Forgive God?

I recall the first time I heard someone talk of forgiving God. I was repulsed. Forgiving presupposes wrongdoing and thus a need for forgiveness—and I was convinced that God did not need mine. The Scriptures clearly teach the sinlessness of God. Jesus, himself, said, “Your heavenly Father is perfect” (Matt. 5:48, NIV).

Still, the idea nagged me. Hadn’t I found God “guilty” of divine lapses leading to disappointments and tragedies in my own life.

To be sure, forgiveness is totally against human nature. We are determined to get revenge, get even, hold a grudge, or quickly condemn. But God encourages, indeed requires, us to forgive. “Be kind and compassionate to one another, forgiving each other, just as in Christ God forgave you” (Eph. 4:32, NIV).

Moreover, he calls upon us to forget. “I will forgive their wickedness and will remember their sins no more,” God says about us (Jer. 31:34, NIV). If we say, “I forgive you, but I will not forget what you have done,” then we have not truly forgiven. God does not do business that way, and neither can we.

Our forgiveness, then, can be like God’s. It is an evidence that we are made in his image, and do certain breathless wonders that could come only from the mind and heart of God. Yet our forgiveness is not God’s, for he adds a dimension to forgiveness we cannot add—the cleansing of the one forgiven. We can erase our judgment against another, but we cannot cleanse that person’s sin.

Rather, forgiveness cleanses us. It permits us to erase from our memory something that eats away at us from within. It may be sin committed against us, or merely sin perceived—something that is perpetrated against us only in a suspicious corner of our mind.

And this is where we get into trouble. Perceived wrongs against us are as pernicious in our minds as the real thing. We even hatch perceptions of God doing evil against us. Which of us has not had that happen when a loved one dies, a crippling disease strikes, a marriage fails, a child rebels, or an economic hardship hits? We begin to ask why God did it—or at least ask why God did not keep it from happening. “If God really loves me,” we argue, “why did he let that happen?”

Our instinct in such circumstances is to summon God before the court of our personal judgment. We condemn him, judge him guilty for what we think he has done, and even imagine that by doing so we are punishing him.

God is innocent, but in our minds he is guilty. A wall of separation appears, built by our perceptions. Poison spreads in our minds and hearts as we judge God and hold him accountable. Such a foolish court scene, of course, does not change God or punish him, but it brings a seductively corrupting presence upon us and ultimately causes our relationship with God to fall apart.

Now here is where I believe we should “forgive” God—not for what he has done (for he has done nothing wrong), but for what we perceive he has or has not done. In other words, we must erase from our minds the grudge, or judgment, or whatever we would call it against our heavenly Father.

This forgiveness is not for God’s benefit, but for ours. It does not cleanse a perfect God, or absolve him of something wrong, for he can do no wrong. But by “forgiving” God we cleanse ourselves, for we cleanse the memory banks of our minds and hearts of something that should not be there.

Henry Ward Beecher once said, “A forgiveness ought to be like a cancelled note, torn in two and burned up, so that it never can be shown against the man.” If any of us has something against God, a grudge or judgment of any kind, it would be well to do the same—tear up the canceled note, or erase the memory banks of our minds, and hold it against God no more.

God is not cleansed, but we are!

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