RETHINKING FORGIVENESS
Learning to View Offenders Like Jesus Does
“Be kind to one another, compassionate,
forgiving each other, just as God in Christ also has forgiven you.”
Ephesians 4:32
I love the fact that the Bible is alive, that you can know a passage well and still continually learn deep truths from it. That happened to me recently with Isaiah 55. I was reading Gentle and Lowly: The Heart of Christ for Sinners and Sufferers by Dane Ortlund. In this intriguing book, the author helps us consider more deeply what Scripture reveals to us about Jesus’ heart, who really is at His core the Son of God, based on what Jesus said about Himself in Matthew 11:28-30;
“Come to Me, all who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest. Take My yoke upon you and learn from Me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For My yoke is comfortable, and My burden is light.”
Ortlund focuses on Jesus’ declaration “I am gentle and humble (lowly) in heart” as the main thesis and then, using a variety of Biblical texts and classic theological writers, helps us see Jesus in a new light. The focus in chapter 17 is on Isaiah 55:8-9; “For My thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways My ways,” declares the Lord. For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are My ways higher than your ways and My thoughts than your thoughts.”
Isaiah 55:8 is often cited when unexpected things happen in ways we cannot understand. When something good comes out of a bad situation or God uses us in a way that is unexplainable, someone will say, “His ways are not my ways…” Yet while this mindset is true - God indeed does work in mysterious ways - God’s providence and wisdom are not the focus of the context of Isaiah 55. His heart toward wayward children is! Look what leads up to verse 8 and following;
“Seek the Lord while He may be found; Call upon Him while He is near. Let the wicked abandon his way, and the unrighteous person his thoughts; and let him return to the Lord, and He will have compassion on him, and to our God, for He will abundantly pardon.” Isaiah 55:6-8
Isaiah was being used by God to call His people back to Him. He begins the chapter by declaring to the hungry and the destitute that God’s door is open and His table is filled. They are welcome. God is saying in essence to them (my paraphrase), “I’m here and I want you here! If you have blown it and sinned, then turn to Me; return to Me. My compassionate heart has already decided to forgive you because I think and act differently than you do.”
The heart of God is dramatically different than the fallen human heart. Ortlund elaborates, “The natural flow of the fallen heart is toward reciprocity, tit-for-tat payback, equanimity, balancing the scales. We are far more intractably law-ish than we realize. There is something healthy and glorious buried in that impulse, of course – made in God’s own image, we desire order and fairness rather than chaos. But that impulse, like every part of us, has been disease by the ruinous fall into sin. Our capacity to apprehend the heart of God is going to melt down.”
We would find it easier to forgive if we viewed people and their sins like Jesus does.
Jesus never let the offense determine whether or not He forgave someone! Why? Because he loves people more than He hates their sin so much that He died and rose from the dead to separate people from their sin. Jesus looks past our failures and sees someone He loves who needs deliverance. He sees the bigger picture.
Yet our mindset often stays on the little picture… ourselves. We place a higher value on how the other persons’ action (or inaction) impacts us than the person who hurt us. Our wounds become our focus, not the intrinsic value of the one who wounded us. We inextricably identify the person by their sin, and the offended with the offense. When we do that, we remove hope from the situation and compassion becomes impossible. Why? Because if we identify a person with their sin, in our minds, we will never see them as able to overcome their sin pattern. Yet when we choose to see them from Heaven’s higher perspective, through the mind of Christ, (c.f. 1 Corinthians 2:16 ) we will look past the sinful behavior and see a person trapped in that sin. If we look past the sin to the person trapped in that sin, we can see our Heavenly Father’s heart Who created them and loves them with an everlasting love which motivated Him to send His Son to pay for their sin in order to deliver them from their sin.
God’s compassion led Him to provide a way to forgive them.
His decision to forgive was made before we repent. “… and let him return to the Lord, and He WILL have compassion on him, and to our God, for He WILL abundantly pardon.” He chose to pre-forgive and provided the ultimate payment for our sin. When we really begin to grasp the depth of God’s love for us and the sacrifice of Jesus that paid for our sin and theirs, when we think like He thinks, we will forgive like He forgives.
The blood of Jesus cover’s all sin, including the ones that wound me!
