Culture of Forgiveness

6 min read

19 “In accordance with your great love, forgive the sin of these people, just as you have pardoned them from the time they left Egypt until now.”

20 The LORD replied, “I have forgiven them, as you asked.”

Numbers 14:19-20

It had taken over 400 years for God to prepare the Israelites so that He might fulfill His covenant promise to Abraham (Genesis 17:7-8). It took that amount of time also for the sin of the Amorites to reach its full measure (Genesis 15:16). But when the time came to deliver the promised land to the Israelites, the Israelites rejected God’s inheritance and rejected His invitation to participate with Him in His great plan of redemption for the world.

God will never force His people to do His will. But we must be absolutely certain on the truth that God’s will will most certainly be accomplished.

And so God was more than willing to let the Israelites be destroyed by plague and start the process all over again through Moses and his descendants. God is never in any rush. God has all the time in the world. God created time.

But God had an even greater purpose in mind. God’s greater purpose was not simply to deliver the promised land to the children of Abraham. God’s greater purpose is to build up a people who reflect His glory to the ends of the earth—and in particular, to raise up a people who demonstrate the grace and mercy of God. And so, what we see here is God’s greater purpose being revealed in Moses’s intercession of forgiveness for the Israelites.

And so when it comes to church and doing the will of God and fulfilling the purpose of God to fill the earth with His glory, a couple of details stand out to me in this exchange between God and Moses.

First of all, the Israelites were a stiff-necked, stubborn people who rebelled against God over and over and over again and would continue to do so. And God knew that even if Moses didn’t, and yet it’s clear from this exchange that God was pleased with Moses’s intercession on their behalf.

Second, if God destroyed the Israelites and started over with Moses, Moses would have been even more prominent in God’s salvation history. In other words, the forgiveness of the Israelites would actually mean lesser glory for Moses himself, and yet Moses prayed for their forgiveness anyway!

So what does all that mean for me and for us? It means that all the evangelism, all the missions, all the church planting—in fact, everything that we do—is less important to God than building up a community that intercedes for one another and forgives one another in the way the Moses did.

It’s not that we shouldn’t do evangelism and missions and church planting and so on and so forth. But if we are not proactively building up a culture where we understand the importance of forgiving one another and then actually forgive one another, then are we really filling the earth with the glory of God?

Of course, even Moses had his breaking point not long after that. But then God sent His one and only Son to perfectly embody what it means to be “slow to anger, abounding in love and forgiving sin and rebellion.

God doesn’t want us to be like the Israelites. God wants us to be like Moses. And more than Moses, God wants us to be like Christ.

Father, You truly are good. I know that I fall short of Your glory every single day of my life. You are good and I am not. But let me not use that as an excuse to not pursue Your goodness. I confess that I need Your grace. And I need Your Holy Spirit so that my life may glorify You, and that You might use me to build a forgiving and interceding culture in Canvas. In Jesus’s name. Amen.