Several years before I met my wife, I was in love with another woman. I won’t tell you her name, it’s not important. What is important is that I believed God had revealed to me that she and I were going to be married. Instead, she eloped with a man that none of her friends knew she’d even been interested in. I was devastated. More than that, I was angry. Angry at her, angry at him, and angry at God who, it seemed, had lied to me and betrayed me.
Three weeks later I heard God say something else, and this time there’s no doubt that it was God, because never in a million years could this have come from myself, or from anyone else. God told me to pray for that woman and her husband. Specifically, he told me to pray that they would have a strong, healthy marriage. And not just to pray once, but over and over again, ten or more times a day, for several weeks.
I learned many things during that time, as my broken trust was gradually rebuilt. But two that really stand out are first, that when my heart and my mind are in a certain place, Matthew 7:7-8 is the most depressing passage in the entire Bible, and second, that by God’s grace alone, the Holy Spirit will do for me what I can not do for myself.
The Call to Forgive
“Everyone says forgiveness is a lovely idea, until they have something to forgive.” – C. S. Lewis
He said to them: “It is not for you to know the times or dates the Father has set by his own authority. But you will receive power when the Holy Spirit comes on you; and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, and in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth.” (Acts 1:7-8)
Why did Jesus tell his disciples to begin in Jerusalem? The majority of his ministry had been in Galilee, after all. There are several possible reasons; Jerusalem was where the temple was located, it had a large, concentrated population, it was the place where Jews from all over the world came during the major festivals. But one that we must not overlook is that Jerusalem was the city where Jesus was crucified.
It was in Jerusalem that the crowd turned from following Jesus and called instead for his execution. It was in Jerusalem where he was falsely accused, beaten, whipped, spat on, mocked, and ultimately killed. The first people to whom Jesus sent his disciples with the message of forgiveness, were the very ones who had murdered him. And on the day the Holy Spirit was first poured out, about 3,000 people in that same city of Jerusalem were baptized into the name of Jesus (Acts 2:41). The forgiveness that Jesus gave to his murderers while they were crucifying him (Luke 23:34) was not just words; he backed it up with actions, blessing the very people who cursed him (Luke 6:28).
But that was them. What do the Scriptures say about me? In Romans 5:10 we read, “For if, while we were God’s enemies, we were reconciled to him through the death of his Son, how much more, having been reconciled, shall we be saved through his life!” Did you catch that? It says “enemies.” God didn’t forgive me as a friend who had accidentally hurt him; he forgave me as his enemy. He forgave me when I was in open rebellion against his authority. And his forgiveness didn’t come cheap. The Son of God allowed himself to be tortured to death so that I, his enemy, could be forgiven, and could receive eternal life. And do I dare claim that there is some injury or insult that I can’t forgive?
Forgiveness is Mandatory.
In action movies, the hero defeats the villain with strength, skill, determination and sometimes trickery. But that’s not the way the real world works. In the world God created, good does not defeat evil by being stronger in the ways that the world counts strength, but by being better. By enduring the worst that evil human beings and demons can devise, without being corrupted. (Matthew 5:38-48, Romans 12:14-21) And a major part of the way this happens is through forgiveness, breaking a cycle of revenge that will otherwise end only with death.
In the Old Testament there is no specific command to forgive. There is, however, the command, “Do not seek revenge or bear a grudge against anyone among your people, but love your neighbor as yourself. I am the Lord.” (Leviticus 19:19)
Jesus clarified and expanded that command beyond “your people” and “your neighbor” to include loving even our enemies. And he made it clear that for his followers, forgiveness is not optional. Immediately after teaching his disciples how to pray he told them, “For if you forgive other people when they sin against you, your heavenly Father will also forgive you. But if you do not forgive others their sins, your Father will not forgive your sins.” (Matthew 6:14-15) He made it crystal clear that I can’t receive forgiveness for my own sins while withholding it from others who offend me. To make the point even more strongly, at the end of the parable of the unmerciful servant in Matthew 18, Jesus warns, “In anger his master handed him over to the jailers to be tortured, until he should pay back all he owed. This is how my heavenly Father will treat each of you unless you forgive your brother or sister from your heart.” (Matthew 18:34-35 NIV)
What Forgiveness is, and What it is Not.
To forgive is to let go of my claim against someone; to decide that I’m not going to collect on what I think they owe me. It doesn’t mean that what was done to me was okay, or that it wasn’t serious, and it has nothing to do with whether the damage and the pain to me were small or enormous.
However, forgiveness also does not mean that I have to allow a person who has injured me to do so again. When Jesus said, “If anyone slaps you on the right cheek, turn to them the other cheek also,” (Matthew 5:39) he was talking about a slap, a humiliation, not an injury. His command was not that I commit suicide, but that I go out of my way to do good to those who hate me1.
I think most of us immediately recognize that the biggest barrier to forgiving is the belief that the person who hurt me doesn’t deserve to be forgiven. That belief is very often true; many times they don’t deserve it. Perhaps they haven’t asked for forgiveness. Maybe they’ve never acknowledged they hurt me at all. Or maybe they’re happy that they hurt me, and even bragging about it to their friends.
On the other hand, sometimes a person can hurt me without intending to. Ironically, that can be harder to deal with than if they did it maliciously. My rational mind tells me that there’s no grounds to hold the person responsible. All my friends say so too, and they may even think less of me if they find out that I’m holding a grudge. But I’m still dealing with the situation, whether that be a physical injury, a financial loss, or whatever. The pain and the anger don’t necessarily go away just because my head knows that the damage was not intended
But can I actually forgive someone if I know they didn’t sin against me? I believe not only that I can, but that I must. When Jesus was explaining the Lord’s prayer, he told his disciples that they must forgive everyone who sins against them, but within the prayer itself he says, “And forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors.” When I looked up this verse using the Blue Letter Bible I found that “debtors” is the translation of the Greek word “opheiletēs.” According to Vine’s Expository Dictionary of New Testament Words, the word opheiletēs literally means “one who owes anything to another,” but when it’s used metaphorically it can also refer to “those who have not yet made amends to those whom they have injured.” Not “sinned against” but “injured.”
Based on this, then, if I forgive somebody, that does not necessarily mean that they sinned against me. All it means is that they hurt me. Forgiveness is still required, even when I don’t have the satisfaction of having the moral high ground. (Otherwise, we’d have to admit that God is okay with me taking revenge against someone who hurt me accidentally, or even when they were legitimately in the right, which seems like a pretty absurd position to take.)
As bottom, then, forgiveness is not about the other person at all, whether they were right or wrong, or what they deserve in return for what they did. It’s about me, and how I choose to respond. Will I forgive, or will I nurse a grudge? (Nursing a grudge is an apt metaphor, by the way, for feeding my anger, a little at a time, to keep it alive until I can get my revenge.) And beyond just not taking revenge, will I make a point of doing good to the one who hurt me? Will I bless them? Pray for them? Provide them with food or drink out of my own pocket when they are in need? Will I, in other words, return good for evil? (Romans 12:14-21).
Forgiveness is Possible.
By now you’re probably thinking that I’ve painted myself into a corner. The forgiveness that I’ve described might be possible for Jesus, but it’s so far beyond what I’m capable of that there’s no point even in thinking about it. And here’s where I need to go back to the beginning, and what I learned during one of the lowest periods of my life.
Jesus commands us to forgive even our enemies. More than that, he tells us specifically that if we don’t forgive everyone who hurts us, then God will not forgive us. That’s a standard that’s almost impossibly high. Yet, at the same time, God’s word clearly teaches that I am saved, and my sins are forgiven, by God’s grace, apart from any work that I do, or even that I could do. I have received a righteousness from God that was not my own doing, but is by faith from first to last. (Romans 1:17). How do I reconcile these two, seemingly contradictory, ideas?
It seems to me that if salvation is only by grace, apart from any work of mine, which it is, and if God also requires that I forgive others in order to be forgiven myself, which he does, than forgiveness must be by God’s grace, received through faith. That is, and I want to be clear on this, it is by God’s grace alone that he forgives me, and it is by his grace alone that I, also, forgive those who hurt me.
Corrie ten Boom was a Dutch woman who helped hide Jews from the Nazis during the Second World War. In 1944 she was arrested, along with her father and sister. Of the three, Corrie alone survived, but only after spending time in Ravensbrück Concentration Camp. In her book The Hiding Place2, she tells the story of a preaching engagement after the war, where she met a former guard at her camp, who was now rejoicing at having received God’s forgiveness through Jesus Christ.
His hand was thrust out to shake mine. And I, who had preached so often to the people in Bloemendaal the need to forgive, kept my hand at my side.
Even as the angry, vengeful thoughts boiled through me, I saw the sin of them. Jesus Christ had died for this man; was I going to ask for more? Lord Jesus, I prayed, forgive me and help me to forgive him.
I tried to smile, I struggled to raise my hand. I could not. I felt nothing, not the slightest spark of warmth or charity. And so again I breathed a silent prayer. Jesus, I cannot forgive him. Give Your forgiveness.
As I took his hand the most incredible thing happened. From my shoulder along my arm and through my hand, a current seemed to pass from me to him, while into my heart sprang a love for this stranger that almost overwhelmed me.
And so I discovered that it is not on our forgiveness any more than on our goodness that the world’s healing hinges, but on His. When He tells us to love our enemies, He gives, along with the command, the love itself.
Forgiveness without limit is not optional for followers of Jesus. But it is only by God’s grace that I am able to do it. That’s the real secret to forgiving; it’s not about the person I forgive, or what they did. It’s about me, and what I allow Christ to do in me and for me. This, as I said earlier, is how the kingdom of God overcomes evil; not by being stronger, as the world counts strength, but by being better. By us being nothing less than sons and daughters of God, living in the reality that it is no one less than God himself who lives in us. The God who forgives his enemies. And ours.
1. I owe this insight to Dallas Willard’s 1997 The Divine Conspiracy: Rediscovering Our Hidden Life in God. HarperCollins, Pymble, Australia.
2. 2006, 1971, The Hiding Place 35th Anniversary Edition. Chosen Books, Bloomington, Minnesota.