I heard a song once that went, “sometimes I pretend we never met, because it’s harder to forgive than to forget.” Pretty sad, right?   If I were to ask you if you are currently harboring any ill will towards someone in your life right now, what would you say? We have all been mistreated, and we have all mistreated others. So how does the Bible suggest we handle this? Should we just simply “forgive and forget”? Is that what God does when we sin against Him?   Forgiveness can be defined as “stop feeling angry or resentful toward someone for (an offense, flaw, or mistake)” or “cancel (a debt).” Think about how final and clear these definitions are. If a debt is cancelled, the balance is zero. There is no debt. If you “stop” something, it does not happen anymore. To paraphrase Newton’s first law of motion, “if a thing is stopped, it stays stopped unless acted on by an outside force!” We can think about forgiveness two ways: God’s forgiveness of us, and our forgiveness of one another.   To understand what the Bible says about forgiveness, we have to understand what it says about sin. Sin is often described as “falling short,” “missing the mark,” or “committing a trespass.” When we sin, to put it simply, God has a mark against us! We have a debt that must be paid or a grievance that needs to be cleared. The beautiful thing about God’s grace and forgiveness is that He will forgive us!   1 John 1 speaks clearly about how God views sin, but also what He has done about it:   “…if we walk in the light, as he is in the light, we have fellowship with one another, and the blood of Jesus his Son cleanses us from all sin. If we say we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us. If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness. If we say we have not sinned, we make him a liar, and his word is not in us.” ( vss. 7-10 )   Here, we learn several things: first, all have sinned (see also Romans 3:23 ). Second, it is the blood of Jesus that cleanses us. In this way, we learn that we cannot wash away our own sins. God is the judge of our righteousness, meaning the debt is to Him. Just like financial debt, we cannot cancel it ourselves. Third, while we cannot declare ourselves righteous, there is something we can (and should) do in order for our sins to be forgiven: confess! While God already knows that we have sinned the moment it happens, He wants us to confess our wrongdoings to Him, and thankfully, we can rest assured that “He is faithful and just to forgive us.”   We get more insight into what God’s forgiveness looks like in passages like Hebrews 8:12 , (“For I will be merciful toward their iniquities, and I will remember their sins no more”) and Isaiah 43:25 (“I am He who blots out your transgressions for my own sake, and I will not remember your sins”). Now, it can be easy be confused by the idea that a sovereign, omnipotent God can “forget” something, but this is not as if our misdeeds just slip His mind sometimes. The idea of forgetting I think is meant to show the completeness of His forgiveness. If something is forgotten, it is simply not there! God is so just and exacting in His measurements of righteousness, that if He is going to declare us “forgiven,” He is going to forgive us completely, as if He has forgotten the sin ever happened.   All this brings us to our sins against one another. We desperately want forgiveness when we sin against God, and we do not like to offend or hurt others. I do not know about you, but when I know I have done something wrong against someone, I get all panicked until I know I have made it right. However, admittedly, sometimes when the roles are reversed, I am not as eager to forgive as I am to seek forgiveness. We cannot blot out memories of wrongs done. Some sins against us personally hurt very badly, and may cause major chaos and drama in our lives. Even “smaller” slights can completely change the way we view certain people and tempt us to hold on to those things for years. So what are we to do?   Jesus says to His disciples, “For if you forgive others their trespasses, your heavenly Father will also forgive you, but if you do not forgive others their trespasses, neither will your Father forgive your trespasses” ( Matthew 6:14-15 ). People can hurt us in a multitude of ways, and hurt us badly! But at the end of the day, we serve a God that is gracious, merciful, and forgiving. When He forgives, He forgives completely. When I find myself “remembering” past grievances I thought I had forgiven others for, I remember the forgiveness of sins I have by the grace of God through baptism. I remember His faithfulness and justice in forgiving His people, and that helps put any wrongs that I have a hard time forgiving into perspective.   Somethings we may not be able to forget, but we are called to forgive.

How would you respond if someone called you Satan?   That would be quite a shock, right? Did you know that at one point Jesus called His apostle Peter Satan?   This may sound like Jesus lost His temper or misspoke, but He did not! Why would He say such a thing? To understand this, we need to go back to the very beginning of Scripture, to the garden of Eden. Consider Genesis 3: 1-5 :   “Now the serpent was more crafty than any other beast of the field that the LORD God had made. He said to the woman, ‘Did God actually say, “You shall not eat of any tree in the garden”?’ And the woman said to the serpent, ‘We may eat of the fruit of the trees in the garden, but God said, “You shall not eat of the fruit of the tree that is in the midst of the garden, neither shall you touch it, lest you die.”’ But the serpent said to the woman, ‘You will not surely die. For God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.’”   At his core, Satan’s main purpose is falsehood, chaos, and rebellion. If God says something is one way, the Devil will say it is another. If God says you should go right, Satan will do everything he can to make you go left. If God says something will kill you, Satan will make you think it will enlighten you. The thing about Satan though, is that while circumstances and world landscape may have changed, his tactics have not. There are so many sins in modern times that people think may them enlightened or brighter than those around them in one way or another, but God has always made it clear: if we do something He says not to do, we WILL surely die! Satan’s game in Genesis 3 is to make the fruit look “good,” “delightful,” and “desirable,” to Eve, by outright lying about what God had told her. Unfortunately, as we well know, he succeeded; she ate, her husband ate, they were expelled from Eden, and the rest, as they say is history.   Which brings us to the New Testament. Again, all throughout the ages, Satan’s tactic of sowing doubt, sorrow, and lies where God has planted surety, hope, and truth has not changed. When Jesus comes to earth and begins His ministry, Satan not only attacks Jesus directly (Matthew 4:1-11 ), but does what he can to get at the apostles as well. Luke 22:3 and John 13:27 for example, both describe the moment Judas decided to betray Jesus as “Satan entering into him.” Other than the example of Judas’ betrayal though, one of the clearest moments we see Satan’s influence on Jesus’ inner circle is in Matthew 16:21-23 , which says:   “From that time Jesus began to show his disciples that he must go to Jerusalem and suffer many things from the elders and chief priests and scribes, and be killed, and on the third day be raised. And Peter took him aside and began to rebuke him, saying, ‘Far be it from you, Lord! This shall never happen to you.’ But he turned and said to Peter, ‘Get behind me, Satan! You are a hindrance to me. For you are not setting your mind on the things of God, but on the things of man.’” (See also Mark 8:31-33 )   Now, returning to our original question: why does Jesus call Peter Satan? Is that language too strong? I do not think so. Do you notice what Peter is doing here?   Jesus said multiple times that He was going to die. As His ministry continued, in fact, He was even clearer about what was going to happen, even indicating above that it would be the Jewish leadership that was primarily responsible for having Him killed. Mark 8:32 even tells us that “He said this plainly.” Jesus often used parables or metaphors to teach, but His prediction of His death was a prediction, not an analogy. But how does Peter respond? Similar to Satan in the garden, saying, “you will not surely die.” God said that if Adam and Eve ate the fruit, they would die, and they did regardless of how Satan tried to twist what God had said. With Peter and Jesus, what Peter lost sight of in that moment, was that difficult as it may be, if Jesus said He was going to die, then He in fact was going to die, no matter how upset Peter got, no matter how much he tried to rebuke Jesus for saying such a thing. Jesus had to come to earth to die for our sins, and not even Satan himself would stand in the way of Jesus accomplishing His Father’s will.   Jesus’ summation of Peter’s shortsightedness is that his mind was set on earthly things, not the things of God. The “things of man,” are pride, fear, anger, revenge, and self-preservation. The things of God are humility, sacrifice, service, and love. When we look at our lives and how we can be tempted to react when Scripture says something difficult, counter-cultural, or counter-intuitive, we must remember Peter and Jesus’ interaction here. As Christian’s, we take the route of sacrifice. We pick up our cross and follow Him, without letting anyone or anything stand in our way.   When trials, temptations, and bad influences cloud our vision of the cross, we have to recognize where those obstacles come from and say what our Lord said: “Get behind me Satan!”   And then keep moving forward. Onward and upward.

You sit down across the table from someone you just met. You just happened to strike up a conversation in a public setting and decide to sit down together to talk some more. After just a couple of minutes, the conversation takes a turn, and this person starts telling you your own life story! Imagine they make a comment about your past, so specific that you are stunned because there is no way this stranger could have known that. In fact, it is something that very few people know about you, and you do not talk about often because it is embarrassing. How do they know? Why do they bring this up? What could all this mean?   Two thousand years ago, just outside of a town called Sychar in the region of Samaria, there was a woman, whose name we are not told, who had an experience quite similar to the one mentioned above when she met Jesus at a well. First, it is important to note the social dynamics at play between these two people. Jews and Samaritans had great social tension between them that went back centuries. They did not like each other at all. Jews especially viewed Samaritans with intense hatred, and would go to great lengths not to have to travel through Samaria. As John puts it in John 4:9 , “Jews have no dealings with Samaritans.”  Despite this, Jesus takes His apostles through Samaria, sits down at a well to rest, and sends His apostles into town to buy food (4:6-7). The woman quickly acknowledges the unexpectedness and abnormality of Jesus addressing her at all, much less striking up a conversation with her, when she says, “How is it, that you, a Jew, ask for a drink from me, a woman of Samaria?” ( 4:9) . Jesus answers by referring to “the gift of God,” and “living water,” and His comments seem to confuse the woman at first, but over time, she becomes convinced that He is the Christ. Her main reason for believing He is who He claims to be? As she puts it, “He told me all that I ever did.”   What happened was, after speaking to the woman about eternal life, Jesus asked her to go get her husband and come back to Him to talk some more. She had not mentioned this ahead of time, but He knew (as the Omniscient God Incarnate) that she had in fact been married five times and was currently living in a sinful relationship with a man she was not married to. We are not told why she had been married five times or what the exact situation is with the man she is currently with is, but we can imagine that her past would have been a source of great shame and heartache for her. Imagine the awkwardness, sadness, bitterness, and pain that would come from five failed marriages. Then add to it the guilt associated with her current relationship. Beyond all of that, though, her painful past is being trudged up all of a sudden by a man who from her perspective, does not know her at all! The truth, though, is that He knew her before she was born! What a powerful thought!   We all react different ways to feeling guilty. I would imagine for many of us, if our past sins were brought up unexpectedly in a conversation with a stranger, we might take offense to that and not want to keep talking, or just be so embarrassed and ashamed that we look for an escape. However, as this woman talks with Jesus, she is appropriately convicted of her sin, and His talk of eternal life and God’s gift to mankind starts to make sense. He was here to save people from their sins, not by sweeping them under the rug, but by addressing them head-on and overcoming them with His own blood! She certainly did not understand all that that meant just from their interaction at the well, but the ball was rolling. All because He told her all that she ever did.   As we look at the skeletons in our closets and the shameful parts of our pasts that only God Himself fully sees and comprehends, may we first be convicted of the high price that sin has, but also find overwhelming comfort in the fact that Jesus died for us, “while we were yet sinners” ( Romans 5:8, 6:23 ).   It is only when we look at Jesus’ description, price, and payment for our sin that we can fully acknowledge that He is “indeed the Savior of the world” ( John 4:45 ).

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