In other situations people feel that although they should forgive, they do not ever need to trust the person again.

Both of these extremes can be wrong.  We always have to forgive, but we do not have to trust those who hurt us and show no sign they are sorry.  On the other hand, once we have forgiven we should strive to allow trust to be rebuilt whenever possible.  The difference lies in the fact that forgiving someone who has wronged us is our responsibility; reestablishing trust is most often the responsibility of the person who wronged us.

In real life, people get hurt repeatedly –  that fact was the basis for Peter’s question to Jesus: “Lord, how many times shall I forgive my brother or sister who sins against me? Up to seven times?” (Matthew 18:21). The problem is a very real one because humanly, repeated wrongs done against us can make forgiveness progressively harder. That is why Peter suggested we only forgive up to seven times –  a “manageable” number of wrongdoings.   Jesus’ answer, of course, was that we must not put a limit on the number of times we forgive someone (Matthew 18:22).  But his answer has no application to staying in a situation where we would continue to get hurt if that is avoidable.  Nor does it mean that we should trust the wrongdoer if it would be unwise or dangerous to do so. Remember again the Scripture’s counsel: “The prudent sees danger and hides himself, but the simple go on and suffer for it.”  This clear wisdom is expounded twice in the Bible (Proverbs 22:3; 27:12) for a reason. 
 
Not understanding these basic truths prevents many people from restoring relations after forgiving those who have hurt them and causes many others to suffer unnecessarily when they do. In his book The Purpose Driven Life, Rick Warren says: “Many people are reluctant to show mercy because they don’t understand the difference between trust and forgiveness. Forgiveness is letting go of the past. Trust has to do with future behavior.”  Warren is surely correct in this, for while forgiving must be immediate on our part, trust must be rebuilt over time and depends on the behavior of the one forgiven. As Warren puts it, trust requires a track record: “If someone hurts you repeatedly, you are commanded by God to forgive them instantly, but you are not expected to trust them immediately…” Our forgiveness of others must always be unconditional, but our trust of others can and often should be conditional – it has to be earned.
 
Forgiveness doesn’t mean we have to see change in the other person in order to forgive them – that would be an entirely wrong approach. We must forgive whether an individual changes or not. But we need not trust them if they have not changed. Trust develops slowly – and it must be remade over time.  Think of the example of Jesus asking Peter three times, “do you love me?” (John 21:15-17) after Peter’s betrayal. Peter had failed Jesus three times, of course (John 18:15-27), and perhaps there is a lesson in Christ’s repeated questions that we should see recurrent or ongoing evidence of change before we fully trust again. 

A simple analogy is that being hurt by another is like receiving a cut to our body.  Forgiving the person acts like the stitches that close our wound, but spiritual and emotional healing, just like physical healing, still require time. Even when we fully understand the difference between granting forgiveness and trust, we must always remember that allowing time for trust to be repaired does not mean allowing ourselves a period of time to brood, feel sorry for ourselves, or to allow resentment or anger to continue to develop. That would be like allowing an infection to take hold in the cut that should be healing. Granting ourselves time to trust again should always be based on our complete and unhindered forgiveness of the other person –  that is the only way we will, in fact, heal. 
  
We should always be open to allowing trust to be rebuilt whenever this is possible. Forgiveness is a possession we all have that we are able to give to others. But trust is not a possession, it is a process that we allow to develop once our forgiving makes trust possible again.

* Exerpted from our new free e-book How to Forgive. You can download a copy here.

“…The teachers of the law and the Pharisees brought in a woman caught in adultery. They made her stand before the group and said to Jesus, “Teacher, this woman was caught in the act of adultery. In the Law Moses commanded us to stone such women. Now what do you say?” They were using this question as a trap, in order to have a basis for accusing him…” (John 7:53-8:11).

The story of the woman caught in adultery and taken before Christ is often said to be of doubtful authenticity, but there is good evidence to show it belongs in our Bibles (see our article on this on our sister site, here).  Although it is a story we may know well, it is one that deserves a closer look.

Entrapment

The story makes it clear that this event was orchestrated by the religious authorities in an attempt to trap Jesus.  If he condemned the woman – who was clearly guilty – to stoning (the biblical punishment for adultery – Leviticus 20:10, Deuteronomy 22:24), the Jewish authorities would doubtless accuse him of sedition because the occupying Romans had forbidden the Jews to enact capital punishment (John 18:31).  But if Jesus said the woman should not be stoned, they could then accuse him of rejection of the Law of Moses and of being guilty of religious heresy.   From the perspective of the Jews, it was a watertight trap that they did not expect Jesus to escape.  Even if Jesus declined to pronounce the woman guilty or innocent and refused to answer their question, his authority with the people would have been greatly undermined, and the exchange would be seen as a victory of the authorities over Jesus and his teaching.

But this situation was not the only trap the religious authorities appear to have set.  The account clearly shows that only the woman was brought before Jesus and charged with adultery. But the Pharisees and teachers of the law said that the woman had been “caught in the act” of adultery – so where was the man who was involved, and why was only the woman being charged?   The Law of Moses specifically commanded that “If a man commits adultery with another man’s wife … both the adulterer and the adulteress are to be put to death” (Leviticus 20:10, Deuteronomy 22:22-24).   

It seems more than likely that the man was hired by the Jews to entice the woman so that the Pharisees could then catch them “in the act,” as this was necessary for the death penalty to be administered (Numbers 5:13). In this case, of course, the man would have been promised immunity and not arrested, as arranged. That an individual could be hired to do such a thing and that the Jewish authorities of the time would organize it is made clear by the “witnesses” hired to falsely accuse both Christ (Matthew 26:59) and Stephen (Acts 6:13).
 
Escape

We are told that Jesus responded to the trap set for him by stooping down and beginning to write on the ground.  What he wrote has been a source of centuries of speculation.  Commentators have suggested everything ranging from writing out the charge as for a Roman trial to one or more of the Ten Commandments or even the personal sins of the accusing Jews.  But we should notice that after he wrote for a while the accusers still did not go away – it was only after Jesus stood up and said “let him who is without sin cast the first stone at her” (vs. 7) and then proceeded to write again that the Pharisees and those with them left.

Yet there need be no mystery in why what Jesus wrote is not recorded.  C. S. Lewis believed that the narrative of Jesus writing in the dust has the ring of an eyewitness account and it may well be that the eyewitness saw Jesus writing but was not close enough to see what it was that he wrote.

That it was what Jesus said, not what he wrote, that dismissed the accusers is seen in the account itself: “… those who heard began to go away one at a time …” (vs. 9, emphasis added).  When Jesus said that the one “without sin” should cast the first stone, the Greek expression occurs nowhere else in the New Testament and may mean “without the possibility of sin” or “without actual sin,” though in either case its point was clear and obviously effective. 

When the throng of accusing Jews left, one by one, Jesus and the woman were left alone – except of course, for the group of bystanders that had gathered there (vs. 1). That group was probably standing at a short distance and included the eyewitness through whom we have the details of the story.

Lessons

So the story of the woman caught in adultery is a fascinating one which becomes more intriguing the more we look at it. But there are clear and important conclusions we can draw from the account.

Christ’s words “let him who is without sin cast the first stone” (vs. 7) and “… neither do I condemn you …” (vs. 11) have sometimes been misused to suggest that we should never judge even proven wrongdoing or that it should be excused. But Jesus was not rejecting punishment being administered to the guilty – as we see in his teaching in many other scriptures – but extending grace to a woman who had been entrapped. He was doubtless aware of the woman’s attitude and if it was a repentant one, but while he did not condemn the woman, he certainly condemned the sin by saying “Go now and leave your life of sin” (vs. 11 and compare John 5:14).   
​
At one level, we can see ourselves in this story.  From this perspective the entrapped woman represents every human. The apostle James tells us that  we are “enticed” to sin by our own human nature (James 1:14), but the word translated “enticed” that he uses is from a root meaning to “trap” and is rendered this way in a number of Bible translations.  Like the woman, we have been trapped by sin and are worthy of the penalty of death. The symbolic role of the Pharisees who arranged the trap in this story is just as clearly that of the enemy who tempts us (2 Timothy 2:26), and Christ is the one who frees us from the trap and who calls us, like the woman, to leave our lives of sin. Perhaps above all, Christ’s words remind us that we do not change in order to be freed and accepted; we must change because we have been freed and accepted.

But even as Christians, knowing  that we must forgive if we expect to be forgiven ourselves,  we do not always realize that there are different degrees of forgiveness and that we must be careful not to accept something that feels like forgiveness on our part, but really is not.

The simplest way to understand this is to realize the difference between what we might call active and passive forgiveness. 

Passive Forgiveness

When we find it difficult to forgive someone, we sometimes forgive them passively.  This means that we may stop ourselves from talking and thinking negatively about the person and certainly from considering any kind of revenge or “getting even”  with them.  Yet the level of forgiveness stops there – at a kind of “letter of the law” level.   Ultimately we may settle into a kind of indifference toward the individual. We do not see the  person  who has wronged us as either a friend or an enemy, but we feel  content in not actively being negative about him or her.  Unfortunately, if we fall into this kind of passive attitude, we may never cross over into a more positive attitude of true forgiveness toward the person.
  
How do we know if we are guilty of this kind of minimal, “passive” forgiveness?   We can often determine this by considering how we react to the person.  Do we tend to keep interaction with them to a minimum, or at least to a lesser degree than before they hurt us in some way?  Do we never really say or do anything positive to them?  If someone else says something complimentary about the person, do we simply smile and not comment?  Any of these reactions can indicate that our relationship with them is a passive compromise and not the result of true forgiveness. 

Active Forgiveness

Unlike passive forgiveness, true active forgiveness goes beyond  emotional and spiritual indifference.  That is why true forgiveness is so hard to accomplish when we have been deeply hurt. It’s not human to want to help the person who hurts us – especially if the person who hurt us clearly did so intentionally.  Yet completely forgiving someone means that, regardless of what they have done, we treat them in the same way we did before they hurt us, that we live with a feeling of compassion for the other person.
 
That is the kind of forgiveness demonstrated by Christ in his words on the cross: “Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing” (Luke 23:34),  by Stephen  regarding those who killed him: “Lord, do not hold this sin against them”  (Acts 7:60), and by countless Christians who have been wronged since that time.   In fact, these two prayers show us how we can know that our forgiveness is active and not passive.  We do not pray for those we only nominally forgive.  If we can pray for those we need to forgive, we are actively forgiving them.

Active forgiveness does not mean we need to stay in abusive or hurtful relationships or situations. We must certainly forgive endlessly and without restriction (Matthew 18:21-22), but sometimes it is necessary to forgive from a distance in order to stop the wrongful cycle of hurt or harm (Acts 12:17, etc.).

But whether we are able to stay in situations or it is wiser to remove ourselves from them, our forgiveness must always be active and full. Whenever possible our forgiveness should be accompanied with active love: “… Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you, pray for those who mistreat you” (Luke 26:27-28).  Such a fully active demonstration of forgiveness is not always possible, but as we saw in the prayers of Jesus and Stephen, we can always forgive actively by praying for those who have hurt or offended us.   Anything less is passive forgiveness.
 
* See also our article “The Second Step of Forgiveness.”

Corrie ten Boom’s memorable quote not only carries a powerful message of itself, but it also urges us to think about what happens when we do not forgive.  An unforgiving attitude invariably harms us far more than the person we are having difficulty forgiving.

Ten Boom’s words remind us that failure to forgive heaps many curses upon our own heads – resentment, hatred, and bitterness are only some of them.  Perceptively, ten Boom added selfishness to that list, because failure to forgive another is to selfishly deny another what we ourselves have been given.

Refusing  to forgive someone or delaying forgiving them “till the hurt subsides” are equal mistakes.  Invariably, the longer we leave something unforgiven, the less likely we are to ever forgive it.  Unforgiveness  becomes a prison from which we cannot escape and delaying granting forgiveness is tantamount to throwing away the key. As has been so truly said, “To forgive is to set a prisoner free and discover the prisoner was you.” 
​

*On the topic of forgiveness, see also our blog post on this site: “What Forgiving and Forgetting Really Means“  and, on our sister site:  ”The Second Step of Forgiveness.”