How Does Forgiving Someone Actually Work?
In my time as a believer, especially as I’ve matured, I’ve heard a lot of misconceptions about believing; I’ve believed one or two of them for a time, even. That’s because forgiveness is a weighty, lofty topic that’s hard to genuinely conceptualize, especially when you’re required to give it to someone but the thoughts of the offense and the pain run through your mind any time you’re free of distraction. I’ve been there; I get it. But if we take some time, look at the Scriptures, and see how God forgives, then we have a shot at employing the forgiveness Jesus requires of us as His followers.
What is forgiveness not?
I mentioned some wrong beliefs about forgiveness: one of those I spent some time rooted in was the idea that we don’t have to forgive unless we receive an apology. I went to Scripture like Matthew 5:23-24 and Matthew 18:15-22. To me, it seemed like there was no need to forgive someone if they didn’t acknowledge what they did was wrong. In this way, I held onto grievances—which were definitely hurtful (as in being falsely accused of heinous crimes I had never even appeared to commit by someone close to me) and pushed away someone else I loved because of it.
In that same situation, a pastor advised me to forgive them for my own sake, and I think this is also wrong, although there’s no verse out there that says as much.
And in the very same situation, I was asked to pretend it never happened by another involved person, to let things smooth over rather than confront the sin because “to forgive someone is to forget the offense” and “it will only cause more problems if you confront this.” And there are all kinds of things wrong with that, but the one that’s relevant to this subject is the “forgive and forget” mentality.
Why forgiveness is not forgetting
Put simply, the defense for this idea is that God forgets our sins when He forgives us because they are not accounted to us any longer; the most common defense for this is Psalm 103:12, “As far as the east is from the west, so far has he removed our transgressions from us,” which I find interesting because it’s definitely not the best verse to defend this idea—well, it is, but only if we understand a little bit of Bible trivia and insight.
In general, I would be more prone to using verses like Jeremiah 31:34, Hebrews 8:12, and Isaiah 43:25 to defend this idea. All of these state some variation of “I, the Lord, will not remember your sins.,” which seems like a clear cut case for God forgetting the sins He forgives, but it’s not. One thing I’ve recently learned about the Bible language, and specifically the Old Testament, is what “remembering” actually means. In modern English, to remember means just that, to mentally recall. But there’s a meaning behind it in Scripture, especially when God is the subject, of action.
When the Israelites are called to remember God’s works, it’s not just a call to recollect His past actions but to change their own actions because of that recollection. So, in this sense, God is not describing a lack of recall of our sins—after all, the omniscient God could never forget anything—instead, He is telling His people what He will do to and for them because of Jesus: not act against forgiven sin. To not remember our sins any longer is to no longer punish or destroy us for acting against Him.
In this sense, Psalm 103:12-14 is actually the best defense of God forgetting our sins, but even that is a statement of the same meaning as God not remembering; it is simply that He will separate us from our transgressions in order to associate us with Christ’s blood rather than our evil.
What, then, is forgiveness?
To understand forgiveness, we have to understand what God does when He forgives because everything good we are able to do must be modeled after Him. As Paul says, “Imitate me as I imitate Christ” (1 Corinthians 11:1). To first deny the messy beliefs about forgiveness I once held onto, God certainly forgives our sin before we ask for it. He forgave it all in Christ, and thank God because I do not have the ability to sit here and list every wrong I’ve ever done and apologize for it. It’s impossible.
So when I pray the Lord’s Prayer, “Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us,” I must be cautious to ensure my own forgiveness. Because if I only forgive when I’ve been apologized to, then my request is for God to treat me the same way. It’s similar to that passage most people never finish when they quote in Matthew 7:1-2, “Do not judge, so that you won’t be judged. For you will be judged by the same standard with which you judge others, and you will be measured by the same measure you use.” Whatever standard you hand out to your fellows is the same standard you request God to use against you.
Swallowing the bitter pain of an offense
Therefore, the best way I know to describe forgiveness comes from a couple of men way smarter and wiser than me: “Forgiveness is swallowing the bitter pain of an offense.” As the men from the podcast, “30 Minutes in the New Testament” went through Matthew and described forgiveness, one of them said this. As I pondered it, the metaphor really started playing out. This is exactly what God did for us in Jesus, and He did this while we were still sinners. Of course, God confronted us all with our sins as He said to do in Matthew 18, but He also went to the cross, suffered, and died just so he could swallow that pain and give us forgiveness in totality.
At the end of it all, as we ought to know, Jesus’s actions on the cross are a perfect model of forgiveness: he took on the offenses we caused God, swallowed and bore them to death, and decided not to associate us with those offenses anymore: He treats us now as though we had done no wrong to Him, which is precisely why we all have the path to the Father through Christ.
To confront the other wrong belief about forgiveness, it must now be clear that we can’t do this for our sake; forgiveness hurts. It makes things worse for us so that it can be better for another. If we acted for our sake, we would vomit our pain on the offender, yet we ought to taste and swallow the bitterness for theirs even as Jesus did.
As I’ve worked through these thoughts over the last two months in lieu of writing this, I’ve had to challenge myself to actually forgive: I make the same challenge to any who read this: consider whether your forgiveness hurts. If it doesn’t, I’d argue there was no swallowing pain but rather a vomiting of it at your offender. And if it does hurt? Congratulations! You’re doing it right. Keep swallowing and digesting that bitter pain, confront the wrong action per Matthew 18, and love that person as though they never did you any wrong. Do that until the pain is gone, and you will have successfully forgiven.