Bob Hamp

In order to understand how forgiveness sets us free, We must recognize the trap that we are in.  Forgiving another is not a rigid expectation of anger management; it is a divine healing.

When someone sins against you, the primary response, the first emotion, is not anger, it is pain or fear, or some combination of the two.  Anger is always a secondary emotion, like a scab that grows over our pain.  Think about pain and fear for a moment.  When you strike your thumb with a hammer (pain) or someone jumps from behind a door to startle you (fear)  your response is not to melt in the agony of the moment but to immediately respond with anger.  The words that come from our mouth after the hammer blow are not about pain, they are expletives expressing the immediate and secondary emotion of anger.

Our anger comes without thought or intentional choice, it is an instinctive response.  This is one of many examples of how our instincts do not always tell us the truth. Our instinct quickly convinces us that anger will do for us two things that anger was never designed to achieve.

We believe anger will bring justice to the life of the one who offended us, and healing to the pain this offender caused.    While the Bible makes it clear in James chapter one (v.20) that the anger of man cannot achieve the righteousness of God, our instincts have yet to be enlightened. Because of this we allow our anger to operate, hoping it will balance the scale of justice and relieve us from the pain we bear, or the fear we carry.

When that well-meaning counselor tells us to forgive, we try to deal with the anger but not with the roots of the anger, our primary experience of pain and fear.

Now that we have a sense of the trap we are in when another person sins against us, let us examine how true forgiveness, the work of God through us, restores our soul and frees us at the roots of our anger.  Tomorrow’s post will tell you the two parts of forgiveness and how to find relief in the cross from the painful experiences inflicted on us.