Forgiveness

A Scriptural study on forgiveness could take us deeply into the Bible and last for days if not weeks or months. Not only can we strictly study forgiveness but we can get into all the places where forgiveness is implied. That is beyond the scope of what I hope to cover in this blog post.

My aim here is simply to cover forgiveness in a way I’d never thought of until I heard someone say something that made me stop in my tracks, mentally anyway.

The word forgiveness is mentioned in the New International Version of the Bible 14 times, all but one of those in the New Testament. The word forgive is mentioned 42 times in the Old Testament and 33 times in the New Testament. If we look up forgiven we see it 17 times in the Old Testament and 28 times in the New Testament. And if we add in forgiving we find it 6 times in the Old Testament, once in the New Testament. That means the word forgive, in some form, is mentioned in the NIV version of the Bible 141 times.

That’s a lot of forgiveness.

In Matthew 6:12 the Lord’s prayer tells us…

and forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors.

We are to forgive. I think that may be one of the easily understood rules of Scripture. Even those that are barely familiar with the Scriptures seem to know that forgiveness is required.

For so long I simply thought forgiveness was something we did when someone wronged us. I have said many times that I don’t need for forgive someone for something because they didn’t do it to me.

But then I heard forgiveness put in a different way. But before I can get into that I need to back up just a little and explain something else.

People are born into sin. If you’ve been reading my blog very long you’ve seen me comment on that before. We are all, by nature, sinful. We commit sin. We live in sin. The regenerate can better control sin and we are grieved by sin.

It grieves us to sin against our Lord.

It grieves us to know we hurt Him.

That doesn’t stop us from sinning but it does keep us in line. The unregenerate aren’t grieved by their sins. They don’t have that line. They live in sin, more often than not unable to even see that what they are doing is wrong much less that it’s sin. Professing ‘Christians’ will sometimes label something as sin but will usually miss a good part of what sin truly is.

The unregenerate, whether they profess to know Christ or not, go on living in sin. They are slaves to that sin. Each person has something that rules their lives and they live with whatever it is.

I used to see all these people as making bad choices. Drug addicts are simply people that made choices that got them addicted and they keep making bad choices. Alcoholics…I saw the same way. Liars are to be tolerated. And so on and so on.

I saw them as people making bad choices. Until the day it was pointed out to me that they are on the path the Lord placed them on. That they are slaves to their sins because the Lord has given them over to it. And that I need to not only be grateful that I’m not on that path but that I need to remember that I’m on the path I’m on only by the grace of God. And that these people were placed on that path. Some of them live in ecstasy, some in misery but they are all there because the Lord put them on that path.

I still struggle with this. I struggle with my tendency to see people as making bad choices, as choosing this or choosing that. I have a hard time feeling compassion for someone that tells me they can’t get their life together when I know they go out partying. I have a hard time feeling compassion for someone that says they have no money when they admit to smoking cigarettes. We all have our priorities…or so my human minds tend to think. And I forget that they were placed on their path just as I was placed on mine.

And that’s where forgiveness becomes something I never thought it was. It goes deeper. It’s not just looking at someone that has wronged me and forgiving them for doing so. It’s looking at strangers and knowing that their path is what it is not by their choosing but by the Lord’s. That they are on that path, quite possibly so that I can be on mine.

What if God, desiring to show his wrath and to make known his power, has endured with much patience vessels of wrath prepared for destruction, ²³ in order to make known the riches of his glory for vessels of mercy, which he has prepared beforehand for glory—Romans 9:22-23

It seems a lot of my blog posts are going back to those verses in Romans 9 here lately. But they make such a powerful statement. And explain so much.

If God has prepared people that he endures with much patience so that he can make His glory known to me. Then I must somehow find it in myself to remember that when my human nature wants to say…you chose to live that way.

I must forgive them whether they have directly wronged me or not. I must remember that they were placed on their path just as I was placed on mine.