Articles
How We Forgive
“For I will be merciful to their iniquities, and I will remember their sins no more.” (Hebrews 8:12)
As Jeremiah looked forward to the blessings of the new covenant, the necessity of forgiveness was set forth. The new covenant was not an achievement of the old covenant. The new covenant was God’s means of repairing the damage that had been exposed by the old covenant. The countless animal sacrifices showed that the problem of sin was huge and that the price was too high for men to pay.
Let’s accept the sufficiency of Christ’s sacrifice as settled in the minds of Christians and consider a question together. What if God forgave us the way that we forgive others? What if God stacked up so many conditions, and clauses, and caveats in order to avoid saying what we seem to think - we will never forget what has been done to us and we really have no intentions of forgiving?
God does require a lot from us in one sense. He requires us to believe in Jesus and to serve Him so completely that we would give up any claims to do our own will over His will forever. Yet, He doesn’t require us to try to make up for all of the wrong that we’ve done. He only requires that we commit to giving up wrong things. To those who have become disciples, he only requires that we ask for forgiveness and He promises to remember our sins no more.
This is mercy, and this is the only way to for us to be reconciled to God. We can’t undo the bad things that we have done to God in the past by doing some good things in the present. We can’t really make up for the bad things that we have done to one another either…but we can forgive, we can forget the past, and we can move forward with the hope of a better future if we’re willing to honor those who have hurt us the way that God honors those who have hurt Him. He invites and encourages them to be reconciled to Him. He does not use His rights as a perfect and holy God to hold us hostage when we wish to be forgiven.
To be clear, God does expect evil things to be given up. If we truly desire forgiveness and reconciliation, we have to become servants of Jesus and we have to remain committed to the process of putting on the new man. Those of us who find ourselves in a position to forgive others would do well to appreciate the fact that if we cannot forgive completely without a continual rehashing of the past, we will be disobeying God and we will be in need of forgiveness ourselves.
“For if you forgive others their transgressions, your heavenly Father will also forgive you. But if you do not forgive others, then your Father will not forgive your transgressions.” (Matthew 6:14, 15)
