Matthew 18:35 “This is how my heavenly Father will treat each of you unless you forgive your brother from your heart.”

We tend to think of “gentle Jesus, meek and mild,” but He said some pretty stern things, and this is one of the strongest. It strikes me that here He says, “My Father.” I wonder if He wasn’t a little exasperated with His disciples for asking Him how many times they should forgive. (Matthew 18:21) When He touched on the same subject after teaching the Lord’s Prayer, He said “your Father.” (Matthew 6:14-15) It seems to imply that failing to forgive cuts us off from the father/son relationship we can have with God. The monetary figures Jesus used here point out the huge disparity between what we owe to God and anything another human being could do to us. Absolutely everything we have comes from God, down to the very last atom of our being, and we are accountable to Him for how we use it. Without His intent and His grace we wouldn’t exist, and yet we ignore Him most of the time and actively disobey Him with remarkable frequency. Compared to that, what could a person do to us? When we refuse to forgive someone, that’s spitting in the face of the God who loved us so much He sent His son to take the penalty for our sin.

This is something I fortunately learned fairly early, courtesy of the family in which I was raised, but it is perhaps the biggest issue in my ministry in Japan. As I tell Japanese when I’m teaching on this, I have a memory from my childhood of thinking, “The Japanese don’t understand forgiveness.” That I would have thought such a thing as an early elementary school student now strikes me as fairly remarkable, but the issue of Japanese and forgiveness remained a mystery to me until after I was already ministering in Omura, and finally got around to studying the Chinese characters that are used in writing Japanese. (I talk about this so frequently that I feel like I must have written on it recently, but I don’t find it off hand.) The character for “forgiveness” sounds the same as the character for “permission,” and the average Japanese is completely unfamiliar with the character for forgiveness; when they say the word, in their minds they are thinking “permission.” There are countless things in the world for which we must not give permission, so that puts us in a very difficult place when it comes to the whole subject of forgiveness. If I didn’t know I serve a God for whom all things are possible, I would be very tempted to give up! As one of my own church members pointed out to me, I’ve got to demonstrate real forgiveness before I can expect anyone to understand it.

Father, You know the magnitude of the issue better than I do. I ask You to reveal Your forgiveness, that is not excusing or permitting, to the Japanese people so that they may indeed repent and believe, for their salvation and Your glory. Thank You. Hallelujah!