I heard a song once that went, “sometimes I pretend we never met, because it’s harder to forgive than to forget.” Pretty sad, right?
If I were to ask you if you are currently harboring any ill will towards someone in your life right now, what would you say? We have all been mistreated, and we have all mistreated others. So how does the Bible suggest we handle this? Should we just simply “forgive and forget”? Is that what God does when we sin against Him?
Forgiveness can be defined as “stop feeling angry or resentful toward someone for (an offense, flaw, or mistake)” or “cancel (a debt).” Think about how final and clear these definitions are. If a debt is cancelled, the balance is zero. There is no debt. If you “stop” something, it does not happen anymore. To paraphrase Newton’s first law of motion, “if a thing is stopped, it stays stopped unless acted on by an outside force!” We can think about forgiveness two ways: God’s forgiveness of us, and our forgiveness of one another.
To understand what the Bible says about forgiveness, we have to understand what it says about sin. Sin is often described as “falling short,” “missing the mark,” or “committing a trespass.” When we sin, to put it simply, God has a mark against us! We have a debt that must be paid or a grievance that needs to be cleared. The beautiful thing about God’s grace and forgiveness is that He will forgive us!
1 John 1 speaks clearly about how God views sin, but also what He has done about it:
“…if we walk in the light, as he is in the light, we have fellowship with one another, and the blood of Jesus his Son cleanses us from all sin. If we say we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us. If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness. If we say we have not sinned, we make him a liar, and his word is not in us.” (vss. 7-10)
Here, we learn several things: first, all have sinned (see also Romans 3:23). Second, it is the blood of Jesus that cleanses us. In this way, we learn that we cannot wash away our own sins. God is the judge of our righteousness, meaning the debt is to Him. Just like financial debt, we cannot cancel it ourselves. Third, while we cannot declare ourselves righteous, there is something we can (and should) do in order for our sins to be forgiven: confess! While God already knows that we have sinned the moment it happens, He wants us to confess our wrongdoings to Him, and thankfully, we can rest assured that “He is faithful and just to forgive us.”
We get more insight into what God’s forgiveness looks like in passages like Hebrews 8:12, (“For I will be merciful toward their iniquities, and I will remember their sins no more”) and Isaiah 43:25 (“I am He who blots out your transgressions for my own sake, and I will not remember your sins”). Now, it can be easy be confused by the idea that a sovereign, omnipotent God can “forget” something, but this is not as if our misdeeds just slip His mind sometimes. The idea of forgetting I think is meant to show the completeness of His forgiveness. If something is forgotten, it is simply not there! God is so just and exacting in His measurements of righteousness, that if He is going to declare us “forgiven,” He is going to forgive us completely, as if He has forgotten the sin ever happened.
All this brings us to our sins against one another. We desperately want forgiveness when we sin against God, and we do not like to offend or hurt others. I do not know about you, but when I know I have done something wrong against someone, I get all panicked until I know I have made it right. However, admittedly, sometimes when the roles are reversed, I am not as eager to forgive as I am to seek forgiveness. We cannot blot out memories of wrongs done. Some sins against us personally hurt very badly, and may cause major chaos and drama in our lives. Even “smaller” slights can completely change the way we view certain people and tempt us to hold on to those things for years. So what are we to do?
Jesus says to His disciples, “For if you forgive others their trespasses, your heavenly Father will also forgive you, but if you do not forgive others their trespasses, neither will your Father forgive your trespasses” (Matthew 6:14-15). People can hurt us in a multitude of ways, and hurt us badly! But at the end of the day, we serve a God that is gracious, merciful, and forgiving. When He forgives, He forgives completely. When I find myself “remembering” past grievances I thought I had forgiven others for, I remember the forgiveness of sins I have by the grace of God through baptism. I remember His faithfulness and justice in forgiving His people, and that helps put any wrongs that I have a hard time forgiving into perspective.
Somethings we may not be able to forget, but we are called to forgive.
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