The word in Greek for "forgive" is worth taking a good look at. It's the same word frequently translated as "divorce," as well as several others. Literally, it means "to let go of, to release, to detach oneself from."
The question then becomes, where our presentations of hamartia are concerned, who has to do the letting go in order for us to move on? The answer to this question really depends on how well we know God personally, and what image of Him we have in our minds.
As I have previously written, all human beings have an inherited neurological malfunction as compared with other animals. If our behaviors are sourced from our own neurology or psychology, no matter how well intentioned our behaviors, we end up causing harm in some way due to everything being run through an overactive threat response system in the human brain. We literally cannot help our behaviors being informed and influenced by this malfunction any more than say, an autistic man can help his behaviors being informed by his own ASD. God understands this very human problem better than we do.
Seeing it this way, God is like a parent with children with a disorder which affects thinking and behavior negatively. Does that parent keep a record of every abnormal and negative behavior that those children have and hold it against them with each passing day? We would likely say that a good parent does not. A good parent understands that the child needs training to minimize the harm they can do, and works towards that child being able to function in society as well as they can without causing harm. A good parent praises successes, no matter how small, and lets go of the past failures no matter how large. That parent will likely take measures to protect both the child and those around them if it becomes necessary, but not because they are holding that child's past failures against them. The greatest wish of such a parent is that the child's disorder would be cured, and their single thought towards the child is to work towards that goal. This should sound familiar to any parent reading this who has such a child.
So, why on earth then would God not let go of the presentations of our human malfunction if we are making progress? If a human being realizes that what he is doing is causing harm, and turns away from it and asks for help, why wouldn't God immediately be right there waiting to do just that? He says as much in Ezekiel 18.
Now let me ask you this, does the good parent demand payment from the child with the disorder in order to not hold their harmful behaviors against them? I would think that the obvious answer would be "no." The good parent would train the child to try and make the harm they caused right, to try to fix what they had hurt if at all possible. They would not condition their love and forgiveness on being given gifts to appease them. We would call this latter parent an abusive and manipulative one, and rightly so.
So, if God, as the good parent, is not the one who needs to let go of our presentations of hamartia, who is? We are.
Our behaviors that cause harm trigger our own good/evil responses which are based on the threat response. Suddenly we find ourselves doing those things which we have previously agreed were "bad," and this then means that we ourselves are a threat and "bad" and therefore must be pushed away or destroyed. Such cognitive dissonance is the source of many psychiatric disorders, and leads the person to either decide that the behavior wasn't "bad" for some reason or other, into a downward spiral, or even blocking the event altogether in one's conscious memory so as to remove the dissonance as the psyche tries to protect itself from... itself.
The only real solution is to admit the behavior caused harm, and then let it go, something which the psyche can have a tremendous amount of difficulty doing because of its own self-image and the changes or updates to that self-image which may be required.
This is the reason why, even after a person has repeatedly heard that God will forgive their sins, they don't feel forgiven, saved, or set free. It's not God holding these harmful behaviors against them, it's their own psyches still running the memory of the harmful behavior through its threat response system which has been adapted to include threats to its belief system, and threats to its ideas of right and wrong, both of which are key parts of its self-image.
So why were the sacrifices then prescribed in the Old Testament? To appease, not God, but the human conscience. In ancient times, contracts were sealed with the blood of animals. A sacrifice for sin was considered a contract between a person and his god that the deity wouldn't hold the sin against him. This is also why God got sick of sin sacrifices in the psalms and prophets because they were meaningless if the person offering them didn't turn away from the harmful behaviors.
This is also why Jesus' death on the cross was not a sacrifice to appease God from holding our harmful behaviors against us, but His death on the cross was meant to make all of us one with Him so that His Spirit could take the reins of our behaviors and bypass our malfunctioning neurology. It was meant to provide a means to act and speak without our malfunction informing and influencing those behaviors, not so that He wouldn't punish us for them.
So, the real question then becomes, do we trust God if He says He won't hold our "sins" against us if we turn away from them, or don't we? And also, are we just thinking that Jesus' death on the cross means that we have a "do whatever we want and face no consequences" card?
He wasn't impressed with those people who abused the sin sacrifices in the Old Testament that way, and Paul's writings indicate He's not impressed with those who look at Jesus' death, burial, and resurrection that way either. We put such malfunctioning people who refuse to be treated or make progress into places where they can't hurt themselves or others. Not because we want them to suffer, but because we don't want them to cause harm. It's clear from Scripture that God does a similar thing when it becomes necessary.
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