Pay attention to yourselves! If your brother sins, rebuke him, and if he repents, forgive him, and if he sins against you seven times in a day, and turns to you seven times, saying, 'I repent,' you must forgive him.
Luke 17:3-4
In this second post, allow me to return to my initial question, namely, "Is unforgiveness the same as bitterness?"
I do not think it is. In the above passage, Jesus seems to imply that one's forgiveness is contingent upon the offender's repentance. "If he repents, forgive him." If someone repents, and turns again and repents of his sin, you must forgive him. If, on the other hand, someone does not turn and repent, Jesus seems to say that we are right in witholding forgiveness. This leads us to a few questions.
First, can one withold forgiveness and not be bitter? Bitterness is repeatedly condemned as sinful in the Bible. "Let all bitterness and wrath and anger and clamor and slander, along with all malice, be put away from you" (Ephesians 4:29). Never are we biblically justified to be bitter towards another individual, regardless of the wrong committed to us. To my question, I answer in the affirmative--it is possible to withold forgiveness and not be bitter, for if Jesus, in Luke 17, says that we should only forgive if the offender repents, this must mean that we are not sinning. Never would Jesus allow us to withold forgiveness if that was sin, and bitterness is ALWAYS a sin.
The next questions I will answer are as follows: "What about Jesus and Stephen?" "What should our attitudes be while we are witholding forgiveness?" "If unforgiveness and bitterness are not the same, yet if you are saying that we are never justified to be bitter, how is your framework different than what most Christians have today?"
I'll get to these as soon as I have time.
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