The issue of forgiveness has long been pickled in lies.
Western Christians struggle against the unconscious Anglo-Saxon world view, the dreary world of Beowulf. All the attempts to brighten things with affirmations and positive celebrations still reflects the merriment of inebriation, since that is the only way Anglo-Saxons knew to be lighthearted. The Anglo-Saxon version of God was brooding and dark, like some moody and tired old warrior. You might be able to amuse Him, but He remains essentially a grouch. Even when the images have faded, the underlying assumptions about reality persist. Anyone familiar with studies in comparative civilizations will recognize it immediately.
So it’s no surprise that most Western Christians don’t have a full grasp of the what Bible says about forgiveness. Most of them assume without question that it must include a measure of emotion, that you haven’t forgiven if you don’t restore the full range of warmth and affection emotionally. This is simply not true, and it’s a very big barrier to Christian growth. It creates a false piety by necessity, in which at an early age Christians are taught to submerge certain feelings that are not permitted because they are somehow sinful, despite being entirely right and natural in God’s eyes. It only complicates things when the equally flawed religious liberalism twists matters in yet another flavor of the same mythology.
In the first place, sin is fundamentally arguing with God. It won’t matter where the argument comes from; the issue is you don’t accept revelation. Something inside of you raises competing demands to play God. All sin is first and foremost an affront to God in His majesty as Creator. It’s personal. Though your sin may be directed against one or more fellow humans, it remains primarily an affront to God as Maker of those humans. He is the only one with standing to sue for the loss. He is the one with whom all moral accounts must first be settled.
This business of Satan, somehow imagined as an equal opposing force, is utterly anti-biblical. Satan serves God. He was demoted from some better position to that of Divine Lictor and Jailer. It helps if you imagine that Satan is incensed at what he considers an unjust demotion, but his spite is aimed at us. Satan will slake his embarrassment on us. When you refuse to stand in God’s favor, you find yourself under the authority of Satan. Satan cannot do anything God doesn’t allow; God never allows Satan to tempt you with things God didn’t make you capable of bearing. Your problem — my problem — is that we keep drifting away from the safety zone and into Satan’s clutches.
The second issue is that sin is best understood as taking something, causing a loss, creating a debt. Injustice against God’s moral character places you in debt to God, a form of slavery. Satan is God’s collection agency. You are placing chains upon your moral existence in this earth. Using the term “spiritual” is simply inappropriate because Western Christians insist on mixing the Two Realms. Scripture addresses it primarily as a hindrance to your mission here below and a failure to shed the chains and weights of unsettled debts. Debt is slavery; it places upon you obligations to someone who may not have your best interests at heart.
Inasmuch as someone’s sin affects you, they owe you. There is a moral balance sheet. They need to clean up the mess they made in your life. Your job is to take the issue to God and ask for terms of settlement: What does He regard as a just settlement of the issue? While it may not be possible for you to address the debtor directly, in your own mind you need to grasp the moral terms of release (only vaguely connected to actual monetary value in the mundane sense). Making amends does not require a formal apology with the implied groveling as we view it in our Western minds, but more properly in Eastern terms where a debt indicates a very confined and limited liability. (Westerners are oblivious to the biblical concept of roles and limited dominion.)
At some point, carrying that load of debt owed to you will weigh on you, too. So you decide to write it off. That’s the higher meaning of Jubilee years, though carrying a grudge for fifty years is a bit much, showing that the moral implications are not limited to a literal meaning. There are thousands of Jubilee moments in your life when debts have to be expunged from your moral reckoning and you move on.
Thus, forgiving someone has nothing to do with feelings. You aren’t required to “forget” in the Western moral reckoning, with all the hugs and kisses. You are allowed to remember that this person should not be trusted again; you do this because you already know you can’t trust yourself for very much. Distrust is not a sin and has no bearing on this issue. Forgiveness is not pretending it never happened; that’s an Anglo-Saxon myth. The imagery in Scripture of how God handles our sin is stated in Ancient Near Eastern terms, and you shouldn’t read an alien mythology back into it. It’s recognizing you couldn’t pay what you owe God, so it shouldn’t surprise you that human weakness prevents them repaying what they owe you.
Thus, you should learn to forgive yourself on the same terms. All those fine schools of psychology are just models of human complexity that allow us to address the few things within our reach. The reality is too complex; it’s like the difference between real spacecraft and your cheap paper-n-plastic model rocket. There is enough similarity that we can learn something useful. In some ways, we humans act as if there are several persons within our heads. Recognizing conflicting demands inside your soul is perfectly normal. You should hardly be surprised to discover one part of you holds a grudge against some other part. Declare a psychic Jubilee on yourself and silence the unreasonable demands when you discover false debts internally.
By now, perhaps you realize the single greatest problem here is the vast burden of our Western Christian mythology. It boggles the mind how often you can encounter a vociferous assertion that God must be shaped in our minds under the world view of Beowulf with a mixture of Greco-Roman folly, as well. There remains a vast archive of Christian literature still held as authoritative today that mistakenly asserts the dire necessity of clinging to this foul stew of Western mythology. This raises a false view of God to the point it become idolatry, a false god in itself. I realize what a burdensome task it is to wade through all the competing approaches you might find in Ancient Near Eastern literature, both common and obscure. That does not excuse the foolish insistence on choosing some other falsehood simply because it’s a different flavor. It is well within the reach of ordinary human scholarship to recognize the unique Eastern approach in Scripture, without fouling it up by splashing Western mythology all over it.
We stand today inheritors of an ocean of intellectual and moral sewage. We are stuck with a mainstream Western Christianity that is loaded with nonsense. It’s bad enough every individual carries their own personal mixed mythologies, but we suffer under leadership that can be downright oppressive and vicious in defending the subtle lies of culture as the only way God permits us to think.
Beowulf is not Scripture.
