Have you ever tried to forgive someone who is not sorry? Someone who won’t even acknowledge that anything happened, let alone anything untoward perpetrated by themselves?

I did it once with an ex-friend who had stabbed me in the back and then tried to come waltzing back into my life two years later like nothing has happened. I confronted her about her behaviour towards me and asked why she thought I should trust her. Rather than apologising, she scoffed and claimed that I should have gotten over it by then and that I needed to just drop it because she was clearly the bigger person for letting it go. I said no, and in response she raged out and told me to never contact her again. A few weeks later, I decided that I didn’t want her to think that she had affected me as deeply as she had with her painful betrayal, so I sent one last message: “I have decided to forgive you” it said. Thankfully, I never heard back from her, but I think that’s because she was probably more offended by being forgiven that she was by being held accountable.

Have you noticed that society is often offended by the idea that God forgives them?

“Why do I need forgiveness? I’m a good person!”

(most people)

Have you also noticed that forgiving someone who isn’t sorry often comes across as passive-aggressive rather than truly compassionate?

My mother used to do that to me all the time. She would be abusive towards me and I would need to cut off contact for my own sanity. For example, I didn’t pick up the phone once on my day off because I was in the shower, so I called her back 15 minutes later and she was angry. She ripped into me about not being available instantly at her beck and call whenever she felt like it, and I explained I had been in the shower, to which she accused me of being a liar. I hung up and refused to answer her messages for weeks. Eventually, she turned up at my house and threatened to tell my employer that I was a drug addict because surely that’s the only reason I wasn’t talking to her. When I told her to get off my lawn and never come back, she asked me for petrol money. Over a month later, she slides into my DM’s sweet as pie, saying how she forgives me for how I treated her and she understands that I’m not emotionally stable, but it’s ok because she loves me. I let it go at the time because I knew she would never acknowledge her part in causing conflict and she would never say sorry to me for anything.

That is not healthy. Letting abusive behaviour slide in order to keep the peace and retain the toxic relationship is not healthy. In fact, it’ll make you physically sick. Abuse victims die younger and often deal with chronic health conditions throughout their years of suffering because their bodies literally can’t cope. We were not made to be punching bags.

Equally unhealthy is insincere forgiveness. Being passive-aggressive like my mother was and like I was when I “forgave” my former friend. That’s not forgiveness and it’s also toxic.

All too often, I hear pastor’s saying to people right in the middle of their suffering, how do you plan to forgive this person? The pastor is so focused on forcing victims to forgive that they never get around to dealing with the unrepentant and usually they end up re-traumatising or alienating the victim because they invalidate their feelings and gaslight them into being responsible for the abuser’s feelings.

It’s such a wasted opportunity because the pastor doesn’t help either of those people. The abuser is still destined for hell because they will not deal with their sin, and the abuse victim is alienated from God and the church because they don’t feel safe.

It’s also not biblical.

The bible is very clear that forgiveness happens as a result of repentance. There is no such thing in the bible as restoration without repentance. We must forgive as we have been forgiven, but we were forgiven because we acknowledged wrongdoing. The debt was paid because we admitted that we owed a debt.

Preachers talk about accepting Jesus as our Lord and Saviour, but what does that mean? It means we must accept that we need a Lord and Saviour in the first place. That’s the key difference between the Christian and the non-Christian. It has nothing to do with leading exemplary lives, and in fact most Christian converts have the worst backgrounds. The people in the greatest danger of not being redeemed are the self-righteous. They don’t think they need God.

The scandal of the cross is that God redeems the irredeemable. God forgives the unforgiveable… if we admit that we need forgiveness, He is faithful to forgive.

So Christians are commanded to forgive as God forgave us. We cannot withhold forgiveness when someone repents. We cannot hold a grudge with someone who has humbled themselves before us. I think that’s fairly easy to understand.

What becomes challenging to understand is when God sends us to offer the gospel to people who have hurt us, or when we hear that a former bully has turned to Christ, or when the bible says to pray for our unrepentant enemies.

You may or may not be surprised to hear that psychology research has found that praying for people who have angered you actually reduces your anger towards that person compared to control condition (Bremner et al., 2011). Praying for your enemies may or may not have an effect on them, but it definitely has an effect on you. In other words, praying for our enemies isn’t about letting them off the hook or excusing their behaviour, it’s about our own healing and our emotional needs. God knows what is best for His children and He is not asking you to do something that prolongs your suffering or invalidates your feelings. Praying for your enemies is good for you.

What toxic people really need is salvation, not to avoid accountability, but to actually confront their bad behaviour. Trust me, turning to God after a lifetime of sin is often punishment enough. It is described in the bible as “circumcision of the heart” for a reason. I used to joke that it’s a brutal process I wouldn’t wish on my worst enemy, and yet I am told by God to wish it on my worst enemy because they need it. Because it’s the only way, as a species, that we stop destroying each other.

Have you ever read the book of Jonah as an adult? I think a lot of us heard the Sunday school version and the biggest take-away I got from it is that big fish can swallow you whole if you go overboard in the sea. It’s actually a very important story for understanding God’s nature; understanding repentance and forgiveness; and understanding our own human nature. As a psychology student I think it’s brilliant.

The narrative starts with God calling Jonah to preach repentance to the city of Nineveh and Jonah’s response is to lead out of his window and run to catch a boat for the furthest corner of the known world. Its comedically dramatic to make a point, which the book circles back to at the end:

Then God saw their works, that they turned from their evil way; and God relented from the disaster that He had said He would bring upon them, and He did not do it. But it displeased Jonah exceedingly, and he became angry. So he prayed to the Lord, and said, “Ah, Lord, was not this what I said when I was still in my country? Therefore I fled previously to Tarshish; for I know that You are a gracious and merciful God, slow to anger and abundant in lovingkindness, One who relents from doing harm. Therefore now, O Lord, please take my life from me, for it is better for me to die than to live!” Then the Lord said, “Is it right for you to be angry?”

Jonah 3:10 to 4:4 (NKJV)

Jonah’s reason for fleeing was because he knew God would forgive his enemies and he didn’t want God’s grace to be extended to them, even though he happily accepted it for himself.

Who were the Ninehvites? Nineveh was a major city in the Assyrian empire which was in power between 900BC and 600BC to the north of Israel, and they were brutal. They were renowned for skinning people alive and they attacked many Israelite cities over the years, slaughtering thousands of people. Can you imagine God asking you to preach the gospel to people who had brutally murdered your family? That’s the scenario of the book of Jonah, and Jonah’s response is very human. When he gets to the city after all his escape attempts have failed, he preaches the barest minimum that he can possibly manage:

So Jonah arose and went to Nineveh, according to the word of the Lord. Now Nineveh was an exceedingly great city, a three-day journey in extent. And Jonah began to enter the city on the first day’s walk. Then he cried out and said, “Yet forty days, and Nineveh shall be overthrown!”

Jonah 3:3-5 (NKJV)

His whole message was “you’ve got 40 days to live” and that was it; nothing about forgiveness, nothing about salvation, nothing about God’s love… just imminent destruction. Jonah was hoping that it wouldn’t work and he was disappointed when it did.

At the end of the book, God tries to teach Jonah a metaphor about the value of life by providing a tree for his shade and then taking the tree away. God does not enjoy giving us consequences for our actions. As it says:

The Lord is not slack concerning His promise, as some count slackness, but is longsuffering toward us, not willing that any should perish but that all should come to repentance.

2 Peter 3:9 (NKJV)

What does God want from us? Repentance. What did the people of Nineveh do to avert disaster for themselves? They repented. Jonah didn’t need to preach forgiveness because that’s not what they needed to hear. They needed to hear that their time was short, and they had messed up with God. They experienced forgiveness after they had that realisation, and not before. Forgiveness was always available from God, but not always granted until the conditions had been met.

Praying for our enemies is not about sweeping their behaviour under the rug, it’s about wanting them to finally get it; to have a lightbulb moment and change their ways. It’s about aligning ourselves with God’s desires for humanity’s redemption rather than gleefully waiting for other people’s destruction. But often, for people to be redeemed they need to hear some hard truths. They need to know that eventually everything they have done to other people is going to catch up with them, sooner or later. Judgement comes for all of us. We can either deal with it now and be restored to relationship with God, or we can leave it until it’s too late.

Don’t neglect to tell people that their actions have consequences. By all means, tell them that there is hope, but don’t minimise the gravity. And finally, always be ready to embrace the repentant without hardening your heart towards them, as the Lord has commanded us.