Big Healing Book - Am I Sick Because God Has Turned Me Over to the Tormentors

Am I Sick Because God Has Turned Me Over to the Tormentors for Not Forgiving Someone?

This question is based on the Bible passage below, the last two verses in particular:

Matthew 18:21-35:
Then came Peter to him, and said, Lord, how oft shall my brother sin against me, and I forgive him? till seven times?
Jesus saith unto him, I say not unto thee, Until seven times: but, Until seventy times seven.
Therefore is the kingdom of heaven likened unto a certain king, which would take account of his servants.
And when he had begun to reckon, one was brought unto him, which owed him ten thousand talents.
But forasmuch as he had not to pay, his lord commanded him to be sold, and his wife, and children, and all that he had, and payment to be made.
The servant therefore fell down, and worshipped him, saying, Lord, have patience with me, and I will pay thee all.
Then the lord of that servant was moved with compassion, and loosed him, and forgave him the debt.
But the same servant went out, and found one of his fellowservants, which owed him an hundred pence: and he laid hands on him, and took him by the throat, saying, Pay me that thou owest.
And his fellowservant fell down at his feet, and besought him, saying, Have patience with me, and I will pay thee all.
And he would not: but went and cast him into prison, till he should pay the debt.
So when his fellowservants saw what was done, they were very sorry, and came and told unto their lord all that was done.
Then his lord, after that he had called him, said unto him, O thou wicked servant, I forgave thee all that debt, because thou desiredst me:
Shouldest not thou also have had compassion on thy fellowservant, even as I had pity on thee?
And his lord was wroth, and delivered him to the tormentors, till he should pay all that was due unto him.
So likewise shall my heavenly Father do also unto you, if ye from your hearts forgive not every one his brother their trespasses.

This passage is admittedly difficult, but that won’t stop us from discussing it. This passage worries quite a few Christians because they have been taught from the pulpit that God will retract a believer’s forgiveness for sins if he fails to forgive someone else. That would be the most hideous consequence imaginable, because forgiven people go to heaven and unforgiven people go to hell. If God were to retract the forgiveness that Jesus paid for you to have – for even one sin – you would spend eternity in hell. So it is of utmost importance to determine first of all whether Jesus indeed meant that you could go to hell even after receiving Him if you fail to forgive other people.

The unforgiving servant was not in any position to ever pay off his huge debt, so he would have been permanently turned over to the tormentors for inability to pay his debt. Is this a picture of a believer being tormented in hell forever, and is that consistent with the New Testament’s teaching for the Church Age?

This passage has several popular explanations. One is that it literally says what it seems to say at face value – you will go to hell if you don’t forgive other people even though you are a new creation in Christ. A second tries to simplify the matter (I would say oversimplify and sidestep it) by asserting that if you don’t forgive others, you are really not a Christian in the first place, so there is no danger to a true believer, who would surely forgive others. Another is that this was pre-cross teaching similar to statements that if you don’t forgive others, God won’t forgive you, and that this has been overridden by the forgiveness that you have in Christ after the cross. Another is that although you won’t go to hell, God will turn you over to demonic tormentors who will make you miserable if you do not forgive. Another position is that God will start treating you as an unbeliever even though you are still technically a believer, and you will be cut off from all the blessings that are yours in Christ until you repent and forgive the other person. Another angle is that the torment is something that you bring on yourself.

So let’s sift through some of this and see what makes sense and what doesn’t.

Can A Believer Go to Hell for Unforgiveness?

I have to outright reject any teaching that God will send a believer to hell for ANY kind of sin, including the sin of unforgiveness, which is itself a forgiven sin. You HAVE BEEN delivered from wrath, as is clear in many Scriptures. No one who has called on Jesus to save Him (and has not subsequently outright rejected Him) needs to fear going to hell based on his bad works. That would create a Galatian-style gospel that Paul warned about and put people in bondage. This is similar to the erroneous teaching that God will vomit you into hell if you are lukewarm instead of hot, to say nothing of the teaching that if a believer remarries after a divorce, he will suffer in hell for it.

In these cases, there seems to be Scripture to back the statements.

Didn’t Jesus threaten lukewarm believers with hell? No, when He said that He would “spue you out of His mouth,” the word you in the Greek is singular. This was addressed to the pastor at the church at Laodicea, not every individual believer at Laodicea. He was threatening to remove the pastor of the Laodicean church. (I realize that Jesus wrote to the “messengers” of the churches, which some have interpreted as being the “angels” of the churches, but it makes more sense to conclude that they were the pastors of the churches. Reading the instructions Jesus gave in the second and third chapters of Revelation make sense if addressed to a person, but not much sense if they were addressed to literal angels at the churches.) This doesn’t mean that He would create a Galatian gospel by sending that pastor to hell, which would be inconsistent with everything Paul taught.

The believers at Laodicea were not in danger of being personally vomited into hell for not being hot enough. This issue hits close to home because the very first sermon I heard as a born-again believer was at a Pentecostal church where the preacher taught that you would burn in hell if you were a lukewarm Christian! I was petrified the first year I was saved that I would still go to hell even though I had called on Jesus to save me. I dreaded that I might not be hot enough! No Christian should have to go through that kind of torment due to misinterpretations of Scripture!

Didn’t Jesus say that marrying a divorced person is adultery and didn’t Paul say that no adulterer would inherit the kingdom of God? This would seem to fit together to say that remarrying after a divorce will send you to hell, as is actually taught in some circles. But the rules for the Church Age are different from what Jesus discussed with the Jews concerning the Law. Even under the Law, a divorced person could remarry. Thus, when Paul said that a woman is bound by the Law to her husband as long as he lives (Romans 7:2), he could not have meant that a woman is bound to her ex-husband, which was not true under the Law, which stated that she was free to remarry (Deuteronomy 24:1-2). Paul’s teaching that a divorced person may remarry (1 Corinthians 7:27-28) has led to many silly “Who’s right, Paul or Jesus?” arguments, but they BOTH had to be right because both spoke in Scripture. Jesus was speaking to the Jews to convince them that they could not follow the Law enough to avoid needing to be saved, while Paul was speaking to the Church about the rules for the Church Age. Once you understand that, you see that there is no conflict.

Why am I talking about remarriage in an article about unforgiveness? I want you to see a principle. Things during the Church Age are not the same as things before the Church Age. When Jesus talked about committing adultery in your heart (which I don’t advocate, of course), was He implementing a Law of Moses 2.0 that would be even harder to follow than the original Law of Moses that only He managed to keep? No, “adultery in your heart” is a forgiven sin just like any other sin under the New Covenant. I believe Jesus was showing the legalistic religious leaders the absolute futility of thinking that they could save themselves by keeping the Law by pointing out their secret guilt before God. He wanted them to be convicted of their need to be saved by grace, not by their works.

Likewise, if you fail to act like our merciful God and refuse to forgive someone else, you absolutely deserve to be handed over to the torturers. This parable makes that clear. The missing piece is that Jesus was handed over to the torturers because that is what your sin, including the sin of unforgiveness, rightly deserves. The point of the parable that you deserve condemnation for unforgiveness remains intact, but the necessity of God torturing YOU over it has been superseded by God’s torturing of JESUS in your place.

Can New Testament Believers Be Judged?

Yes. The believers at Corinth were judged for their irreverence toward the Lord’s Supper, consisting of ill treatment of other believers who wanted to partake but could not. But Scripture says that this judgment was so that they would NOT be condemned with the world. It was correction and prevention of the further harming of other believers, but the judgment that came at Corinth did NOT result in the condemnation of hell for the individuals involved. These believers, even if they went to heaven early, did not lose their forgiveness over their sins. So this can’t be cited as a case where a forgiven believer becomes unforgiven. See Sickness as Chastening and Judgment in the New Testament for more details about the situation in Corinth.

Are Those Who Don’t Forgive Just Not Righteous in the First Place?

This is a convenient way to rationalize the parable in question and Mark 11:26 – assume that the unforgiving people just aren’t saved. However, that is inconsistent with other Scriptures. For starters, Ephesians 4:32 and Colossians 3:13 command forgiven believers to forgive others. So it must be possible for a believer to be unforgiving, otherwise these commands would be needless.

Will God Turn You Over to Demonic Tormentors?

If any tormenting gets done for any sin, either God does it or you turn yourself over to it. God never subcontracts vengeance because vengeance is His (Romans 12:19 and elsewhere). Satan and his demons don’t torment anyone in hell; God is the one who created it to be a place of torment. So no, God does not turn you over to the devil or his agents for punishment. The closest you’ll get to that is when Paul ordered the church at Corinth to hand a sinning man over to the devil for the destruction of his flesh, but even that was not for punishment and vengeance when you read the account carefully. The idea was for the man to be restored, which he was.

If the devil or demons tormented you at God’s beckoning, He would be unfair to punish them in hell for doing the job He assigned them. Nothing the devil and demons do is the will of God; they are always anti-God. The man in Corinth was handed over to Satan have things happen to him that were NOT God’s will so that he would wise up. Satan steals, kills and destroys because those things are his nature. If he thought for a minute that he were helping anyone be a better Christian or become a Christian in the first place, he’d stop.

Does This Mean That You Bring Torment on Yourself?

I consider it a fair statement that you DO bring torment on yourself if you refuse to forgive. It creates a poisonous environment. If you are cruel, you trouble your own flesh (Proverbs 11:17). However, if you do it to yourself, it is NOT God handing you over to be tormented because He supposedly no longer forgives you.

Will God Cut You Off from Your Blessings and Treat You as If You Were an Unbeliever?

We know that God has already blessed you (Ephesians 1:3), so the question is whether he will blockade you from accessing your blessings by faith if you are in unforgiveness. This would leave you in the same condition as an unbeliever, cut off from God’s blessings. But this would just be another way of saying that God punishes you for unforgiveness. God already punished Jesus for your unforgiveness, so He would be unjust to demand two payments for the same sin.

Make no mistake about it – you WILL have trouble accessing your blessings when you hold on to a grudge. But it is not God causing the blockage, it’s YOU. You are creating an environment for yourself where it will be very difficult to receive anything. Unforgiveness agrees with the Law, and you don’t receive anything when you agree with the Law – you only receive when you agree with grace.

This leads to the only other option – that what Jesus said has been overridden during the Church Age. But don’t we invalidate Scripture if we take that position? No. Let’s discuss this at some length.

The Word Is All Inspired, but a Newer Covenant Can Override an Older One

When something is explicitly replaced at a later time by something different, what was introduced later supersedes what was introduced earlier. For example, Moses commanded the keeping of the Sabbath. However, the New Testament is clear that you are free to treat all days the same or treat one as different from another, and it’s your choice. That supersedes Sabbath-keeping in the Old Testament, which is by the way the only one of the Ten Commandments that does not carry over into the New Testament.

Similarly, eating certain food, such as shellfish, was considered an abomination under the Old Covenant. However, the New Covenant is clear that all foods are lawful, so that supersedes the older commandment.

1 Timothy 4:4-5:
For every creature of God is good, and nothing to be refused, if it be received with thanksgiving:
For it is sanctified by the word of God and prayer

Jesus told His followers before He died and rose to pray that God would deliver them from evil (or the evil one, depending on your translation). However, Colossians 1:13 is plain that in the Church Age, you have been delivered from the devil. Jesus’ “words in red” have been superseded by what He bought for us when he died and rose. He hadn’t done that yet when He gave the sample prayer commonly known as the Lord’s Prayer.

I believe that Jesus’ “shocking” statements that if you did not forgive others, God would not forgive you was addressed to those under the Law, as in the Church Age we have already been forgiven for ALL sins (Ephesians 4:32, Colossians 3:13 and elsewhere). (Mark 11:26, where Jesus said that God won’t forgive you if you don’t forgive others, is explained in far more depth in the article What 1 John 1:9 Really Means.) I therefore hold that in light of the Scriptures, your being already forgiven supersedes any pre-resurrection Scripture saying that God WILL forgive you only if and when you forgive others.

However, there is another nuance in the passage about the unforgiving servant. He was ALREADY FORGIVEN too, but lost his forgiveness. Can we lose our forgiveness, and thus our salvation, despite having been ALREADY FORGIVEN? The argument above about Mark 11:26 doesn’t really cover that case.

Final Destination: It’s by Grace

The key in the New Covenant is that we are not saved by works; we are saved by being born again when we confess Jesus as Lord. You become a new person on the inside, a new spirit being that did not exist before, when you confess Christ. In order to go to hell, you would have to become unregenerate again. Losing your salvation over not forgiving someone is tantamount to saying that a given sin (in this case, unforgiveness) could send you to hell. This would teach that sin causes you to become the “old man” again. That is foreign to what the epistles teach the Church about that matter. Once you establish that (supposedly) a sin could send you to hell, you could dive right in to the erroneous teaching in some Pentecostal circles that you lose your salvation every time you sin in ANY way and you have to keep getting re-saved, being careful to not die with ANY unrepented sin lest you burn in hell. That idea creates fear and bondage by incorrectly dividing the Word of God.

Given that you didn’t get saved by avoiding sin, what makes you think that you STAY saved by avoiding sin? You were saved by grace through faith, so as long as your faith is in Jesus for salvation, your sins are irrelevant to your final destination. Your final destination does not depend on being saved by grace through faith and THEN “living right” afterward. It’s all based on believing what Jesus did for you and not based one bit on how much you sin later.

Thus, the idea that any sin, including the sin of unforgiveness, could result in the forfeiture of your salvation, is contrary to the message of grace in the New Testament. However, Jesus’ words were in the New Testament too, so we do we do about that parable?

Jesus’ Parables and New Covenant Salvation

The following statement may seem like heresy to you at first, but I can prove it: Jesus told some parables that did NOT reflect the New Covenant plan of salvation by grace through faith that the Church enjoys today. The obvious question is why not, and the obvious answer is that Jesus could not offer the New Covenant plan of salvation because He had not yet died and risen from the dead so that we could become new creations. He spoke to the Jews under the Law, and the point of much of what He taught was how mankind utterly deserved hell and the futility of trying to make yourself righteous.

But didn’t Jesus say that some people would be condemned for their WORKS? Absolutely. But He didn’t say that about the righteous.

In the parable of the good seed and the tares (weeds), those who offend and do evil are thrown into a furnace of fire for their WORKS.

In the parable of the net, those who are bad are thrown into a furnace of fire based on their WORKS.

In the parable of the talents, hell was the “reward” for the person with one talent who buried it in the ground. He went to hell based on his WORKS.

In His story of the sheep and the goats, the goats were consigned to an eternity in hell based on what they did NOT do – visit the sick and those in prison, cloth the naked, and so on. Their judgment was based on their WORKS.

The rich man who was not generous with Lazarus was sentenced to hell for his lack of generosity – his WORKS.

Not all of Jesus’ stories discuss works in regard to eternal destiny. The account of the rich young ruler at first appears to be works-related, as Jesus told him that if he wanted to enter life, he needed to keep the commandments. However, it came to light that he was a good commandment-keeper from his youth, but Jesus then commanded him, “Come, follow Me,” which he was not doing at the time. Your works don’t determine your final destination; whether you are a follower of Jesus is all that matters.

The parable of the wedding is more like what we see in Paul’s epistles, where both good and bad – regardless of their works, were invited to a wedding, but one fellow was cast out for not having on a wedding garment, which could be an analogy of the robe of righteousness we have when we receive Christ.

The parable of the lost sheep and the parable of the lost coin both emphasize the need for repentance. The prodigal son threw himself on his father’s mercy and had no trust in his past, which he realized made him unworthy. His restoration was based solely on mercy.

What do we make of all this? Someone near us actually proclaims a works gospel and claims that Jesus’ parables back him! Do they?

Unrighteous people going to hell for their works is New Covenant. In the book of Revelation, the wicked are judged for their works at a great white throne. What is NOT New Covenant is people going to heaven for their works. People today are saved by faith, not by works. But those who are NOT saved will still be judged according to their works.

Second, Jesus said that a good tree bears good fruit and a bad tree bears bad fruit. A good tree is not good because it bears good fruit; it bears good fruit because it is a good tree. So those who do good works can be assumed to be good trees, which in a Church Age context would be people who are saved. People can’t do good works to become Christians, but Christians do good works because they ARE Christians.

So I don’t see Jesus’ words as a problem.

Conclusion and Warning

Under the New Covenant, ratified by the blood Jesus shed at a time later than when He told the story of the unforgiving servant, you do not lose your forgiveness and thus your salvation if you fail to forgive someone else.

However, holding on to unforgiveness is one of the most unchristian things you can ever do. Jesus’ entire ministry was based on love, mercy and forgiveness. Your life does not represent Him well if you refuse to forgive the way He did. Also, you are commanded to forgive, as we saw above. Failing to forgive is a sin, and sin always has negative consequences that degrade your life. You could well end up tormented because you didn’t forgive, but it won’t be God tormenting you but rather you refusing to stop doing something that results in torment. If you sow to the flesh, you will reap corruption from the flesh (Galatians 6:8).