Does God forgive everyone?
No He does not.
Does He want too?
Yes, He does.
Is He willing to?
Yes.
Will He do it right now if they ask?
Yes.
Is it all wrapped up, ready to go?
Yes.
All paid for?
Yes. That’s where forgiveness is at, but He doesn’t forgive everyone, and there needs to be repentance when you’re talking about Biblical forgiveness, because God is just.
Still God loves everyone, whether they are repentant or not. Still, God is totally just. It's up to us to repent. It's up to us to seek His forgiveness.
Look at the way God forgives. Hebrews 8:12 says:
"FOR I WILL BE MERCIFUL TO THEIR INIQUITIES, AND I WILL REMEMBER THEIR SINS NO MORE."

Can you imagine what it would be like if God forgave the way that people forgive? You sin against somebody and then ask their forgiveness and they say, "Sure, I forgive you, but I am never, never going forget it. What's more, I think I'm going remind you of it. As a matter of fact, I think I'll remind you of it every time I see you."

God is merciful though, and He doesn't give us what we deserve.

"4But God, being rich in mercy, because of His great love with which He loved us, 5even when we were dead in our transgressions, made us alive together with Christ (by grace you have been saved), 6and raised us up with Him, and seated us with Him in the heavenly {places} in Christ Jesus, 7so that in the ages to come He might show the surpassing riches of His grace in kindness toward us in Christ Jesus." Ephesians 2:4-7

Does that sound like something we deserve? The surpassing riches of His grace? That's what you see repeated in that passage; grace connected with forgiveness. Indeed, it's what you see the Bible, embodied in Jesus and throughout the gospel and the New Testament. Grace means "unmerited favor." Again, it's the idea that we don't deserve forgiveness and He gives it anyway.

This is one of the things we need to get squared away in our thinking when we're talking about the whole issue of forgiveness. When I'm going to forgive somebody, I need to recognize that I don't just forgive that person "if they deserve it." The reason for that is because there's actually nobody that deserves forgiveness. Everybody deserves justice, right? And justice should be meted out, right? That's what an unforgiving heart is looking for. It's looking for justice. We would be in a really bad way if God had an unforgiving heart. (laughing here) It would be a real mess for our lives. "For God so loved the world," right? He gave His only begotten Son. For us. So that we wouldn't have to die. So that we could have eternal life. Forgiveness for us from God is all wrapped up in love. Not a friendship type of love, but He has us wrapped up in His "agape" love. In that agonizing love that sees a value in us despite what we're doing.

So, just from the outset, when we're talking about forgiveness, we're dealing with something that's beyond us. It's wrapped up in God's love, and that's the fruit of Holy Spirit. Holy Spirit is working in our life, and what's hopefully going to be happening is, we're going to start seeing people the way that God sees them. We're probably going to see some of them as messes and with trashed lives. We may be angry with them. We may be totally angry with them about the things that they've done, but hopefully we're going to be loving them despite the things that they've done and the fact that they're such, well....jerks.

In Matthew 6, Jesus set it up so that we would be reminded continually about the need for forgiveness;

9"Pray, then, in this way: 'Our Father who is in heaven, Hallowed be Your name.
10'Your kingdom come. Your will be done, On earth as it is in heaven.
11'Give us this day our daily bread.
12'And forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors.
13'And do not lead us into temptation, but deliver us from evil. For Yours is the kingdom and the power and the glory forever. Amen.'

12'And forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors. ?
Huh?
What?
Okay, that's kind of scary. (laughing here) If you go to pray, and you pray anything along those lines like, "God forgive me, just like I forgive other people," that will put things spiritually into line. As soon as you pray that, there are people who will pop into your mind, right? That is probably someone that God wants you to deal with.

"14For if you forgive others for their transgressions, your heavenly Father will also forgive you. 15But if you do not forgive others, then your Father will not forgive your transgressions." Matthew 6:14,15

Wow. It's interesting that out of the Lord's prayer, forgiveness is the only aspect that gets a commentary by Jesus. He doesn't talk about our "daily bread." He doesn't mention honoring the Father. What he talks about is the issue of forgiveness. Why do you think that is? Personally, I think it's because forgiveness is the hardest of these things to do.

There are those who would try to soften the blow of these statements by saying that a person who will not forgive is obviously a person who has never been forgiven by God. That is not true. There are lots of people who have been forgiven by God, who are unwilling to forgive others. There are people who have a real relationship with Jesus, who have a hard heart toward certain people in their lives, and those verses are a warning, and God is not going to go away on this issue. It needs to be taken care of.

As far as the spiritual implications of verses 14 and 15 go, I have no idea. But it needs to be taken care of. Jesus made that apparent. So how do we get this stuff done? We're often dealing with people who have hurt us pretty radically, and it's a hard thing to forgive the "unforgivable," but Jesus did some hard things. Going to the Cross was pretty hard. Hard words. Hard wood. Hard nails. He took care of forgiveness though. He sacrificed. He provided. He forgave.

I like it that God recognizes that I've been hurt. He recognizes that everybody gets hurt, that we're all damaged goods. I know of people, men and women I've sat with, who've been sexually abused in radical ways. They hurt. Some of them were
once in a state where they wondered why it was allowed to happen to them and why didn't God cause it to stop. They literally wanted God to kill their abuser.

It can be a hard thing to realize at times when we're being hurt that God doesn't just love us. He loves the person who is hurting us too and that's a hard thing to hear for some people, but that's how God is and He doesn't change, according to the Bible. "For God so loved the world."

So did God love Hitler? Did He love Stalin? Nero, Genghis Kahn, all of these people through history who have gone about just destroying other people's lives? Obviously those guys died in their sin, and they are getting payment for that. But up until their death, God is giving them every possible opportunity to turn from their sin and repent.

Look at a guy in the Old Testament named Manasseh. He went around persecuting the believers, he set up idols for false worship. He does all this garbage and God sends him into captivity to Babylon, and (though this is not taught in the Bible) Jewish history says that he took his fathers' friend, Isaiah and had him put to death, and the way that he did this was by having Isaiah "sawn asunder." When they did this sort of thing, they didn't saw people across the middle. They started between the legs, and sawed toward the head until they were finished.

Now after this in his captivity, Manasseh ends up calling on the name of the Lord and gets saved. Now, true, he reaps some of the consequences of his behavior, but he gets saved. The Bible specifically says in 2 Chronicles 33 that God forgives him. Manasseh dies, and where does he go? He goes to paradise, specifically the same place where he could stand in front of Isaiah, the man whose gruesome, horrible death he caused.

Is Isaiah asking, "What are you doing here?" No, obviously at that point Isaiah has been perfected, and Isaiah knew something that we all need to know. He knows that what somebody has done to us, in comparison with what we owe to God is nothing. We should forgive, because God forgives us.

Most issues of unforgiveness are wrapped up in an attitude of, "I'm better than you are." You know what? From my perspective, you probably are better than I am. But from Gods' perspective, none of us is better. That's something we all need to recognize in order to forgive.