THE POWER AND CHALLENGE OF FORGIVENESS
“Lord, how often shall my brother sin against me, and I forgive him? Up to seven times?” Matthew 18:21
I have been reflecting this week on the challenge of forgiveness for every individual and especially me! We are living at a time when the pressures from a number of sources will result in increasing potential for relationship difficulties. Looking ahead, it seems clear that there will be more oppression from a dictatorial state as the “new world order” gains control of all the tools for living – notably - energy, food and money. The West is seeking to restrict the supply and use of energy, supposedly to “save the planet” and this in turn will lead to food shortages which already are being seen in a number of countries. Trillions of dollars are being spent in costly alternative energy projects which are not only inefficient but have a life cycle that results in significant carbon emissions. It is easy to foresee further government monitoring of energy use via “smart meters” and restrictions on home heating and cooling by state surveillance. Digital passports containing our health records and vaccination status will be mandated to reduce the risk to public health from ongoing pandemics (COVID-19 and monkeypox are just the beginning). Location data from mobile devices will be used to track us to ensure we are “safe” because a digital identity will be required. Most financial experts think that it will just be a few years until central bank digital currencies are implemented which would allow control over expenditure. This is part of the transition that has been advocated by Klaus Schwab and the World Economic Forum for “the great reset” and associated Fourth Industrial Revolution.
As we move into this “surveillance state” (and it is difficult to see how the trajectory can be changed, given the levers of power held by the globalist leaders), there will be increased pressures on individual relationships, which are always under threat. The COVID-19 lockdowns resulted in people “snitching” or “dobbing in” their UK neighbours who flouted the rules - and now authorities are asking people to “dob in” or report people who are using hoses and excessive water, in the face of the drought in the UK.
The impact on individual relationships will become greater over the coming years as “Big Brother” - progressively becomes the daily experience. The Head of Stalin’s secret police, Lavrentiy Beria is reported to have said “show me the man and I’ll show you the crime”. It will become easier to convict people of crimes and probably “thought crimes”, with monitoring of social media so that only “acceptable” views are allowed by Big Tech. Interestingly, this is the approach being used in relation to President Trump with a raid at Mar-a-Lago to search for documents that could demonstrate a ”crime”.
As I thought about these issues and what we have ahead of us, my mind was drawn to the story of Cornelia “Corrie” ten Boom and her family who stood against the Nazi regime in Holland during the Second World War. Corrie told her story in the famous book The Hiding Place published in 1971.
Corrie ten Boom was the youngest of 4 children of a family whose father was a watchmaker and jeweler in the town of Haarlem, very close to the North Sea, and an outer area of Amsterdam. The family were Christian believers and lived above the father’s jewellery shop. They honoured and respected the large Jewish community in Amsterdam and believed that the Jews were “God’s ancient people”. Corrie herself trained to be a watchmaker when she was about 30 years old and was involved in outreach to the local community including the establishment of a youth club for teenage girls.
After the German invasion of Holland in 1940, the ten Boom household became a refuge for Jews and students opposed to the Nazi regime. A secret room behind a closet was built into the bedroom above the jeweller’s shop, which could hide up to 6 people. An elaborate warning system also was established to give the refugees time to hide in the secret location. The refugees were then moved to other safe houses and it is estimated that as many as 800 Jews’ lives were saved. In February 1944 a Dutch informant told the Germans about the ten Boom’s “underground” work to hide Jews and the Germans arrested all the ten Boom family and their helpers -35 in total. Remarkably, the Gestapo failed to find 6 Jews who were concealed in the secret closet and these people were rescued from their hiding place 3 days later. Corrie’s elderly father died soon after in a prison close to the Hague and Corrie and her sister were sent to the Ravensbrück concentration camp where Corrie’s sister Betsie died just before Christmas in 1944. Corrie was released from the camp at the end of 1944 for reasons that are not known. After the war, Corrie set up a rehabilitation centre for concentration camp survivors and began a worldwide ministry. Remarkably at one of her meetings, she came face to face with one of the prison camp guards who abused her in the camp and was implicated in her sister’s death. This man asked for her forgiveness but initially she felt that such forgiveness was impossible. This led to the powerful story she tells of forgiveness, which is detailed in a talk given before her death in 1983.
Corrie simply says that in looking at Jesus and His life and sacrifice, ultimately the only thing that she could do was to forgive the guard – not by the power of her will but by the supernatural power of God.
Jesus provided guidance for the challenges we face in dealing with people who may have wronged us. There are a remarkable series of teachings in Matthew 18 - where after highlighting some difficulties in relation to the government and taxes (Matthew 17:24-27), Jesus teaches about relationships. His disciples come to him to ask who is the greatest in His kingdom? Jesus demonstrates who is the greatest by calling a small child to Himself and telling the disciples that “whoever humbles himself as this little child is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven” (Matthew 18:4). He then goes on to warn about causing offense and the care needed for nurturing and protecting children. Jesus teaches His disciples a number of core principles in the remainder of Matthew 18 using a range of illustrations and parables (which surprisingly earlier in the Book of Matthew Jesus says: “I speak to them in parables, because seeing they do not see, and hearing they do not hear, nor do they understand.” (Matthew 13:13). It seems as though Jesus wants us to work hard to understand what he means and the core truths He is speaking about often may be hidden from us and need supernatural revelation.
At some stage in the discourse with His disciples, Peter asks a question and it seems as though he had some training with the Master and realizes that forgiveness is an important principle of Jesus’ kingdom. He asks Jesus “Lord, how often shall my brother sin against me, and I forgive him? Up to seven times?” (Matthew 18:21)
Jesus answers “I do not say to you, up to seven times, but up to seventy times seven”. You don’t need to be a top mathematician to calculate that this is a large number of times that we need to forgive someone! Jesus then goes on to tell a parable that is called “The Unforgiving Servant” (Matthew 18:21-35).
It is worthwhile reading this section of the Book of Matthew but essentially the parable tells the story of a king who is owed a huge sum of money by one of his servants but the king forgives the debt because he has compassion for his servant who has a debt that is impossible to repay. The servant however did not show similar compassion towards a fellow servant who owed a much smaller debt. The king then became angry and Jesus says that the king
“..delivered him (the first servant who owed all the money to the king) to the torturers until he should pay all that was due to him. So My heavenly Father also will do to you if each of you, from his heart, does not forgive his brother his trespasses
(The Greek word translated as trespasses is paraptōma, which means offence, fault, sin or fall)” (Matthew 18:34-35). Being delivered to the torturers sounds bad and it is! The Greek word is basanistēs and it means tormentor or torturer who finds truth by use of the rack! It looks bad to be an unforgiving servant because we are all in need of forgiveness ourselves and the consequence of unforgiveness is that God hands us over to the torturers. Torturers are not well known for their compassion and mercy (I think that no-one with these traits gets the job) and so Jesus is telling us that the alternative to us forgiving others, is serious suffering ourselves. At this stage, we need to be “betting on self-interest” and forgiving those close to use (and anyone else for that matter) so that God doesn’t call in our much larger debt to Him and we find ourselves handed over to the torturers.
So, you are wondering, what does this have to do with anything? Well, I think it is at the centre of everything in the lives that we lead and in the season to come. For small communities and families to thrive in the midst of coming hardship and persecution, forgiveness will be an essential trait for survival. Over the last 20 years, I have noticed in working with groups, in families, amongst friends, in a range of social situations, that causing offense is easy and can result in a breakdown of relationships. In almost every family there are family members who don’t speak to each other. In church groups, relationship breakdown and hurt have resulted in church splits. In social groups, an action or comment can destroy the harmony of a group. We can choose to harbour the pain and resentment and hold onto it like a treasured possession, in which case we are handed over to the torturers, or we can forgive. I suspect that these torturers are quite real in the spiritual realm but in any case, I know that I have experienced torturing of the soul when I have held on to unforgiveness. The quote from Dr Lewis Smedes who was a professor at Fuller Seminary in California captures this well: “To forgive is to set a prisoner free and discover that the prisoner was you”.
In the coming challenging times, we are increasingly going to have to rely on family, local community and close networks where the success of these critical groups will depend people being able to forgive one another so that harmony can reign.
So – why is it so difficult to forgive? There is no simple answer to this but we can see that problems started with the first family after Adam and Eve were expelled from Eden. With their two sons, Cain was jealous of his brother Abel, because Abel’s offering to God was well-regarded but Cain’s offering was of “no regard or respect” (Genesis 4:4). The Bible says that God told Cain “sin is crouching at the door. And its desire is for you, but you should rule over it” (Genesis 4:7) – in other words you have a choice about how you respond to a perceived slight. Cain’s choice in the face of anger was to kill his brother Abel. This scenario has been played out millions of times over the succeeding millennia and each of us are potential victims of anger and unforgiveness today.
We have a genetic predisposition to hold onto the pain and trauma of offense and end up finding ourselves (mostly unknowingly), handed over to the torturers. The question then is, how do we forgive? It isn’t easy and all of us can feel justified by harbouring resentment and anger towards the one who has wronged us. I can’t say that I am an expert on forgiveness in any way. I have held onto unforgiveness until I realized that I was drinking the poison and expecting that drink to affect my adversary, when I was being poisoned myself. Jesus is the top bloke at forgiveness as there would be none of us, having been nailed up on a cross on trumped up charges, who could have said “Father forgive them, for they know not what they do” (Luke 23:24). Amazingly enough, like Corrie ten Boom said, Jesus helps us with forgiveness as we look to His example and importantly for believers, His life in us (Galatians 2:20).
Despite my lack of expertise, I have learnt a little along the road of life and here are my top 5 tips about forgiveness, learning from Jesus and life experience:
1. If you are wronged, assume that there was no ill-intent – offense often is perceived and because we can’t understand why a person said or did something, we assume mal-intent. In reality, most people don’t have bad intentions or a desire to deliberately injure us. We can prevent bitterness taking root in our hearts, if we assume that whatever was said or done did not have an intent to harm us. Unfortunately we often assign good intent to our own actions but bad intent to those of others.
2. Avoid triangulation – we seem to have been designed with a flaw which results in us complaining about someone to everyone apart from the person whom we feel has wronged us! Jesus’ advice is:
“if your brother sins against you, go and tell him his fault between you and him alone. If he hears you, you have gained your brother” (Matthew 18: 15).
Because, as the leadership expert Pat Murray frequently quoted: “the result of all communication is misunderstanding”, many problems can be prevented by talking to the person who offended us. Often, there was a misunderstanding or miscommunication. However, our tendency is to talk to everyone else about what has happened, which magnifies the offense in our hearts and often seeds problems in other relationships.
3. Forgiveness means letting go – there is something about our need for personal justification that results in us holding on to the offense that we feel. If we remember that unforgiveness results in us “being handed over to the torturers”, we should be motivated not to harbour resentment and unforgiveness. If we let go of the desire to be right, the advantage is that we don’t keep digging our way further into the depths of relationship difficulty. It is always helpful to have the idea of being handed over to the torturers in the back of our minds!
4. If we have caused a problem, ask for forgiveness – this is one of the hardest things to do and as my old boss said: “I may not always be right but I am never wrong”. I had experience in a wonderful course I attended many years ago where I inadvertently caused serious offense for another person in the course. One of the facilitators said: “a person’s reaction to something you did tells you a lot about them and nothing about you” – in other words it may not be something that is serious or bad to an outside observer but the person may have been triggered by something you said. It may be totally unrelated to what you did or said but relates to something that happened earlier in their life. I saw the impact of this when I went to the person, and with some coaching, simply said:
“I know that I have caused pain and offense, can you tell me what happened?”. The person told me that when I spoke to him, I had crossed my arms and looked in a certain way that made him angrier than he had ever been since he was a boy when his father had done something similar. I was staggered and with some help, didn’t try to JED (justify, explain or defend) but rather asked further questions and I sought more information. A key phrase that I have found useful is: “tell me more?”, rather than our instinct which is to say: “I never said that”! What I found in this particular situation was that there was more! As I understood, my own anger faded away and my relationship was restored as I listened and understood. Often we are too quick to try to explain ourselves and use phrases like: “that’s not what I meant” or “I didn’t say that” rather than listening and understanding how we caused a problem. It is only at the end of listening that we can say that we are sorry and ask for forgiveness. Then the person may also be amenable to hear about how things seemed from our perspective but only once the other person has felt heard and understood.
5. Ask God to help us deal with the pain from the offense – my own experience and the experience of many whom I’ve talked to is that when we feel mistreated, we don’t want to risk being mistreated again. Often then we remove ourselves or cut off contact. There may be times when this is appropriate but we don’t want to risk being handed over to the torturers. God is a God who desires to draw near and my experience is that when we ask Him for help, He gives it. Sometimes this is simply a change in our own hearts or it may be a particular strategy to deal with the relationship difficulty.
Forgiveness is challenging for each one of us and in cases where there has been significant harm caused, like with Corrie ten Boom, forgiving doesn’t mean saying that what was done was OK. It does mean that you don’t hold on to unforgiveness which is a poison to our souls and can affect our mental and physical health. We all need to live in a spirit of forgiveness. As Martin Luther King Jnr said: “Forgiveness is not an occasional act, it is a permanent attitude”.
WORLD NEWS ROUNDUP
A Summary of Some Significant Events Around the World in the Last Week
USA
The Mar-a-Lago raid continues to send ripples around the US and also the world. The hatred of Trump by his enemies knows no bounds and I was struck today by the various processes that have been brought against Trump by the Democrats. Democrat Congress representatives started calling for his impeaching on the day he was sworn into office in 2017. Then the fabricated Russian collusion hoax was promoted via a dossier put together by a person paid by the Clinton campaign. This was used within the Justice Department to launch a hugely expensive investigation overseen by Robert Mueller, the former FBI Director. After spending US$32 million - and President Trump being lambasted on a daily basis by most media outlets, there were no adverse findings for Trump. Impeachment proceedings promoted by Democrats in the House, were rejected by the Senate. The House of Representatives then tried a knockout blow after the elections with another impeachment process with the claim that Trump fomented insurrection on 6th January 2021, when there was a huge protest in Washington DC. The proceedings reminded you of the Stalinist “show trials”, except that with Trump there was no fake confession of wrongdoing.
All the evidence from the 2020 Presidential election demonstrates multiple ways in which voting was rigged in the swing states and this is demonstrated most conclusively in the film 2000 Mules. However there were many voting irregularities with dead people voting, those residing out of state but voting illegally, dubious addresses and signatures on postal ballots and of course doubt about the voting machines themselves. It is very reasonable for Trump and his supporters to question the integrity of the voting process in the last election, where tens of millions more people voted than in any previous Presidential election. However, Trump has been portrayed as trying to destroy democracy and the Democrats have constituted a partisan committee (the so-called January 6th Committee) to try to smear Trump and have him indicted. This seems to have been the real reason for the Mar-a-Lago raid with agents attempting to vacuum up anything they could find that may incriminate Trump. It is an outrageous infringement of the 4th Amendment to the Constitution which states
“The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probably cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.”
The FBI obtained a warrant from a judge who was not independent, the agents would not allow observation by President Trump’s lawyers during the raid, requests were made to turn off security cameras at Mar-a-Lago and the search even included Melania Trump’s clothes closet! The violations of the 4th Amendment are important as what has been done is nothing less than a political hit job using the FBI as a partisan tool of the Democrat political machine. It is worthwhile listening to an analysis of the raid by Dr John Eidsmoe, a law professor, who discusses the significance of the raid and the importance of the Fourth Amendment in an interview with The New American.
The Democrats have an obsession about side-lining Trump and appear to be prepared to use any means necessary to take him out of contention. They must realize from their own polling that President Trump has the support to win the Presidential election in 2024 and so while they control Congress, they will use all the tools at their disposal to continue to vilify Trump. Of course they have a lot of support by the media who are all in lock step with their anti-Trump rhetoric.
The Biden administration is doing all they can to destroy the US economically, spiritually and organizationally. There are dark days ahead and with the mid-term elections now in sight in early November, the Democrats will have to create a crisis to gain control of voting if they are to prevent being routed in the House and Senate.
United Kingdom & Europe
As the “hustings” continue for the two Conservative Party candidates for Prime Minister, Boris Johnson has been on holiday and the moving vans have taken away most of his possessions from No. 10 Downing Street. It seems that he and Carrie have relocated to Chequers, the country residentce of the Prime Minister which to me looks a lot more convivial location than Downing Street. Boris will probably be pleased to give up the UK premiership as his earning potential will be considerably enhanced once he gets onto the speakers circuit. A recent report noted that the former PM, Theresa May, has earned more than £2 million from speeches since leaving No 10 Downing Street, 3 years ago and Boris is much more “saleable”.
A number of problems in the UK, like many other countries, look intractable and there are no simple solutions to inflation (just announced to be an annual rate of 10.1%), rising energy costs, independence movements seeking to destroy the Union, high education costs, an unprepared military more focused on “diversity” than fighting capacity, and healthcare is in a shambles. A story this week demonstrated the crisis in emergency care when a 90 year-old woman was forced to wait 40 hours for an ambulance to come and then had to remain overnight in the ambulance outside Emergency because there were no beds free in the Royal Cornwall Hospital. The likely cause of the increased pressure on the National Health System, is the high COVID-19 vaccination rate in the UK and the prevalence of adverse effects demonstrated by the Yellow Card system - with more than 1.5 million adverse events now described. Despite this, there have been no investigations by the MHRA - the UK government agency that oversees regulation of medicines. The COVID-19 vaccines are a time bomb in relation to health and this week it was reported by the UK Government that 1 in every 482 people died within 1 month of being vaccinated. These data are from the UK Office for National Statistics. Between January 2021 and May 2022, 92,146 people died within one month of COVID-19 vaccination. Of course, the argument will be that the vaccination may not have caused the deaths but it should be a hypothesis that is investigated. Meanwhile, all-cause mortality has increased in England and Wales by 14% - which translates into an additional 1,000 people per week.
The negative impact of the COVID-19 vaccines on health will be evident for many years to come but the UK government and other Western governments are conveniently looking the other way. However, truth cannot be hidden forever and at some stage, the harmful effects of the vaccines will be reported by the scientific journals where there is a fearless editorial board. Nonetheless, the push for mandatory vaccination will roll on and with the World Bank creating a US$1 billion fund for vaccine passports. The technocrats are not going to give up on this idea and the monkeypox “emergency” is just another virus in a likely continuing release or escape from laboratories.
Russia and Ukraine
I read a wide range of articles about Ukraine but it is very difficult to find out what is happening on the ground with reports of both Russian advances and Ukrainian success. I did note though that Russia has deployed state-of-the art hypersonic missiles to the Baltic region, bordering Poland. This looks a very concerning development as NATO gets drawn further into the conflict. Europe is sweltering at the moment but it is only a few months before the European winter will demonstrate the impact of the Russian sanctions and there will be widespread European discontent. Interestingly, critics of the German government’s approach in relation to the energy crisis have been branded “enemies of the state”. One can see the direction we are heading with the World Economic Forum calling for the use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) to censor “hate speech” and “misinformation”.
There does seem to have been an escalation of the conflict with reports in the last 24 hours of attacks by Ukraine on an important military airport in Crimea . Who knows what will happen next but the conflict has dragged on for more than 6 months with many casualties and no sign of any peace agreement between Ukraine and Russia. It does look as though Ukraine is being used by sinister forces in the West as a tool and the end result will be a devastated and destroyed country.
China vs The West
It is interesting that a Chinese company has bought farmland in North Dakota, not far from the Grand Forks Airforce base. Of course it would be impossible for an American company to ever buy land near a Chinese military base. It is important to remember that every Chinese company is under the direction and control of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), something that Jack Ma (the founder of Alibaba) briefly forgot before receiving a consultation visit from CCP officials.
For their own reasons, the CCP is persisting with the zero-COVID policy and a recent report notes the economic chaos that has ensued. People have been locked in stores for up to 48 hours as authorities have mass tested thousands in the pursuit of zero COVID. The end result is depression of economic activity and growth is estimated to fall well below the projected annual figure of 5.5% this year.
Most people have heard of the “belt and road initiative” also called “one belt, one road”. Reports are that China has signed cooperation agreements with 149 countries and 32 international organizations with a total of around 3,000 projects with a value in excess of US$1 trillion. The US has warned about countries being caught in a “debt trap” and there is suspicion that behind the “belt and road” initiative lies a clever plan to acquire key infrastructure when countries find that they cannot meet China’s loan requirements.
Concern continues to grow in Taiwan and surrounding regions about conflict with mainland China as China continues large scale military exercises . There was an interesting article that I read this week in The Indian Express newspaper where it noted that the Matsu Islands, which belong to Taiwan are only 10km from China’s coast. The residents there are concerned as the islands are probably a staging point for a Chinese invasion. Undoubtedly there is a timetable in Beijing but no one except President Xi, his closest allies and Hunter Biden would know!
Israel
As Israel prepares for yet another election due at the beginning of November, the challenge of Iran remains at the centre of Israeli concerns. The fear in Israel is that the UN Permanent Security Council members, will reach a deal with Iran that will result in a nuclear threat to Israel. The interim Israeli Prime Minister, Yair Lapid, has advised that the “world should walk away from nuclear talks”. This seems good advice but the West and particularly the US is desperate to reach an agreement with Iran.
An interesting agreement was reached this week between Israel and Turkey with what has been described as a “reset”. Israel and Turkey have re-established full diplomatic relations after a break of four years. Turkey is seen as a leader in the Arab world and it will be interesting to see how the warming of relationships between the two countries will impact the rest of the Middle East.
I always find Amir Tsafarti’s updates helpful and in his latest update -
he reports that Israel attacked a “third country” during the recent conflict in Gaza. He notes the close links between Russia, Iran and China and how significant this is for world affairs. It appears that the “third country” that Israel attacked was a military base in Yemen that is supported and equipped by Iran.
Israel is under constant threat and their intelligence services and capability to detect terrorist threats is remarkable.
Summary
There seems to be increased instability around the world and a loss of confidence in democratic processes. Globalists like Bill Gates use money and power to operate behind the scenes to influence key decisions such as Senator Joe Manchin’s vote to ensure passage of the so-called “Inflation Reduction Act” - which will achieve the opposite effect. I have been reading the Books of the prophets Jeremiah and Ezekiel and have been struck by the reality that it is God Himself who determines the rise and fall of nations. As we witness the decline of the West, God’s hand is sovereign and we can put our trust in Him. Psalm 22:8 declares “For the kingdom is the Lord’s, And He rules over the nations.” I am continually reassured by Romans 8:28 “And we know that all things work together for good to those who love God, to those who are the called according to His purpose. “ Finally the Psalmist in Psalm 37:4 provides clear guidance to us: “Trust in the LORD, and do good; Dwell in the land, and feed on His faithfulness.”