Learning to Forgive, Part 2
Matthew 18:23-27
If you've been at Grace Church for any length of time, you know that I thoroughly enjoy what I do. But maybe you don't know that I don't think I've ever enjoyed anything more than having the privilege of preaching Matthew 18 and Romans 6 and 7 at the same time. It's a challenge each week as I prepare and study and pray and meditate, but the truths that are in these two particular sections of scripture are so heart gripping that I confess to you that this has been a very special, special joy and benediction in my own life. And I thank God for every new adventure, every new occasion of opening the word.
And I also thank Him that at this point in my life, whatever may happen in the future of my life, I'm still very much in the process of discovering the things of God's word as I'm coming through new chapters and seeing old chapters in new ways and it seems as though after all the years that have gone behind, you might sort of get to the point where you've got it all down and it's all understood and you really never do, because the Lord unfolds the riches of His word again and again and it's been such a wonderful, wonderful time for me and I trust for you as well.
Well, that takes us to Matthew 18 this morning and I would encourage you to open your Bible. We're looking at the final section of this chapter, verses 21-35. The title that we gave to the whole chapter is the Childlikeness of the Believer. The Childlikeness of the Believer. The Lord, of course, gathers His disciples around Him in a home in Capernaum and He takes a little infant into His arms and using the little infant as an illustration of spiritual truth, He says that we are spiritually like little children.
The disciples were and we are. And as little children there are certain things that we need to understand. First of all, we enter the kingdom like little children, then we are to be protected like little children. We are to be cared for like little children. We are to be disciplined like little children and then in our text verses 20-35, we are to be forgiven like little children just as children need frequent forgiveness so do we. And just as in a family you are very prone to forgive the failings of a child because of their youth and ignorance, so you are to forgive one another in the same way in the family of God.
So we're learning about forgiveness. We're learning about the importance of forgiving one another of not holding vengeance or grudges. Of freeing ourselves from the bondage of those kinds of things that we may forgive as we have been forgiven. Now we went into that in some detail last time and I trust the spirit of God has left enough of that message lingering your mind so that you can link it up rather readily with what we're going to look at today. We started last week with what we called the inquiry about forgiveness in verse 21. "Then came Peter to Him and said, Lord, how often shall my brother sin against me and I forgive him? Till seven times?" And remember I mentioned to you that Peter was sort of bouncing off Jewish tradition which said you forgive three times and that's it? And the fourth time you don't forgive again.
And Peter feeling the magnanimity of the heart of the Lord and the generosity and the mercy and the tenderness and the loving kindness and grace of our Lord was want to say well, do we go way beyond that Lord to seven times? Do we forgive each other seven times? Now that was the inquiry about forgiveness. The extent of forgiveness our second point came in verse 22 and the Lord's answer. "Jesus saith unto him, I say not unto thee until seven times, but until seventy times seven." That's the extent in what the Lord is saying. As we saw last week is there's no limit to your forgiveness.
There are no boundaries to your forgiveness. You just keep on forgiving. Luke said, if he sins against you seven times in a day, forgive him. So we are to forgive one another over and over and over and over and over again endlessly, without limitation. We are to be engaged in the forgiving of one another, which is born out of love and tenderness and mercy and grace that ought to be ours because we understand how much God has forgiven us, right? And that was the meaning of Ephesians 4:32, "that we are to forgive one another even as God for Christ's sake has forgiven us." As God forgives us continuously, no matter what our sin, in His grace so are we to forgive continuously each other when they even sin against us.
We also saw the effect of forgiveness last time, that third point in our little outline. And we said looking at Matthew Chapter 6, that the effect of forgiveness, that is when you forgive others, you will be forgiven also. Now it's important that you understand the meaning of that. You know, the Lord says in that prayer, "forgive us our debts as we have...or as we forgave others also." Then He says, if you don't forgive others, I won't forgive you. When you don't forgive someone else, the Bible says God does not forgive you in the relational sense. So you have a sin that puts a barrier between you and God.
And as long as that barrier exists, two things occur. One, you do not experience the joy of communion with God. Two, you do experience the chastening of God. And so there's an effect brought to bear upon the believer in this matter of forgiveness. So the inquiry led to the extent of forgiveness. The effect of forgiveness we saw as well. Now, let's look at the example of forgiveness. And this the last point and takes up the rest of the chapter. It's going to take us two weeks to deal with it, because it's a rather lengthy passage. It is a parable and I'd like to read it to you to start with. So follow along in verse 23. I think you'll get the message rather readily.
"Therefore is the kingdom of heaven likened unto a certain king, who would take account of his servants. And when he had begun to reckon one was brought unto him who owed him ten thousand talents. But for as much as he had nothing with which to pay, his lord commanded him to be sold and his wife and children and all that he had in payment to be made. The servant, therefore, fell down and worshiped him saying, lord have patience with me and I'll pay thee all. Then the lord of that servant was moved with compassion and loosed him and forgave him the debt. But the same servant went out and found one of his fellow servants who owed him a hundred denarii.
And he laid hands on him and took him by the throat saying pay me what thou owest. And his fellow servant fell down at his feet and besought him saying, have patience with me and I'll pay thee all. And he would not. But went and cast him into prison until he should pay the debt. So when his fellow servants saw what was done, they were very sorry and came and told unto their lord all that as done. Then his lord after he had called him and said unto him oh thou wicked servant, I forgave thee all that debt because thou besoughtest me, shouldest not thou also have had compassion on thy fellow servant even as I had compassion on thee. And his lord was angry and delivered him to the tormentors until he should pay all that was due unto him. So likewise shall my heavenly Father do also unto you if you from your hearts forgive not everyone his brother his trespasses."
Now that's a very straightforward, very clear, very obvious principle and we're going to see it unfolding both this Lord's day and in the following message which will be two weeks from today. There's a certain harshness in this parable. In fact, there is such severity in the attitude of the king in verse 34 and in the application in verse 35 that many people have studied the parable and concluded that it couldn't be speaking about Christians. Because how could the Lord get angry with Christians and how could He turn Christians over to the tormentors. How could he make them pay? It just can't be applied to Christians they say.
Well, let me tell you at the very beginning so you're not in the dark, that I believe it does apply to Christians and as we go through the parable verse by verse, I will point out in each point where it's germane why I believe it is true that this is in reference to Christians. If you do not forgive others you will not be forgiven. And if you do not forgive others and you are not forgiven, then you put yourself in the position to experience two things. You will not know the joy of communion with the Lord and you will know the chastening of the Lord and I see no problem with seeing what happens at the end of this parable as the chastening that comes to a sinning Christian. And we'll see that as we go. We should not be shocked that the Lord is harsh and stringent and firm and strong in dealing with His own, because that's part of how He conforms them to the holy standard of His revealed will.
That should not shock us. We also know very clearly from the 12th Chapter of Hebrews that the Lord does chasten His own. He scourges them and even the terminology is somewhat parallel to the idea of tormentors in verse 34. But the key concept, at least for us, to begin with is to go back to verse 23 and let's look at how the parable begins. It begins with the word therefore. And that word links it with the previous passage. And the previous passage is all about one Christian forgiving another Christian. It's all about my brother, verse 21, sinning against me and my attitude toward my brother and my forgiving my brother.
It's all about my brother or my sister who sins in the fellowship and needs to be restored and forgiven. And the parable is built on that principle and so I think the therefore lends itself well to an understanding that this, though a general principle to be sure which can be widely applied is primarily in reference to those within the family of God who need to understand the import of forgiveness. It is a very impactful parable. It is dramatic. It is powerful. It is potent and it's truth is utterly irresistible. It will be only a question of whether or not we choose to obey its application.
Now having said that, let's look at the parable in verse 23. "Therefore, the kingdom of heaven is likened unto a certain king who would take account of his servants." Now the Lord likes to speak about His kingdom in terms of parables. They are veiled stories, stories from common every day life which carry a spiritual meaning. And the Lord does this often. And often he says that the kingdom of heaven is like this. The kingdom of heaven, and I don't want to spend a lot of time defining it, is simply the sphere of God's rule on earth through grace and salvation. The dimension of God's rule. We're in that kingdom. We who love Christ. We're under His control, under His power. We've been translated out of the kingdom of darkness into the kingdom of His dear Son.
My kingdom, He's saying, is like this, the sphere of my rule on earth through grace and salvation is like this. This is how it is my kingdom. And again, I think that lends itself, although very frequently in Matthew, the kingdom is broader than the real people in the kingdom and doesn't include those who superficially attach. I think in this context talking to the disciples, He is speaking of the kingdom in its truest sense. People who are in my kingdom need to understand that my kingdom is like this. Now the man character is a certain king. Somewhere in your margin write that that's a reference to God and it's the first parable given in the New Testament in which God is likened to a king.
God is the king in this parable, obviously. "And this certain king had set a time to take account of his servants." The word servants, doulios, bond slave, bond servant. Now that word has to do with a servant who is in bondage to his master. It doesn't necessarily mean he's in chains. Some of them may have been chained. Some of them may have had very, very limited freedoms, but others of the bond servants, the doulios, would have had very extensive freedom and privilege. They were nonetheless bond to the one over them, whether they were slaves or household servants with more liberty than a slave or whether they were as in this case what you could call set traps. That is they were preventual governors who served the king by ruling certain areas of his kingdom, certain provinces.
And their responsibility was to report to the king, to rule in his behalf, primarily that came down to collecting taxes, which were then to be turned over to the king for the support of the entire kingdom and for the royal treasury. So the term here is not in the usual sense, the household doulos or the bond slave doulos, but this preventual governor who has been given an area of dominion and rules as it were under the king himself to collect out of that part of the kingdom and give back to the king what is rightfully his. Now may I suggest to you that these have to do with men in general. That when God created man and put him in the earth, He gave man dominion over the earth. He made man a steward of all that he possesses.
And that's man in general, whether man knows Christ or does not. Men have been entrusted with the treasure given by God. Their very life and breath is a gift from God. He is the one who owns it. All that they possess belongs to God. All the money they have belongs to God. It is God who gives them the power to get wealth. All the talent they have really is God-given talent. All the capacity, capability and potential they have has been deposited in them and on them by God Himself. So that every man lives in the world even before he knows God with a stewardship committed to Him by God who created him the way he is, where he is, with responsibility that he has and with the treasure given into his care.
So I see this as the king who has all of these people who have been given certain commodities, which in fact, belong to the king and to whom they owe account for their use of those commodities. And that is why in verse 23 it says, that he would take account. Now I don't see this as the ultimate accounting. I see this as a...perhaps an annual accounting. Some period of time when the king wants to take an inventory, maybe every year or every other year or every half year, these preventual governors had to bring into him all the taxes that they had collected. They had to show where the taxes came from. They had to give the king and his kingdom in the royal treasury the proper percentage and keep for themselves in their own operation what was rightful for them.
So there was a periodic accounting and what we see in the passage is that God calls men to a periodic accounting. It isn't necessarily the accounting of the great white throne judgment which is final judgment, but is the accounting of a time of great conviction when men are called to face God for what they're doing with their life. And that's the heart of the interpreting of the first few verses of the parable.
God calls men to an accounting for their lives. For some people that might be happening today in this very service, for the first time or the hundredth time. But periodically through the flow of life as men possess in their hands the stewardship of the things that God owns they are called to give an account for their life. And there will be many such accountings before that final judgment verdict is rendered at the great white throne.
In Romans Chapter 1, it says that God has deposited in man the knowledge of Himself. That God has given to man the environment around him enough information that he may follow that path to the knowledge of God. That God has given man the intellectual capability to understand and reason and see the truth. That God has presented to him the revealed word, the Holy Spirit. In other words, God has given a treasure to men that they are to perceive it from Him and they are to follow that perception to the full understanding of who He is and what He wants. And God periodically calls men to such accounting.
You could see the same concept here in John 16 where it says that the Holy Spirit has come to convict the world of sin and righteousness and judgment. It is the ministry of the Holy Spirit periodically at the discretion of the sovereignty of God to call men to an accounting of conviction. You've been there at one of those junctures if you're a Christian, you came to Jesus Christ. You were called to an accounting. Someone preached a sermon. Someone confronted you with a sinfulness of sin. Someone showed you the law of God and how miserably short of it you were. Someone demonstrated to you that you had violated the law of God and you looked in your heart and by the convicting work of the Spirit and the word of God, you saw that it was so. And you saw yourself for what you are, a sinner, and you came for the grace of salvation.
And maybe for some of you that conviction was heightened by a physical illness. Or it was heightened by the death of someone you love very much or the loss of a job or a painful experience. But God calls men to such accountings. Whereby alarming circumstances or alarming truth or alarming guilt or penetrating awakening of the conscience, men who appeared to be asleep before are all of a sudden alerted to the sinfulness of their sin. And sometimes he brings along severe circumstances to heighten that intense awareness.
As we study tonight in Romans Chapter 7, we're going to see that's exactly what happened to the apostle Paul. He was going along in his life and it seemed as though everything was going well. And all of a sudden, God took him on the Damascus Road, slammed him in the dirt, blinded him, and called him to accounting. And I believe it was in that very interval of his life that Romans Chapter 7 became a reality to him and he looked inside his life and he saw the exceeding sinfulness of his sin.
He had sort of smugly gone on prior to that thinking that he could keep the law on his own. No doubt under a certain kind of conviction. No doubt wanting to be self-righteous and please God, but understanding not the exceeding sinfulness of sin, until he was slammed in the dirt, blinded and faced the reality of the fact that his sin was not just something you do or don't do on the outside, but sin was something that boiled in the very nature of the soul itself.
And when he saw the sinfulness of sin, he had a right response. Not all people did. The rich young ruler was confronted by Jesus Christ. He too thought that sin was only external issue of what you do or don't do. And when he was asked if he kept all the law. He said all those things have I done since I was young, and the Lord drove the point to his heart as if to say it isn't what you do or don't do on the outside, it's what's in you and what I see in you is covetousness and what I'm going to tell you to do is sell everything you have, get the money and give it all to the poor and the man walked away.
Why he was convicted, but he rejected the conviction. He had an accounting that day, but he rejected the accounting. He was told that he was covetous in the heart and that the sin problem wasn't something on the outside, it was something deep on the inside. And at the moment of his accounting, he turned his back and walked away. Paul on the other hand was held to an accounting and he saw the law of coveting. He saw the law of lust. He saw the law of evil desire. Only instead of turning and walking away, he embraced the Savior who alone could deliver him from his sin and he was redeemed.
But all men come to that same accounting and it may happen again and again. And it may be rejected again and again and for all of us who know Christ at one time, it was accepted and we entered into eternal life. And so what we have here then is God calling men to the accounting of conviction of sin. And just to help you know how sinful sin is, look at verse 24. "And when he had begun to reckon, one was brought to him who owed him ten thousand talents." It's the time of conviction. And one is brought, because these people don't come voluntarily. They usually come kicking and screaming. They do not come voluntarily. He would never have come if he had not been called. Why would he want to be discovered as an embezzler? He would never have showed up, but he was brought. And the debt that he owed is ten thousand talents. Now it gets almost humorous when you read about this and you read the backgrounds and so forth as people try to figure out much this was.
Because from one nation to another and from one time period to another and one point in history to another, values change so much. All we can say is this was a lot; a lot. And comparative figures might help. This preventual governor in the parable owed ten thousand talents. As a fascinating comparison, you might want to know that at the same period of time, the time around the life of Jesus, the total revenue collected by the Roman government from Idumea and Judea and Samaria, the total revenue was 600 talents.
The total revenue collected from Galilee was 300 talents. So if this guy had collected, embezzled and wasted ten thousand talents, that is an astronomical figure. If it's taken just as a fact that it was actually ten thousand. You might want to know that when the tabernacle was built, the Lord said to them, I want you to overlay all these elements in gold. You know, arc of the covenant and many other things had to be overlaid in gold. You might want to think back on that and imagine all of that precious gold that overlaid all of those factors in the tabernacle and if you're curious about that, it tells us in Exodus Chapter 38, verse 24, that there were 29 talents of gold.
And then when the temple was built, there were 3,000 and the whole place was overlaid in gold and that was only 3,000. Ten thousand talents is astronomical. People have estimated anywhere from 16 million to two billion and everything in between. You might want other comparisons. The Queen of Sheba, she came to visit Solomon one time and she wanted to give him a gift that was commensurate with his incredible wealth and so she gave him 120 talents, 1 Kings 10:10.
The king of Assyria laid upon Hezekiah 30 talents of gold as a magnanimous amount. Now what is this talking about? You want to know what it's talking about? Sin. Sin is the debt. Ten thousand is the amount. But let me take you on a little journey in your thinking. In Daniel Chapter 7, verse 10, we read this. And this is a vision of the glorious son of man coming in his second coming and look what it says. "A fiery stream issued," Daniel 7:10, "and came forth from before him," that is before the throne of God, here it comes, "a thousand thousands ministered unto him and ten thousand times ten thousand stood before him." What does that refer to? Angels. Ten thousand times ten thousand. Now go to Revelation Chapter 5, verse 21...verse 11. There aren't 21 verses.
"And I beheld and I heard the voice of many angels around the throne and the living creatures and the elders." How many? "And the number was," what, "ten thousand times ten thousand and thousands of thousands." Now you find it in the Old Testament, you find it in the New Testament. By the way, you'll find such usages of the thousands and the ten thousands in Song of Solomon 5, in Ezekiel 45, I think also and Ezekiel 48. You find it a couple of places in 1 Corinthians also. Let me tell you something, the largest term, the largest numerical term in the Greek language is that term, ten thousand. It's the term murion. And so when they used the term murion, it is not always a technical term so that when you're looking at angels and it says ten thousand times ten thousand, you're supposed to multiply ten thousand times ten thousand. You know exactly how many angels there are.
It simply means myriads upon myriads. It would be the...it is the highest term that could be used. It would be like us saying he owed the king zillions. It's just a term that is almost taking us beyond numeration. And I see it in that sense rather than a technical sense of exactly ten thousand talents. What it's saying is he owed a myriad. He owed an inestimable, incalculable, unpayable debt beyond any ability to pay, beyond any ability even to calculate. Now think with me on this because this is really a profound truth. This is our sin, people. That's what He's talking about. We are brought before God in a moment of conviction. And we are faced with the fact that our sin is inestimable. It is incalculable. It could not even be counted. It cannot even be numbered in its volume.
The sum of our sin is beyond comprehension. Now that's what happens. And that's what God intends to happen when you come to be convicted by the power of the Spirit through the word of God. When a person comes to the accounting time of conviction before God, it is so that they may see the utter sinfulness of sin. And we're right back to Romans 7 again. Paul says, "When I saw what I really was, when I saw God's law and I looked at my sin," he says in 7:13, "I saw the utter sinfulness of sin." Or the exceeding sinfulness of sin.
And that is a critical element in bringing someone to true salvation. Everyone of us must be brought to the point where we see this mountain of sin incalculable. It's a littler wonder when Job was brought there that he said, "I abhor myself." It's little wonder that when Ezra was brought there, he said, "oh my God, I am ashamed and blushed to lift my face to thee my God." And he had his face in the ground. "For our iniquities are increased over our head and our trespasses gone up to heaven." It's the same kind of attitude that we find in the heart of David who even though He was a man after God's heart prayed with the tear-stained face, "Oh Lord for thine own name sake, pardon my iniquity."
You see our sin is a debt and it is a debt that is beyond calculation. It's so great that we can't even estimate it and it let alone pay it. Now look at verse 25 and see what happened. "So the man was brought to accounting, for as much as he had nothing with which to pay." Now this is the most dire circumstance imaginable. "His Lord commanded him to be sold and his wife and children and all that he had and payment to be made." Now this is just punishment friends. This is a real debt, not an artificial one.
The parable indicates that the man had embezzled the money from the king. He didn't even have any of it to pay. There was no way to recover it. The punishment is very severe, very severe. Sell the man into slavery, sell his wife into slavery, sell all his kids into slavery, get what you can. Sell his house and everything he owns, get what you can and we'll take that and apply it toward the debt which is unable to be fully repaid, but we'll get everything we can out of him. And there's no complaint made by the way because it's just. There's no complaint. The man has not complained. He does not beg for justice. This is justice. This is even better than justice, because the debt can't be paid.
Now this kind of picture is very interesting and is somewhat unique to Israel. We don't find this kind of thing commonly in Israel. There are few places in the Old Testament where there were special circumstances in which a person could be sold into the service of another one to repay a debt. But this was primarily the way the pagan world operated and the people in and around Israel who were not a part of the nation Israel will be very familiar with this kind of thing. So would the Jews because they had seen the Pagans do this.
If you couldn't pay a debt, you instantly became a slave. And you paid your debt by working off what you could. Your wife became a slave and all your kids became slaves. And everything you owned was sold and turned into cash for the one to whom you owed the debt. That was not uncommon. That's sort of like the indentured servant kind of thing. And since the man had been defrauded, he had a right to claim back all that he could claim. I think if we had such laws today it might affect some ways things are done in our society where people are a little bit more free with the bankruptcy law than they be if they knew that they would all have to go to work for the one in whom...to whom they were indebted. It might be a good approach. Tend to keep us from getting too far out on our credit.