God’s mercy and forgiveness-Part one

Posted on January 6th, 2012 by Pastor Steve Walker

How do I forgive a person if they don’t ask me to forgive them?

The only thing worse than being refused forgiveness, is being the person who refuses to forgive. Forgiveness has the power to set us free from all kinds of physical, emotional, and spiritual strongholds. Unforgiveness has an equal power to enslave us in bitterness, discouragement, shame, guilt, and depression.  To experience the act of forgiveness is powerful and life-changing.

We believe and teach that forgiveness happens on two levels. This article will be laced with many Scriptures so I encourage you to be a good Berean and to do the work of Scripture study along with reading this teaching.

First we forgive a person because God commands us to forgive. There are no exceptions to the rule (Matt. 6:12-15; Matt. 18:21-35; Mark 11:25; Rom.12:17-21; Col. 3:13; Eph. 4:32). This forgiveness is a spiritual act on our part that in essence agrees to allow God to pronounce the judgment of guilty, condemn the person for their sin, and hand out the punishment according His justice and timing. God does not want us to be overcome by another person’s evil. This forgiveness that God commands is a gift to us, designed to keep us from becoming bitter and overcome with anger, grief, hatred, revenge or even murder (see Eph. 4:31-32; Heb. 12:15; Rom. 12:14-21). Unforgiveness can become a cancer in our soul, causing us to negatively affect everyone around us. God wants to spare us from this and so commands us to be Christlike when it comes to forgiving people.

While hanging on the cross, Jesus prayed to the Father to, “Forgive them for they know not what they are doing.” Jesus was in essence saying, “Father, do not hold this sin against them. They are ignorant. If they should come to you in repentance, please forgive them.” Just so we don’t miss the impact of Jesus’ statement, his crucifiers were representing all sinners that day. These amazing words of Jesus on the cross are for us. That is the meaning of Romans 5:8, “But God shows his love for us that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us.” While we know that Jesus’ prayer did not procure forgiveness for everyone standing there that day, nor did these words mean that every sinner is automatically and universally declared forgiven, we do know that Jesus was able to turn them, and us, over to his Father to take care of in perfect justice.  Another great example of forgiveness is Stephen in Acts 7:54-60.  As Saul and the Jews were stoning him to death for loving Jesus, he dropped to his knees in the shadow of the cross and said these amazing words, “Lord do not hold this sin against them….”

All of this forgiveness is on the level of what we call judicial forgiveness. Judicial Forgiveness can be defined as forgiving the penalty that we would like to see exacted upon that person because of the sin that they have committed against us.  God commands us to allow him to be the judge and jury relieving us from carrying this burden. This is applicable in all situations including rape, murder, adultery, etc… (There is no shortage of these sins being forgiven in the Bible). Only an omniscient God who can make the perfect punishment fit the crime, can bring perfect justice to sinful situations. Put simply, we are not omniscient, therefore we cannot exact the perfect punishment for the sins that are committed against us.

I believe that this initial forgiveness is between us and God. We are saying to God that we are willing and desirous to forgive them and release the offender into His hands…to the One who knows exactly what should be done and will be done. We hand them over to the supreme court of God’s perfect justice and mercy. This level of forgiveness is for us, not the offender. We realize that though we may not see justice in this life--we’re confident that the offender will not go unpunished if he doesn’t repent and turn to God for mercy (Prov. 23:17-18; Heb. 4:13; 10:31).  If he does repent (made possible only by the blood of Jesus) God will forgive him just as he does us when we do the same (Eph. 1:7; Col. 1:14; 1 John 1:8-9).

Now what if the person never changes? What does God want my response to be?

What if they never ask us for forgiveness? What are we required to do then? Do we pretend everything is ok when we see them? Do we need to be friends, send them a Christmas card, even though they are unrepentant? This is the second level of forgiveness. We’ll answer that in future blogs. 

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