Matthew 6:9-13 (NKJV) 9“In this manner, therefore, pray: Our Father in heaven, Hallowed be Your name. 10Your kingdom come. Your will be done On earth as it is in heaven. 11Give us this day our daily bread. 12And forgive us our debts, As we forgive our debtors. 13And do not lead us into temptation, But deliver us from the evil one. For Yours is the kingdom and the power and the glory forever. Amen.
We have been looking at the weapons of our warfare given to us to resist the devil. One of the major weapons in our arsenal is the weapon of prayer. In our last post we looked at Jesus’ request of the Father to forgive us our sins. We must keep a repentant heart before God. This does not mean that we should feel condemned. It simply means that we must be aware that we live in a sinful world and that we are not immune to its influence. In our prayer we need to be open to hearing from God if something is not right and we must be quick to repent when we know we are out of sync with God’s nature.
However, Jesus ties this to another truth that is just as important if not more so. God forgives but we must also forgive. After Jesus concludes his prayer template, he revisits the idea of forgiveness.
Matthew 6:14-15 (NKJV) 14For if you forgive men their trespasses, your heavenly Father will also forgive you. 15But if you do not forgive men their trespasses, neither will your Father forgive your trespasses.
This is a scripture that is a little difficult. We know that God loves us unconditionally. We know that we are saved by grace, God’s undeserved favor, and that we access that salvation by faith (Eph. 2:8.) Is God’s forgiveness really dependent on our willingness to forgive others? Jesus says it is.
I think we need to understand something about how things work in the Kingdom of God. One thing that can help us is to look back at the “types and shadows” we find as God dealt with people in the Old Covenant. One of the most important Jewish festivals is Yom Kippur, or the Great Day of Atonement. In this ritual two goats were brought before the priests. One was killed and its blood sprinkled on the Altar. The second had hands laid on it by the High Priest and the sins of Israel were placed upon it. It was then released into the wilderness to carry the sins of the people away.
Throughout the rest of the year, Israel was required to present many offerings for individual sins. All of those individual sacrifices were validated by the Day of Atonement sacrifice. We have one great sacrifice that has paid the full price for all our sin.
Hebrews 9:14 (NKJV) 14how much more shall the blood of Christ, who through the eternal Spirit offered Himself without spot to God, cleanse your conscience from dead works to serve the living God?
When God forgives, he does not then hold our sins over our heads as a threat. He paid for it all and this scripture says he even cleanses our conscience from the dead and sinful works of the flesh. Without that offering, no repentance would be valid and every offering we might try to give to God would be worthless. However, he still exhorts us in 1 John chapter one to confess our sins to the Father with the assurance he will forgive us. He can do this in complete justice because of the offering of Jesus blood on the cross. Just like the ‘scapegoat” in the Old Covenant offering, our sins are carried away, not held as a reminder of how bad we were. Why then, does Jesus say that the Father will not forgive our trespasses if we do not forgive those who sin against us?
The answer is in the understanding that God has placed principles in his Word that produce certain effects in any given situation. One of the most important is the principle of forgiveness. There is a famous parable that illustrates this perfectly.
This story begins in Matthew 18:21. You should read the rest of Matthew 18. This parable is in response to Peter’s question concerning how often we must forgive. Jesus answer that we have not “forgiven our debtor” if we forgive him seven times. We must be willing to forgive seventy times 7. This is not the new limit on the number of times we must forgive. 70 times 7 was a Hebrew idiom. It symbolized an indefinite, uncountable amount. Seven is also the number of completion. Jesus says our forgiveness must be complete. Anything less is less than what God gave us.
The story goes on to talk about a servant who owed his master 10000 talents. In our day $10,000 would be a lot, but not a huge amount. 10000 talents are 375 tons of silver. That would be equivalent to between 200 and 300 million US dollars. That is an insurmountable amount. It could never be paid back. His situation was hopeless, yet the master chose to forgive his great debt.
After receiving forgiveness, he went looking for another servant who owed him one hundred denarii. This is roughly 4 to 9 thousand US dollars. This is not a small amount for most people today, but it is not insurmountable. In wages, a denarius is one days wage. 100 denarii would be 100 days wages. 10000 talents would be 16 years of wages. This servant who had been forgiven so much threatened his fellow servant with debtors’ prison if he was not paid every penny of what was owed to him.
The master, when he finds out what the servant has done, demands he be arrested and cast into debtors’ prison himself until his debt was fully paid, a task that was impossible. What is the message that Jesus wants us to understand in his prayer template and subsequent comments on forgiveness? It is the degree of our debt to God verses the debt owed to us by anyone.
When we have been wronged it is a significant thing. I used to think that what was owed to the servant in this parable was just pennies. That is not true. It was a significant amount of money. However, that is dwarfed by what this servant owed the master. They were both just servants. There is no indication that the one who owed this great debt was more important than the one who owed him. How could anyone accumulate a debt of 250 million dollars? He must have been doing a great deal of stealing. Yet the master forgave him.
What was our debt of sin. We might say that we were not murderers or thieves, but the degree of sin does not matter. Jesus paid a debt for us that carried as its repayment price eternity. No debt of forgiveness we might pay to another person can be measured against that. If we do not forgive those who sin against us, we are putting ourselves in a position where we can be subject to condemnation, not from God but from the devil we are called to resist. This creates a legal way the devil can hinder God’s blessing in our lives.
When we forgive the minor debt owed to us, there is no back door the devil can use to stop our ability to resist him. When we do not forgive, we act like the devil. When we choose to forgive, we are emulating our Father in heaven who forgave us such a great debt.
Jesus is not saying that a lack of forgiveness for our brother will keep us from heaven. That is already bought and paid for. He is saying that he cannot override the devil’s opposition to us if we have not opened the earthly channel of forgiveness. Forgive us our debts (sins) as we forgive our debtors.
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