Militant
There is something militant involved in forgiveness. ” In so doing you will heap burning coals on his head,” Rom.12:20. Some call this “passive-aggressive.” Christ called it being like God, Matt.5:48.
Meekness is confused with weakness. Moses was the meekest man on the earth, Num.12:3. Yet Pharaoh and his kingdom were brought to its knees before him. All he did was step aside and leave his vindication to God. He had already tried his own hand at vengeance, killing one lone Egyptian. It put him 40 years behind his destiny on the backside of a desert. Vengeance is not ours, says the testimony of Moses.
Meekness is yielding my rights, and their enforcement, to God. Moses not only became the meekest man on the earth but the most powerful as well. The most powerful ruler of the most powerful human kingdom on earth broke before him in absolute humiliation and devastation. The Egyptian landscape was left in a fiery hailstone smoldering like unto a thermal nuclear blast wave.
Meekness is not weakness, its power is just unexpected, left to God’s behind-the-scenes execution in His time, and in His way. Our ways and our time must step aside in preference of forgiveness, doing good to our enemies and praying for them that offend us.
Saul, now Paul, certainly wouldn’t call it passive after his Damascus road conquest. Neither would Pharaoh. Today, the “Adversary” feels the same way. He trembles at those who are detonating the secret, atomic power of meekness.