Introduction and questions by Sam Rohrer
Answers by Renton Rathbun
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What if the infection in the spiritual realm due to broken relationships remains untreated and continues to fester as a physical infection does? In the physical realm, the infection will spread throughout the body and to others all around. So, what treatment can bring healing? It’s called forgiveness. We’re going to define forgiveness—what it is, what it isn’t—and explore why we should forgive, as well as the consequences and the power of forgiveness.
The New Testament is filled with references to the necessity of forgiving others that link our forgiveness directly to God’s forgiveness of man’s sin as seen in Christ’s work on the cross. One example is Ephesians 4:32, “Be kind to one another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another, as God in Christ forgave you.” First, we need to define forgiveness as the apostle Paul referenced here in Ephesians 4:32.
As 21st century Americans, we typically think of forgiveness as trying to obtain a feeling of psychological acceptance of the pain that someone else has brought into our lives. But Ephesians 4:32 tells us that forgiveness isn’t about making myself feel something. Instead, it looks a lot like an activity that we might call a choice or a skill. We find in this verse that Christ took on the penalty for our sin and created a way of reconciliation between us and the Father.
The idea of reconciliation means to restore peace between two people. So, the part between us and the Father, that’s the forgiveness part. Providing a way of reconciliation, that’s Christ’s part. In a nutshell, what we learn from Christ’s work on the cross is that forgiveness is this: when we provide a way of reconciliation between the offender and ourselves. You see, the burden is on us to provide a way.
What then does it look like to forgive, and what does it look like not to forgive?
If you think about how Scripture describes God’s forgiveness, especially when you look at the Old Testament, it often says that God remembers our sins no more. Now, obviously God is God, and therefore He is not extracting the knowledge out of His mind. We must remember that a lot of the language in Scripture is covenantal. In other words, God is saying that legally, or in any other way, He will not hold our sins against us. In other words, He’ll never bring them up again.
In today’s world, we have counterfeit forgiveness. We find a way to start feeling better about what happens so that it doesn’t bother us anymore. But then when the person agitates us, we get upset again, and his or her sins come back into our minds, and we want to bring them up. Real forgiveness refuses to bring up those sins again.
Why should we forgive others?
A lot of us may remember in Matthew 18:21 when Peter asks Jesus, “How many times should I forgive my brother?” And Jesus famously says seventy times seven. If you keep reading, you will find out why we forgive.
Jesus explains it in a parable about a servant who is an evil servant. This servant owes 10,000 talents to his master. There’s no way the servant can pay it back. So, the master forgives 10,000 talents of debt and takes that burden off the servant. The servant is incredibly relieved. He was forgiven, but then he goes home and immediately finds someone under him who owes just a little bit of money. This servant gets so angry at this person who owes him just a little bit of money that he chokes him and yells at him to pay him back. The person who owes the servant money doesn’t have the money to pay him back. So, the evil servant throws him in prison.
The master gets wind of this, and the master brings the servant back and says, “I forgave you a huge sum of money, and you can’t even forgive this other guy just a little bit of money?” The master sends the servant to be tortured until he can pay the large sum back.
This is a picture of how God views His forgiveness to us. He forgave us more than we can possibly understand. We don’t think about how horrible our sin is before God. So, when someone sins against us, we can’t forgive them that little bit.
And this is hard for us to understand because some of us may have endured some really horrible acts from other people. Yet what God is saying to us is that our sin is so horrible that even the worst thing anyone has endured from someone else still doesn’t hold a candle to what we’ve done against the Lord.
The why of forgiveness
The why of forgiveness is found in how we were forgiven. If Christ can provide a way of forgiveness for us in light of the depth of our sin, God expects us to do a small thing, which is to provide a way of forgiveness for people that have sinned against us.
There is a sense in which we think, “Well, forgiveness will bring me peace in my heart.” That is a benefit which sometimes happens to people. However, that feeling of peace doesn’t always come. That feeling is not a benefit we should be seeking out as the reward for forgiving someone else. Sometimes, the uneasiness is still there, and we might wonder if we should have forgiven that person.
The true benefit of forgiveness is that it provides a tangible way that we can demonstrate our gratitude to God for His forgiveness of our sins. We should want to demonstrate thankfulness to God, and sometimes that demonstration is in our worship on Sunday, sometimes it’s in a prayer. But sometimes it might be found in forgiveness. Forgiveness gives you a difficult moment that requires real sacrifice. It allows you to get a small glimpse of what Christ has done for you in reconciling you to the Father. In a similar way, you are to provide a way for reconciling someone else to yourself. And that is one of the most positive things that forgiveness can do for us.