Israelites. They walk with God and prosper, then they go off to do their own thing and suffer. They lose wars, they suffer famine, they are taken captive, and after a period of time—I don’t mean hours or days, I mean years and decades—they finally figure it out and get their hearts right with God and abandon the idolatry and other sins and reestablish God to His rightful place in their individual and collective lives…but that is not the end.

The pattern recurs throughout the historical narrative of the Old Testament of the Bible. They walk with God and prosper; they turn away from Him and suffer. Second verse, same as the first. Walk with God and enjoy His blessings; abandon Him in exchange for the false gods of the cultures surrounding them. Instead of addressing the cultures and introducing them to Jehovah God, they often adapted to those cultures and collected their ungodly habits and practices.

But that is not the point of this piece. Perhaps another time. In fact, I am pretty sure of it.

The pendulumic swings of the Israelites in relationship to God are not altogether foreign to us. We often experience the same kind of near-and-far in our relationship with Him. After all, we’re only human.

Whenever the Jews did return and right their spiritual ship, there were two elements that were necessary to ignite the process of relationship restoration. Jeremiah 3:25 says,

“We lie down in our shame, and our reproach covers us. For we have sinned against the Lord our God, we and our fathers. From our youth even to this day, and have not obeyed the voice of the Lord our God.”

Here we read of their humility (personal recognition of their offenses and their wrongness) and confession (specifically identifying their shortcoming to the one offended). These two elements are necessary to make forgiveness and restoration possible.

God being God, He is in any relationship the Constant that never changes, never errs. When two imperfect people are in conflict, restoration requires these same two elements on the part of both parties every time the relationship is broken.

Few are the conflicts I have ever witnessed in which one party was completely at fault and the other was wholly holy. It almost never happens. Even if it begins that way, often it can be that the initially innocent party reacts wrongly and that sends the relationship spiraling further downward. Mr. I-Didn’t-Do-Anything-Wrong and Mr. I-Won’t-Forgive are doomed to defeat.

However, if two parties in a conflict implement these two actions—understanding that their behavior or attitude was wrong and confessing their specific offenses to one another, enabling mutual forgiveness to take place—they will find that their relationship can again experience unity. Two times two will equal one.