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Tuesday, September 18, 2007

Forgive and Forget

I've been thinking about this topic recently and then read this in Luke (Jesus speaking):
"Be on your guard! If your brother sins, rebuke him; and if he repents, forgive him. And if he sins against you seven times a day, and returns to you seven times, saying, 'I repent,' forgive him." The apostles said to the Lord, "Increase our faith!" (Luke 17:3-5).
"Forgive and forget." We've all heard the formula so many times that we've come to assume that it's the right formula. Funny thing ... no matter how diligently I search, I can't find anything in Scripture that says we are to forgive and forget. Perhaps it comes from Jeremiah:
"They will not teach again, each man his neighbor and each man his brother, saying, 'Know the LORD,' for they will all know Me, from the least of them to the greatest of them," declares the LORD, "for I will forgive their iniquity, and their sin I will remember no more" (Jer. 31:34).
There are two problems with that. First, it is very difficult to speak of God as "forgetting" something, since that would negate His omniscience and, in truth, turn out that we know things He doesn't. Second, it is God speaking, and turning that into a formula for our forgiving others is quite dangerous. He does things we can't, aren't required to do, and never could do.

What is the formula? "If your brother sins, rebuke him; and if he repents, forgive him. And if he sins against you seven times a day, and returns to you seven times, saying, 'I repent,' forgive him." What does it mean to "forgive" in this context? To forgive means to give up a claim on an account. It means to pardon. Now, in real life, a pardon doesn't vanish from the records. It simply absolves the person from paying any penalty.

What about Jeremiah's comment? Doesn't it say God forgets? Well, at first blush that's what it appears to say. But the statement isn't exactly "forget"; it is "not remember" and there is a difference. To remember means to call to mind, to recall, to think about. In older English we might have used it as a verb this way if we met a friend on the road: "Remember me to your wife." It's not that his wife forgot you; it's that you want him to call you to her mind. God says, "I will not call to my mind the sins that I have forgiven." That doesn't require that they no longer reside in memory. It simply means that He's not going to bring it up anymore.

That, in fact, is how forgiveness works. In forgiving people, we absolve them for their error. We, in essence, agree to take the loss. We acknowledge that we were wronged. (So many people think that forgiving is finding excuses for what they did. That's not forgiving; that's excusing.) We agree that what they did was wrong and we agree to absorb the loss. Then we set it aside, not to call it back up. It isn't stored in an account someplace, ready to be flung back in their face when it comes up a second or third or a seventh time. This doesn't require that it be forgotten. It simply requires that it not be recalled.

Forgive and forget, in fact, is somewhat easier than the command Jesus gave His disciples. If you've forgotten a wrong, then forgiving "seven times a day" is no problem; you don't remember the previous events. No, this is much more difficult. You may remember; you just cannot recall. It operates from a position of strength that says, "I have faith that God is providing all I need." It comes from the belief that "you meant it for evil, but God meant it for good" (Gen. 50:20). It is based on the belief that God works all things together for good to those who love God (Rom. 8:28). It is simply a function of love (1 Cor. 13:5) This is why we must cry, as did His disciples, "Lord, increase our faith!"

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