‘But God demonstrates his own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us.’ Rom 5:8
James, this is a great question! You see, on the one hand the answer is a really simple “no“. Romans 5:8 tells us that whilst we were still sinners, Christ died for us. Whilst our lives were smeared with the muck of sin and our hearts were dead towards God, Christ died for us! This is glorious and if we’re honest, a reminder of the outrageous nature of the Gospel. We were not just undeserving but rather anti-Christ in our heart’s motivations. The Apostle Paul, in Ephesians, put it like this:
‘But because of his great love for us, God, who is rich in mercy, made us alive with Christ even when we were dead in transgressions—it is by grace you have been saved. And God raised us up with Christ and seated us with him in the heavenly realms in Christ Jesus’ – Eph 2:4-6
So, on the one hand we’re saved or forgiven by God’s sovereign grace through faith. Dr. Martyn Lloyd-Jones put it this way:
‘It is grace at the beginning, and grace at the end. So that when you and I come to lie upon our deathbeds, the one thing that should comfort and help and strengthen us there is the thing that helped us in the beginning. Not what we have been, not what we have done, but the Grace of God in Jesus Christ our Lord. The Christian life starts with grace, it must continue with grace, it ends with grace. Grace wondrous grace. By the grace of God I am what I am. Yet not I, but the Grace of God which was with me.’
Clearly then, one answer to your question is certainly a resounding no. However, there is a second answer to this question that is vital otherwise we may end up diminishing the glory and wonder of the grace of God which we’ve just been revelling in! So, to your question, “Do we have to forgive others first before God will forgive us of our sin“, another answer is, “kind of… let me explain”.
In the prayer that Jesus taught his disciples (see Matt 6:9-13), we read these words: ‘And forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors’. Here Jesus seems to be showing us some kind of link between our ongoing forgiveness and the way we forgive those who wrong us. So what’s going on here?
The simplest way of answering this is to point to one of Jesus’ most graphic parables (or short pithy stories). In Matthew 18, Jesus tells the story of two servants. The first owed his master 10 thousand bags of gold. Now, Jesus is clearly using exaggeration here to make a very important/cutting point. It’s like that classic 1980’s milk advert which compares Liverpool Football Club with Accrington Stanley (“Who are they exactly?”). Jesus shows that this servant has no means of paying back this debt and so ‘falls’ upon the mercy of the master (v26). The master is gracious and cancels his debt (v27). The story then switches in shocking brevity to a second encounter that this graced servant has, this time with another servant (let’s call him the second servant) who owed him 100 silver coins (notice the contrast in the amount of debt!). Rather than responding like his master, the first servant refused and had the second servant thrown in prison (v30). You could not get a more shocking contrast. Gracious forgiveness of a debt so large and so overwhelming vs punitive punishment for a much smaller debt. The most shocking thing of all is that the one who had lavishly received grace, dealt out this punishment on the lesser debt! Grace had not transformed his heart! Grace had not transformed his view of other people.
This story illustrates Jesus’ words in the Lord’s Prayer. Essentially, if we choose to hold other people’s wrongs against them, not offering forgiveness, we’ve not understood the magnitude of our debt that was graciously forgiven by Christ. In short, we’ve not understood the gospel! We’ve not allowed the gospel to transform our hearts and the way we see other people. What we’ve actually done is used Christ as a ‘cosmic genie’ who, when we say the right words (maybe a prayer of commitment) gives us what we want (forgiveness from our debt of sin) and yet nothing in us has been transformed. By approaching Christ, this way, we’ve missed the vital point that the grace of God is meant to get down into our hearts, lives and attitudes and transform the way we see others. In fact, it’s impossible to truly receive the grace of God and it does not transform our hearts towards others (Ez 36:26-27).
So, to put it bluntly, if we choose not to forgive others, really what we are saying is we’ve not really understood the gospel! In fact, we’ve treated Jesus like a commodity and not a saviour and Lord. Our unwillingness to forgive others is the symptom of a much deeper heart sickness that needs addressing – blindness to our own indebtedness towards God and our desperate need for his grace.
Now before I close, let me be clear. Forgiveness is tough! In many situations, forgiveness will feel like a dry and dead act of the will. Yet, if you wait for your feelings to catch up then you may never act. Aren’t you glad that Jesus didn’t rely upon his feelings in the Garden of Gethsemane? If so we might never have had a saviour? In addition, forgiveness does not mean returning to an abusive or controlling situation. No, that’s returning to an unhealthy and possibly even unsafe environment. Forgiveness is the act of looking to the cross, seeing that we have wronged God a million times worse than anything that has been done to us and then looking towards that person(s) who has wronged us and saying, “in the same way Christ has forgiven me, I now choose to forgive you”. That’s gospel-shaped forgiveness!