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Luke 17:3-4

(3) Take heed to yourselves. If your brother sins against you, rebuke him; and if he repents, forgive him. (4) And if he sins against you seven times in a day, and seven times in a day returns to you, saying, 'I repent,' you shall forgive him."
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Do these verses mean that we must forgive only if the one who sinned against us comes to us and repents? If so, we do not have to forgive anyone until he admits his sin and specifically asks for forgiveness. Yet, Jesus does not say only if. Instead, He says, "If someone comes to you and repents, it is your obligation to forgive." In other words, if someone asks forgiveness, we dare not say, "I don't know if I will ever be able to forgive you"—because the payment for our own sins hangs in the balance! In these verses, He does not mention what to do if your brother does not say, "I repent." Yet the Bible is full of injunctions to forgive and examples of forgiveness, and none of them stipulates that we wait for the sinner to come to us and repent before we forgive.

In Mark 11:25-26, Jesus says, "Whenever you stand praying, if you have anything against anyone, forgive him,that your Father in heaven may also forgive you your trespasses" (emphasis ours throughout). There is no mention of stopping your prayer to see if an offender is ready to repent. He simply says to overlook those offenseswhen they come to mind. Then He warns again that if we do not forgive, neither will the Father forgive what He has against us.

Paul writes in Ephesians 4:32, "And be kind to one another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another, even as God in Christ forgave you." Colossians 3:13 contains similar instruction: ". . . bearing with one another, and forgiving one another, if anyone has a complaint against another; even as Christ forgave you, so you also must do." Our human nature, carnal as it is, might argue that, since we have to forgive asor like Christ did, and that before He forgave us, we had to repent, then we need not forgive another until he repents.

However, that view entirely misunderstands our standing before God. When we first sinned, we instantly racked up a debt that only a life of equal or greater value could pay. Since we were not struck dead on the spot, it follows that God was already choosing to overlook the offense—though not in an eternal sense. God did a measure of overlooking just in choosing to call us because our sins had alreadycreated an impassable gulf.

Yet, He did something to bridge that massive gap, even before we repented and formally came under the blood of Christ. He was already exercising a measure of forgiveness. If He were not, we would have been blotted out. Our debt was not paid in full then, but it was being overlooked nonetheless. Since that is how Jesus worked with us, we, too, can overlook the sins—debts—against us even beforesomeone says, "I repent."

We see this same approach in Jesus' dealing with people in the gospels. Even without their asking for forgiveness, He tells them their sins are forgiven. There is also His personal example when, as His lifeblood was draining away, He prayed and said, "Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they do." His torturers and those calling for His death certainly had no thoughts of repentance. Even so, Jesus did not wait for them to come around before asking the Father to overlook the most awful offenses in history. If that is the example He set, then neither should we wait for someone to repent before we forgive.

— David C. Grabbe

To learn more, see:
Sins in the Balance (Part Two)