Forgiveness: among the best of words uttered in the human languages! In English, we have words like love and peace, but none quite like the word forgiveness. So much could be said concerning this word, but we will not cover all that could be written.
Some time ago, I came across an old news story about a family of five. Detailed within this news story were an angry daughter and a forgiving father. Being concerned and loving parents of a sixteen-year-old teenager, the parents thought it was best if their daughter stopped dating her boyfriend, who was nineteen at the time. They thought he was a bad influence on their daughter. Upon telling their daughter this, the teenager became outraged. She did not want to stop seeing this boy, so she began to concoct a plan to get rid of troublesome parents, and what she did was shocking! Two days after they told her to stop dating her boyfriend, she planned with her boyfriend and friends to murder her two younger brothers and both parents. Was she successful? Almost! They managed to shoot all the family, leaving all but the father dead. And the father, five bullet wounds later, would do something I deemed very shocking!
Instead of harboring ill will, bitterness, resentment, and hatred in his heart toward his daughter, who destroyed all that he lived for, the father decided it best to forgive her. How is this possible? For the average man or woman, holding on to these emotions when someone has wronged them would seem right and valid! But not so for God.
When you think about it, God is like the father who forgave the daughter. For we all have sinned and come short of the glory of God (Romans 3:23; 1 John 1:8,10). And it is because of our sins that Jesus had to die on the cross (Isa.53:5). That is, if we were going to have a relationship with the Father. See that the Father was/is willing to forgive (remove our sins and our guilt from sinning [1 Peter 3:21; Acts 2:38]) us our sins, and since that is the case, then as brethren seeking to be like the Father and the son we must forgive one another (Matthew 18). We must become like little children who stand ready to forgive one another. Of course, this forgiveness towards one another is not the removal of sin, for only God can do such, but rather, it is the release of any hard feelings or ill will towards the one who has wronged you. Yes, there will be times when people will wrong you! Yes, it may be hard to forgive, but we must if we are to receive such from the Father.