Forgiveness

In our day and age retaliation seems to be the watch word. We learn it at a very young age, when someone on the playground shoves us. The normal and instinctive reaction is a hard push back. In this kind of a retaliatory world there comes a call to forgive.

But what is forgiveness? Is it forgetting the event and having it erased from memory? I don't think so because then you run the risk of being taken for granted again and again in a similar fashion and you'll never see it coming each time.

Is it just not reacting and allowing the situation to blow over? Again I do not think so because there are only so many such occurrences that a man can allow to blow over before he boils over.

So what is forgiveness? One of the best definitions I heard, stated that forgiveness was the giving up of your right to be angry and retaliate. It made sense, because when someone hurts me it automatically gives me a one up position where i now seem to have a right to get even or settle the score. Forgiveness would be to give up not just the right, but to give up even the attitude that tells you that you have that right to get even.

This being said, I could easily be called a very forgiving man when I don't retaliate and rather find myself in my room praying for people who hurt me in the past. Asking God to forgive them because they honestly did not know what they were doing at the time. But Jesus calls us to do more than that. He calls us to forgive like He did. It takes only a supernatural kind of forgiveness to be able to not just pray "Father forgive them for they knew not what they DID", rather to be able to pray "Father forgive them for they KNOW not what they are DOING."

Jesus' forgiveness overflows even in the midst of the circumstance where He is being hurt. What kind of forgiveness is this? Its hard to fathom and yet it is this forgiveness that keeps us day to day and allow us to stand in a the presence of a holy God.