Forgiving and Reconciling, Part IX: The Best Bible Story On Forgiveness That’s Rarely Told (And Even More Poorly Understood)

Posted on September 21, 2011 by Pastor Foley

It’s the best Bible story on forgiveness that’s rarely told in churches and Sunday School lessons–and even less rarely understood. It explains why our reflecting Christ’s forgiveness to our enemies is such a crucial part of his plan to draw the world to himself.

The story is found in Matthew 18:21-35.

Therefore, the kingdom of heaven is like a king who wanted to settle accounts with his servants. As he began the settlement, a man who owed him ten thousand talents was brought to him. Since he was not able to pay, the master ordered that he and his wife and his children and all that he had be sold to repay the debt.

The servant fell on his knees before him. “Be patient with me,” he begged, “and I will pay back everything.” The servant’s master took pity on him, canceled the debt and let him go.

But when that servant went out, he found one of his fellow servants who owed him a hundred denarii. He grabbed him and began to choke him. “Pay back what you owe me!” he demanded.

His fellow servant fell to his knees and begged him, “Be patient with me, and I will pay you back.”

But he refused. Instead, he went off and had the man thrown into prison until he could pay the debt. When the other servants saw what had happened, they were greatly distressed and went and told their master everything that had happened.

Then the master called the servant in. “You wicked servant,” he said, “I canceled all that debt of yours because you begged me to. Shouldn’t you have had mercy on your fellow servant just as I had on you?” In anger his master turned him over to the jailers to be tortured, until he should pay back all he owed.

This is how my heavenly Father will treat each of you unless you forgive your brother from your heart.

This is how Jesus defines forgiveness. Not as feeling, forgetting, or act of will, like human beings think about it. Instead, he defines forgiveness as our passing on to those who have sinned against us the judgment and the mercy that we ourselves receive from God. 

In the story, what should the servant have done? He should have passed on the judgment and the mercy he received from the king. 

What was the judgment? The judgment was that the man could not pay the debt, and therefore by rights he and his wife and his children and all that he had be sold to repay the debt.

What was the mercy? The mercy was that the king bore the debt himself. The debt didn’t just disappear. It was real money that someone had to pay. So the king paid it.

So what should the servant have done when he met the man who owed him money? He should have passed on that judgment and mercy that he had received from the king. That would have sounded something like this: “By rights, you yourself should be sold to pay this debt. But I will bear this debt myself, in the name of the king, who bears my debt in himself.”

And that last part of the sentence is the key: “in the name of the king, who bears my debt in himself.” Many readers of the parable miss that. If you ask them, “Why is the servant thrown in jail to be tortured?” they will say, “Because the servant should have been more generous. The master forgave the servant a big debt, so the least the servant could do is to forgive his fellow servant the small debt.”

But that misses the point. It leaves out the realization Jesus is wanting Peter and his other hearers to have. The servant is not thrown in jail and tortured because he wasn’t more generous. Torture, after all, is quite an extreme punishment for selfishness. Instead, the servant is thrown in jail and tortured for being, as the master calls him in verse 32, a “wicked servant.” He is a wicked servant because through his actions he has hidden the work of the king, who bears the servant’s debt in himself.

What would make the servant a “good servant”? Not just forgiving the debt owed him but forgiving the debt in such a way that the generous character of the king would be revealed. If all the servant did was to forgive the debt of his fellow servant, he would still be missing the point. He would simply be drawing attention to his own generosity (and drawing on his own generosity, which would last all of about a day before it burned a hole in him).

But if he said, “My fellow servant, I forgive your debt—I bear the cost myself—because our master the king is generous, and today he has forgiven me, and he bears my debt in himself.” That would draw attention to the work and character of the king master. And that would make him no longer a wicked servant.

So, back to Peter:

What Jesus is showing Peter is that how Peter forgives reveals—accurately or inaccurately—the work and character of Peter’s God. If Peter forgives seven times, the God of Peter is a God who forgives like a human being. Like a human being, that God quickly runs out of patience and wants sinners to pay for their sins themselves.

But if Peter forgives seventy-seven times in the name of the God of Peter, then the God of Peter is revealed to be a generous God indeed—one who does not forgive like human beings do. One whose forgiveness is judgment plus mercy—a force so powerful that it will eventually set right the damage that sin and death and evil have caused.

So God’s mission of righteousness—setting the world right through his judgment and mercy (which is what he means by forgiveness)—is advanced or hindered precisely to the degree that Peter realizes that his own forgiveness of others is nothing more or less or other than part of that mission.

Debts to the servant, in other words, have become debts to the master; as the servant forgives those debts, so forgives the master.

If the servant fails to forgive those debts, the generous character of the master is shrouded or, worse, denied. And sin and unforgiveness continues to burn like acid through our human race, sinners and sinned against alike.

But as we’ll share in Part X, the good news is how through the Holy Spirit, Christ is continuing to overcome our foolishness and gather our race’s sin and unforgiveness to himself.

We just don’t recognize him as he does it.

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Forgiving and Reconciling, Part VIII: A Straightforward Explanation Of Why Our Failure To Forgive Others Is So Damaging To Us

Posted on September 19, 2011 by Pastor Foley

Not only did Christ bear our sin; he sought to do so. Because he is setting the world right—remember, that’s what his righteousness means—he sought for the uncontested right to bear all sin. He knew that the only way sin could be eliminated was for him to bear it—for us to yield it to him. So he actively invites us to yield our sin to him. 

But we foolish human beings fail to permit him to do this. We keep believing either that we can bear other people’s sin ourselves (and thus pay the penalty of their sin in ourselves), or that we can get other people to bear their sin themselves (that is, we keep trying to get them to pay the penalty of the sin they sinned against us in hopes that that will make the sin go away).

Foolish.

Equally foolish, some of us try to get Christ to bear our sins against him and others, but we insist that other people bear their own sins against us. This actually angers God particularly, because it shows that we don’t understand the nature of sin or what Christ is doing when he bears our sin.

When we try to get Christ to bear our own sin while we simultaneously insist that others pay for their own sin, it shows God that our motives are all wrong. We’re focused on our own self-preservation. We’re not focused on Christ’s work of setting the world right. If we were, we would know that if we try to put someone’s sin back on them instead of redirecting that sin to Christ to bear, sin will just burn more holes—not only through our enemies, but probably through us again, too, and even more people.

This is the message that Jesus shares with Peter in Matthew 18:21-22. Peter is talking to Jesus about forgiveness, and it’s clear that Peter doesn’t understand how forgiveness—God’s judgment plus God’s mercy, offered by us as Christ’s ambassadors—is God’s means of righteousness, of setting the world right.

So Peter asks, “So Lord, how many times must I forgive someone? Seven times?” You can see that Peter is still thinking about self-protection here, not God’s righteousness. He’s thinking, “I don’t want to be taken advantage of.”

But Jesus says back to Peter, “No, not seven times. Seventy seven times!” Because Jesus’ focus is on setting the world right, not protecting himself. And he knows that forgiveness (God’s judgment plus God’s mercy) is God’s primary tool for accomplishing that purpose. So the goal is to use that tool as many times as possible, not as few times.

And Jesus can tell that Peter and everybody else who is standing around them slack-jawed is confused by this, because they’re thinking about human forgiveness (which has no power to fix anything; it just delays and moves around the acid of sin and burns new holes in people).

So he tells them a shocking and little-told story that’s designed to enable them to see the contrast between God’s forgiveness and human forgiveness.

And that story is the focus of Part IX–the pivot point of our series on forgiving and reconciling.

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Forgiving and Reconciling, Part VII: Sin Can’t Just Disappear, Which Is Why Human Forgiveness Is So Very Impotent

Posted on September 16, 2011 by Pastor Foley

How does God define forgiveness?

The original languages of Scripture are rich with meaning in this regard.

The term used most often for forgiveness in the Old Testament is the Hebrew nasa’, which means to bear, to carry, or to be taken away. 

In the New Testament, there are several words in the Greek for forgiveness, including aphesis, which means release from bondage.  This is the term for forgiveness that is used in Luke 3:3 to describe the mission of Jesus:

He went into all the country around the Jordan, preaching a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness [or release from bondage] of sins.

So forgiveness in the Scripture is portrayed as a release from bondage. Through his forgiveness, Christ releases us from the bondage of sin.

But here’s the really amazing part:

The way that he releases us from the bondage of sin is the only way it turns out that humans can be released from their bondage, namely, that that bondage is transferred to Christ himself. That’s the Hebrew nasa’—to bear or carry.

This is why human ways of forgiveness just don’t work. This is why forgiveness can’t be about feeling, forgetting, or willing sin to be forgotten. Sin has to go somewhere. It can’t just evaporate. It doesn’t just disappear. In order for someone to be set free from it, someone else has to bear it.

And that’s what Christ does.

As John the Baptist says in John 1:29, Christ is the lamb of God who bears the sins of the world in himself. And that’s the message throughout the Scripture, like in Isaiah 53:4-5 (NIV):

Surely he took up our infirmities
and carried our sorrows,
yet we considered him stricken by God,
smitten by him, and afflicted.
But he was pierced for our transgressions,
he was crushed for our iniquities;
the punishment that brought us peace was upon him,
and by his wounds we are healed.

Or, as Peter put it in 1 Peter 2:24 (NIV):

He himself bore our sins in his body on the tree so that we might die to sins and live for righteousness (NIV).

You may recall in the Old Testament the idea of the scapegoat, as in Leviticus 16:20-22:

“And when [Aaron] has made an end of atoning for the Holy Place and the tent of meeting and the altar, he shall present the live goat. And Aaron shall lay both his hands on the head of the live goat, and confess over it all the iniquities of the people of Israel, and all their transgressions, all their sins. And he shall put them on the head of the goat and send it away into the wilderness by the hand of a man who is in readiness. The goat shall bear all their iniquities on itself to a remote area, and he shall let the goat go free in the wilderness.”

One of the key insights we get from that passage is that sin can’t just disappear. It has to be borne by somebody, or something that, in this case, wanders around in the desert as it bears the sins of Israel.

This is why all human efforts at forgiveness ultimately fail: because humans (and goats, for that matter) can’t bear sin for very long. Sin crushes human beings—our own sin and the sin of others against us—and we cry out in protest. And we fight back. We can sometimes bear sin for a little while. We can forget about sin that’s been sinned against us for a little while. We can be loving for a while to those who have sinned against us. We can even will ourselves to bear their sin for a while. But then sin always burns through us like acid, and it always pours right back out. Only Christ can bear sin without transferring the bondage from one person (the sinner) to another (the person who the sinner sins against). If sin is not transferred to Christ, it just keeps moving around and burning new holes through new people.

Now, here is the amazing news:

Not only did Christ bear our sin; he sought to do so. It’s a non-negotiable part of his plan to set the world right. But as we’ll talk about in Part VIII, it’s the part that we fail to understand when we refuse to forgive those who sin against us.

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