How do you forgive someone who has wronged you? They have treated you poorly and are in the wrong, whether that is ever admitted or even realized. How do you forgive someone who has wounded you and then they played the hero or the victim in the aftermath? I think it is a legitimate challenge and one that we need God’s help to truly forgive in sincerity, whether we get the apology or not. One starting place in asking God to help us forgive is to look at examples where God was the one doing the forgiving. 2 Chronicles 30 is one of those examples. The people are celebrating the Passover for the first time in a long time at King Hezekiah’s invitation. We find that they aren’t super familiar with all the ins and outs of this practice. Despite being of central importance, Passover has been long neglected in their worshipping life. So they’re not all clean according to the Law of Moses. That’s not good! Yet King Hezekiah prays this profound prayer, “May the Lord, who is good, pardon everyone who sets their heart on seeking God—the Lord, the God of their ancestors—even if they are not clean according to the rules of the sanctuary.” This is an extraordinary pardon! There are rules for this kind of thing, but Hezekiah is asking for the Lord’s leniency on such matters and wants to focus on the heart. The Lord’s response to this extraordinary request? “And the Lord heard Hezekiah and healed the people.” I find this prayer and God’s response such a helpful counterexample to my own stereotypes of the Old Testament. I get stuck thinking the Old is all rules and law and the New is all love and grace. A careful reading of both reminds us that there are standards to be upheld in the New Testament (even in Jesus’s teaching!) and there is profound grace in the Old Testament, such as in Hezekiah’s prayer and the Lord’s gracious and forgiving response. Just as at the anointing of King David when we were taught that “people look at outward appearances but the Lord looks at the heart” (1 Samuel 16:7), we find generations later in 2 Chronicles 30 that the Lord is interested in the heart. After all, the purpose of the Law in the first place was to keep our hearts from going astray. Can we do the hard work of the heart work to forgive others? Can we release our grudges against those who have wronged us when we don’t know for sure what is in their heart? Easier said than done. But we start with our own heart and can pray, “God, make my heart more like yours so that I can learn to forgive as you have forgiven, to love as you have first loved us.” - Pastor Steven