Does forgiving someone mean forgetting it, and trusting them again?

The question

“Forgive and forget” is one of those phrases that everyone has heard so often it feels quoted. It gets said at funerals, in family arguments, in counselling rooms, and it gets said to people who have been badly hurt by somebody who has not stopped.

Two things are worth separating. Is “forget” in the Bible at all? And if forgiveness is commanded, does the command include handing the person back the place in your life they had before?

The answer

Start with the smaller claim, because it is quickly settled, and then do the one that matters.

”Forget” is not in the command. There is no verse in which anybody is told to forget a wrong done to them. “Forgive and forget” is an English proverb; it has been in the language for centuries, and Shakespeare has Lear say “Pray you now, forget and forgive” in the fourth act of King Lear. It is not a translation of anything. It is a good-sounding phrase that got welded onto a command it did not come from.

There is a verse people are half-remembering, and it repays looking at. “I will forgive their iniquity, and I will remember their sin no more” (Jeremiah 31:34). It is quoted again in Hebrews 8:12, and Isaiah says something similar: “I will not remember your sins” (Isaiah 43:25).

Two features of those sentences matter. The first is who is speaking. In all three it is God, about himself, inside the terms of a covenant. It is a promise God states about his own future conduct. It is not handed to anybody as an assignment, and no writer in Scripture turns it into one.

The second is what “remember” is doing. In Hebrew usage, remembering is characteristically an action rather than a mental event. “God remembered Noah… and God made a wind to pass over the earth. The waters subsided” (Genesis 8:1). God did not suddenly recall that Noah existed; God acted on his behalf. Read that way, “I will remember their sin no more” is not a claim about divine amnesia. It is a legal undertaking: this will not be raised against you again. Which is a considerably better promise than forgetting, because it is deliberate.

Now the part that actually decides the question.

What is commanded is the release of a debt. The vocabulary is consistently financial and legal. The line in the Lord’s Prayer is “Forgive us our debts, as we also forgive our debtors” (Matthew 6:12) — the noun is literally debts. In the parable that follows Peter’s question, the master “released him, and forgave him the debt” (Matthew 18:27). Colossians uses a different word again, one built on the root for grace: forgiving as a thing given freely (Colossians 3:13).

Put together, the picture is of cancelling a claim. You are owed something — an apology, a repayment, an explanation, a punishment — and you write it off. You stop pursuing collection. That is the act being commanded, and it is demanding enough on its own.

Trust is a different act, and Scripture never commands it. This is the load-bearing claim, so let me show the working rather than assert it, including the point at which it gets weaker.

There is no verse anywhere that tells a person to restore access, resume proximity, or hand back a position of trust to someone who has abused it. Not one. That is an argument from silence, and arguments from silence are the weakest kind, so it should not carry the whole weight — an absence of a command is not a prohibition.

But there is a positive datum, and it is a striking one. John writes: “many believed in his name, observing his signs which he did. But Jesus didn’t entrust himself to them, because he knew everyone” (John 2:23–24). In the Greek, “believed” in verse 23 and “entrust” in verse 24 are the same verb. They believed in him; he did not believe in them. These are not enemies — they are people who had just been convinced by what they saw. He still withheld himself, on the stated grounds that he knew what they were like.

That is narrative, not command, and it should be treated as such: it tells you that withholding trust is compatible with the character of the person who taught most about forgiveness. It does not hand you a rule about who to let near you.

And there is one more line, which is quietly one of the most realistic sentences in the New Testament. “If it is possible, as much as it is up to you, be at peace with all men” (Romans 12:18). Two conditionals in eleven words. Paul builds in, on the face of the instruction, the possibility that it will not be possible and that it will not be up to you. A command to restore every relationship could not have been written that way.

Which leaves the hard verse, and it should not be softened. Matthew 6:14–15 does tie the two forgivenesses together, and there is no reading of it that makes the conditional disappear. Christians have found it difficult for two thousand years, and anyone who tells you it dissolves on closer inspection is selling something. What can be said, and it is not nothing, is what the sentence is actually about: it is about forgiving — releasing a claim — and not about proximity, access or trust. The verse is heavy. It is not heavy in the direction the objection assumed.

The same goes for “seventy times seven” (Matthew 18:22). It sets no ceiling on forgiveness. It says nothing about keys, doors, contact or return, because the question Peter asked was not about those.

So the proverb does too much work. It bundles a command, a promise God makes about himself, and a decision Scripture leaves entirely open, and then hands all three to the person who was hurt as a single obligation.

The scripture in full

Genesis 8:1 — how “remember” is used

Where Christians disagree

What the text does not tell us

This page is about forgiveness between two people. What forgiveness means as a formal practice within a church differs between Christian traditions, and that question is not addressed here in any direction.

Within the interpersonal question, the text is silent on a great deal, and the silences are worth stating as plainly as the content:

In one paragraph

“Forget” is not in the Bible. It is an English proverb, in the language for centuries, that got attached to a command it did not come from. What Scripture commands is the release of a debt — the vocabulary is financial and legal throughout, from “forgive us our debts” to the master who “released him, and forgave him the debt”. The verse people half-remember about remembering sins no more is God speaking about his own conduct inside a covenant, and in Hebrew usage “remember” means to act rather than to recall. Trust is a separate act, and no verse commands its restoration: what the text gives instead is a narrative in which Jesus, surrounded by people who had just come to believe in him, “didn’t entrust himself to them, because he knew everyone”. Releasing a debt and handing back the keys are two different acts. Only one of them is commanded.