Read Matthew 18:21–35
Questions from the Scripture text: Who came to Jesus? What
did he call Him? About whom does he ask? Having done what? What does he ask about
forgiving him? What number does he think is generous? What modification does
Jesus make to this number (v22)? To what does He now make an analogy by parable
(v23)? Who is the key figure in the parable? What is He doing with whom? What
does He discover about one of them (v24)? What couldn’t the servant do (v25)?
What did the king command to be done? How did the servant respond (v26)? For
what does he ask? How does the king respond (v27)? Whom does the servant go and
find (v28)? What does this fellow servant owe him? What does the first servant do
to him? What does he say? How does the fellow servant respond (v29)? But what
does the first servant do to him (v30)? Who see this (v31)? What do they think
of it? To whom do they come and tell about it? What does the master do (v32)?
What does he call the servant? Of what does he remind the servant? How does he say
that the servant should have responded (v33)? What does his master think of
this (v34)? What does he do to the servant? Until when? Whom does the Lord
Jesus say will do like this (v35)? To whom? If they fail to do what? From what?
What
do forgiven people do? Matthew 18:21–35 prepares us for the sermon in the morning public worship
on the coming Lord’s Day. In these fifteen verses of Holy Scripture, the Holy
Spirit teaches us that genuinely forgiven people forgive others genuinely.
To his credit, Peter
seems to have gotten this. He needs to forgive his brother. And surely he
remembers 6:14–15: “For if you forgive men their trespasses, your heavenly
Father will also forgive you. But if you do not forgive men their trespasses,
neither will your Father forgive your trespasses.” But he thinks that surely
there must be a limit to forgiveness. After all, haven’t we just been hearing
that sin is an offense against the greatness of God and of Christ? Surely,
there must be a limit to forgiveness.
Jesus’s answer is
not to tell Peter that the limit is higher than he thought. Jesus’s answer is
that the amount that he has been forgiven, and ought to reciprocate, is beyond
his imagining. Peter’s number wasn’t just high; it was a number that meant
completeness to him. Jesus’s number indicates that the completeness of what we
owe to God is so far beyond us, that we will never forgive another so much as
to wear it out.
In the parable, the
debt that the other servant owed the wicked servant was real. People are really
going to sin against us. And the amount was not small, humanly speaking. One
hundred denarii is four months’ wages. But the amount that he had forgiven
would be $36 million USD at the time of writing, and quite possibly more comparatively
valuable in first century Galilee. Whatever the amount, like the 490, the exact
quantity is not the point. For, the amount that believers have been forgiven in
Christ is infinite!
In parable, the
amount in question is not the only disparity between the two situations. There
is also a difference in relationship. The wicked servant is not the master of
the one that owes him the money. They are all servants of the same master. The
one that the wicked servant refused to forgive is, to borrow the language of
earlier in the chapter, a “little child” (v2, 3, 4, 5) or “little one” (v6, 10).
They belong to Him
Who has forgiven us an infinite debt. This is one reason why forgiveness must
not only be unlimited, but must be from the heart. It’s not primarily for
ourselves, or for the one that we re forgiving. It’s unto Him Who looks upon
the heart.
It is impossible
for us to have been forgiven and to be so stubbornly ungrateful to God that our
heart is hard against our repentant brother. In v13, the shepherd rejoiced over
his retrieved sheep; and in v27, the king/master was pleased to forgive his
servant because he was moved with compassion over the pleading servant. Those
who are the Father’s (v35) will imitate the heart of the Father. And those who
are not the Father’s may be sure that they will pay fully for their sin in the
place where “it is finished” will never be heard.
How deeply do you
feel your gratitude to God for your forgiveness? How does this gratitude
express itself I how you have responded to professing believers who pleaded for
forgiveness when they sinned against you?
No comments:
Post a Comment