Forgetting The Past

Philippians 3:13-14 NIV

Forgetting what is behind and straining toward what is ahead, I press on toward the goal to win the prize for which God has called me heavenward in Christ Jesus. 

When I was in seventh grade, there was a boy named Mark Munschausen who used to make fun of me incessantly.  I was the tallest kid in the school and he was the shortest boy in my class.  He used to try his best to humiliate me in front of my schoolmates for what reason I don’t know.  Of all the other kids at the school, I was his victim.  After perhaps six months of this, I finally exploded.  On the grass field of the school playground while a group of us including Mark were playing football, he said something to me that set me off.  I chased him down and tackled him, began punching him relentlessly and then started choking him.  All the while tears were streaming down my face.  I had never been in a physical fight before…and haven’t since.  Someone must have pulled me off Mark because I don’t remember quitting on my own.  The fight ended, as much as you could call my pummeling him a fight, and as far as I can recall, I was never disciplined for it, never even brought to the principal’s office.  We settled our dispute on the playground and he never made fun of me again.  As I look back upon the “encounter” I must say I never made it my goal to look for other Munschausens in the world to fight them.  I never took out my rage on others of German decent.  I didn’t make it my determination to crush all other short people.  The name Mark has never had a negative connotation for me since the fight.  And freckled kids (Mark was freckled) have not stirred my anger.  All I have since then is a rather indifferent attitude toward the whole business.  I don’t feel guilty for what I did and I am not in any way still disturbed by the teasing I suffered back then.  It might as well have never happened it is so insignificant to my life now.

There is much made of how our past influences who we are today and there certainly is a great deal of truth to that contention.   Children who have been abused are generally scarred for life by it.  Plenty of men and women are afraid to get married after their first marriage failed.  Many people have trust issues because they have never forgotten how someone they loved betrayed them.  Some people won’t eat peas because they got sick at one time eating them.  There are adults who have never gotten over their fear of swimming because someone they knew drowned or of dogs because they were bitten when they were young or of going into dark rooms because they were molested when they were a child.  Perhaps you had a tough time liking someone who reminded you of someone else.  You might flinch when a car comes too close to you as you are driving after having been rear ended.  Plenty of people who came out of the depression continued the rest of their lives saving milk cartons,  old cans and scraps of wood just in case they might someday need them.  Many people try to run from their past by moving as far away from their home town as possible.  Some leave careers because of bad experiences that traumatized them.  The past for many is a terrible prison where they have been trapped; for others the past has kept them from trying new things and making new friends.  The past is not always our friend.

There is a person in the Bible who never escaped his past and it caused his downfall.  The third son of David, King of Israel was haunted by his past.  His sister was raped by his older half-brother and for three long years, Absalom plotted how he might avenge the crime.  As the years went by, Absalom grew increasingly bitter about the lack of action his father took when he heard about the rape and decided he would take justice into his own hands and take vengeance on his sister’s rapist .Absalom never said a word to Amnon, either good or bad; he hated Amnon because he had disgraced his sister Tamar.  (Genesis 13: 22 NIV) Finally, Absalom made his move and murdered Amnon, his half-brother who had committed the rape.  But Absalom’s rage was not stemmed by his revenge.  He then began to plot the overthrow of his father’s government and take the crown from him.  Absalom planned four years the revolt and eventually had enough support within the nation to rebel against his father’s rule.  He was eager in fact to have his own father murdered in the process.  Absalom, for whatever reason, his father’s lack of support when Absalom was young or David’s seeming indifference to the rape of Absalom’s sister Tamar, never forgot how he had been wronged by his dad. In the end, Absalom’s inability to forget his past cost him his life when he was killed in battle trying to destroy his dad.

There are millions around the world like Absalom who do not let go of their past even though it damages them psychologically.  In contrast Joseph was sold into slavery by his brothers and despite winding up in prison for a crime he did not commit was not governed by all the wrong done him.  In fact he faced his brothers fully and rather than condemning them, reminded them of the part God played in his exile to Egypt.  “And now, do not be distressed and do not be angry with yourselves for selling me here, because it was to save lives that God sent me ahead of you.  For two years now there has been famine in the land, and for the next five years there will not be plowing and reaping.  But God sent me ahead of you to preserve for you a remnant on earth and to save your lives by a great deliverance. So then, it was not you who sent me here, but God. He made me father to Pharaoh, lord of his entire household and ruler of all Egypt.” (Genesis 45:5-9 NIV)

Notice in this that Joseph never blocked out his past; he saw it as redeemed by God.  He did not deny the evil that was in the hearts of his brothers, he redefined though their work.  Nothing you or I have endured is too monstrous to be reconstituted into a resurrection of sorts.  Joseph did not forget his past; he was in a sense governed by it and not how the vast majority of us are governed by our past.  Getting sold into slavery was the only way Joseph would have voluntarily left his father to resettle in Egypt.  When Joseph was falsely accused by Potiphar’s wife of trying to rape her, God used her accusation to bring out Joseph’s own true loyalty to God and moral fortitude and establish the two joined together as his determining personality trait.  The idiotic assumption Potiphar made that Joseph was guilty led to Joseph gaining a rock solid trust in God to see him through any trial he might ever face.  It also landed him in the sole place where he could establish for one of Pharaoh’s most important officials the power he possessed as God’s personal servant and prophet.  We must not pass by this too quickly.  Only at the point of great desperation and need could Pharaoh’s cupbearer be ready to ascertain the most important bit of information he would encounter ever.  The Lord was intervening in his life and he might never have known this without meeting Joseph in prison; might never have been able to help Pharaoh see that God was intervening in the king’s own life if he hadn’t met Joseph in prison.

Given the monumental place our past has with regard to our present, we must see it for what it is.  The Apostle Paul had every reason to be consumed by the pain of his past.  After all, each time he made it back to Jerusalem he must have encountered some widow or orphan Paul personally put in that condition.  He came across in cities all over the western world men and women who had ugly scars because of what Paul had done to them.  It is not easy to live with a past such as Paul’s, especially given the insatiable hunger Paul had to love each soul he met.  If anyone had a dreadful past he must have wished to bury, it had to have been the Apostle Paul.  Yet he never seemed emotionally crippled by his past and he certainly never buried his past.  This is why.

Everything changes when we take for ourselves Jesus Christ crucified, including our past.  When Jesus, God in flesh died on the cross, He redeemed us.  That means He gained for Himself by dying everything there is about us and immediately transformed it into something completely new including what we have faced before.  The transformation cuts both ways…forward and backward.  We have a future that is different and eventually perfect and we have a past that is different and eventually perfect.  When we are born again, God does not leave us with a fragmented and awful heredity that leaves us psychologically crippled.  He makes our past right and good.  No experience we have had once we have been totally redeemed by the Cross of Christ is a gaping wound…it is God’s own place of strength.  Imagine a separated shoulder that after it is surgically repaired is stronger and more helpful than ever.  Your past, once God has had His way with it through the Cross of Christ is your ally and valuable resource for the enhancement of your life as well as the lives of a multitude of others.  It is only as we defy our Lord to make good of our past by unbelief that we limp about, crippled by our past.

Paul’s rallying cry, of “forgetting what is behind”, was not a spin doctor’s challenge to pretend like nothing happened to us before.  He simply stated how it is when we give our lives to Christ.  The past is just as good to us as our future not because we decide it is but because it really is.  Consider this about the forgetting.  Imagine you have suffered a terrible back injury.  All you think about is that back of yours because it through pain demands your attention.  Day and night, each movement and activity is ruled to some degree by your aching back.  Your back comes up in your daily conversations, is a big part of your praying and constitutes your rapt attention.  But suppose that back of yours begins to heal.  You think about it less, pray about it more infrequently and it comes up in fewer and fewer of your conversations.  You don’t even notice your back when you lift something or sit or take a walk.  It is so completely healed that you forget your back.  That is what Paul is talking about your past.  In Christ, as you in faith put your past into the body of Jesus crucified, your past gets more than healed; it becomes perfected…the perfect past for one as important and beloved of God as you.

The revelation from God that you have sinned is the point at which you start to see your past become your great friend.  The Bible makes it clear what you must do about your past.  Repent, then, and turn to God, so that your sins may be wiped out, that times of refreshing may come from the Lord, and that he may send the Christ, who has been appointed for you — even Jesus. (Acts 3:19-20 NIV) When you turn from your sin and face God squarely, which is what “repent” means, a miracle happens.  The Holy Spirit comes upon you, and you are not the same person you were before.  Christ enters you and you begin to work in His power and you think with His mind working by means of your mind and you love through Christ and bless through Christ and help through Christ and encourage through Christ and heal through Christ and pray through Christ.  Everything changes when you turn from your sin and face God.  Your mind does not think with a limp and you do not act lamely but capably, effectively as Jesus Christ lives through all you do.  Repent, for you as a Christian, does not mean a groveling, despair over your past; it is a turning to God that Christ may live thoroughly through you. Our road map through our past into our future is Galatians 2: 20.  I have been crucified with Christ.  That is your past.  And I no longer live but Christ lives in me.  That is what you are now. And the life I live in the body I live by faith in the Son of God who loved me and gave Himself for me.  That is your past combined with who you are now determining what you will be from this point forward.  Take a moment to remember some things that you have had happen in your past…good or bad that have shaped you and influenced you now.  Fling those memories of what happened into the crucified body of Christ and miraculously, perfectly, God will transform them and they will be…each one of them, cause for you to be happy.  They are and forever will be your friend and your help as you move forward in Christ.