The Forgiveness Ladder (Forgiveness IX)

Forgiveness is a steep climb. There is a ladder in the work of forgiveness: forgiveness of others, forgiveness of self, and forgiveness of God. Each level has its own challenge and trial. 

Forgiveness of others is the bulk of the work, as outlined above. Life stings, and we all have people and pains that we need to address and to forgive.

On the next rung, however, we all discover that to come fully into our adoption in God, we need to forgive ourselves. I hesitate to say “forgive yourself,” because the Scripture never talks about forgiving our own selves. But it does talk about refusing to judge ourselves, and this is quite close to what I mean by forgiving ourselves.[1] We must refuse to hold our weakness, our limitations, our humanity, our wounds, and even our failures in contempt. Not because we like them but because we are committed to letting God receive us. Letting God receive us is perhaps the core principle of spiritual life in Jesus. You cannot fully come to God if you are holding yourself in self-hatred and self-contempt. So there is a movement and posture in prayer that sounds like this: “I rejoice in my weakness; how can You be so good as to receive me when I’m so unsorted?”

But you may also discover that it’s not just someone else you need to forgive, or your own self, but something bigger. There may be disappointments that have so rocked your life that the only thing to blame is reality itself. The universe. And behind that, God. The Scripture makes one thing abundantly clear: God can take it.[2]

When I was younger, I worked for a summer in the mountains of North Carolina. It was a stunningly beautiful place in which to be miserably depressed. And I was. One night, I took a walk deep into the woods. I was so frustrated with how down I was and so angry beneath the depression, and my anger finally erupted. I grabbed a huge stick and started hitting an oak tree with it, as hard as I could. If I could watch a video of it now, no doubt it would be almost comical, but at the time it wasn’t funny at all. I was raging, and I blamed God. Then I cursed him. Literally.

The anger coming out was a good thing; anger needs to find its way out. So does lament, as the Scripture repeatedly makes clear. But the cursing? Maybe not so much. Yet God did not smite me. In fact, two months later, a friend was praying for me and got a quizzical look on her face. I could tell she felt embarrassed, but she asked me, “Brandon… did you curse God?”[3] “Yes, I did,” I said, taken aback. Another wonderfully bizarre example of God’s Spirit leading me back onto the path. She led me through a prayer of repentance, not for the anger but for hanging it on God and cursing Him. 

I learned something then: not only wasn’t God not to blame, but He can take all of the good, bad, and ugly that lives within me. He can take my lament and my sorrow. In fact, He is with me in it. That is what we will discover when we forgive: that God the All-Vulnerable has already been suffering with us. He is not a distant deity watching indifferently from afar. He has been in the dirt with you, suffering with you the whole time.[4]

If we only relate to God as the All-Powerful, we are going to be very confused by life, and probably very angry. It’s only when you discover that God is also the All-Vulnerable that the spiritual journey goes from black-and-white into color. In many ways, the entire goal of spiritual life is to discover that God is not just transcendent (out there) but immanent (right here). We can overemphasize either reality and get out of balance, but in this Both-And—God All-Powerful, God All- Vulnerable—we find a posture of both awestruck wonder and heartfelt intimacy before God, bound together by worship and love. When we come to know God the immanent, the All-Vulnerable, we discover that God was crucified long before Jesus hung on a tree. God has made Himself vulnerable to suffer with us, to be with us, long before we knew it. Until we see and experience this reality, we continually hit roadblocks in our own hearts, unable to deeply connect with the Divine. On the other hand, when life strips us (as it inevitably will), we can, like Jesus, experience the consolation that comes from being comforted by God—what Paul called “the fellowship of his suffering.”[5] Forgiveness, too, will lead us into this fellowship. It is a stripping away of outer self so that our inmost and truest self can be held by God. 

For all of these readings in one place, order my book 'Learning to Live and Love Like Jesus.'

[1] See I Corinthians 4:3. “Refusing to judge ourselves” has nothing to do with excusing or ignoring bad behavior. Obviously, as we discussed in ‘Chapter 6: Confession and Repentance,’ there is no freedom for us if we don’t take responsibility for our actions and label good “good” and bad “bad.” Rather, refusing to judge is about a posture of remaining open and not declaring “case closed,” because God Himself remains open. We must remain open to the endless possibilities available in God. Further, the Scripture invites us out of thinking that we are powerful enough to transform our own selves on our own terms, apart from God, which belief often leads to an exacting self-contempt and self-hatred. Refusing to judge ourselves simply means doing our best while embracing our limits, confessing that we aren’t God and that we can’t get everything right, learning to laugh at ourselves, and, when we miss it, going again with proper remorse but without undue lament (another both-and), knowing that it’s God who maintains our relationships with Him and not the other way around. 

[2] Remember that a large portion of Scripture is people wrestling with God’s seeming absence or with their own confusion about God. Spend some time in the Psalms, in Job, in Lamentations, for starters. Think of Jesus’ own prayer in Matthew 27:46: “God, why have you abandoned me?” The Scripture commissions us to honestly voice and grieve our pain, because this—rather than withholding it—is actually a sign of trusting God and moving toward Him. There is nothing spiritual about refusing to lament and grieve. 

[3] A clear example of what the Scripture calls “a word of knowledge.” See 1 Corinthians 12:8.

[4] A reality the Prophet Isaiah points us to: “In all [His people’s] suffering He, too, suffered.” (Isaiah 63:9)

[5] Philippians 3:10.