FORGIVEN BECAUSE FORGIVING
By D. M. PANTON.
As
the years glide by, and the irrevocable past disappears beyond all possibility
of altering it, one problem becomes overmastering, and its solution as comforting,
as practical, and as divine a truth as any in the Bible. How am I to deal with sins (since my
conversion) over which I now have no control?
Sins of which I have been unconscious in my own heart-life; sins,
unconfessed, of which I was conscious at the time, but have since totally
forgotten; hurts and injuries done to others which can never be put right,
because I was never even aware of them; sins against the dead, whose pardon I
cannot now obtain:- all these are neither the sins which were forgiven at my
conversion, nor are they the sins put away and pardoned since. They remain.
As Archbishop Trench puts
it:- “The Christian stands in a middle point, between
a mercy received and a mercy which he yet needs to receive.” It is to solve this urgent and anxious
problem, more urgent and more anxious as we draw nearer the Judgment-Seat, that
our Lord has revealed one of His loveliest and divinest truths; an utterance of
which Dr. Robertson Nicholl has
strikingly said:- “THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH HAS NEVER FAIRLY FACED THESE WORDS, OR
PUT THEM INTO PRACTICE.”
But
we must first get our feet on rock. It
is vital to grasp that the parable of the Debtor (Matt.
18: 23) is for the Church of God, and for the Church of God alone; that
believers, and [regenerate] believers only, are involved. This is so, because (1) it is in answer to
Peter’s question – “How oft shall my brother sin against me, and I forgive him?”
and it immediately follows legislation for the Church, in one of the
exceedingly rare passages, in which our Lord names the Church. “Therefore the kingdom
is likened unto a certain king.” (2) Our Lord says, - “The kingdom of heaven” - which, in parables, is always the kingdom in mystery, the
Church - is that with which he is dealing: that is, it is what happens inside the Church. (3) The man dealt with throughout, as a
warning in respect to Peter’s question, is a forgiven soul: “I forgave thee all that
debt.” None is a forgiven soul
but the saved. (4) Moreover, the truth
our Lord is laying down is already embedded forever in our Lord’s prayer, in
which, our pardon, as erring disciples, is made to turn, at our own request, on
our pardon of others: “forgive us, as we forgive.” (5)
But the Lord Himself makes all douht for ever impossible. “So ALSO” so, in
an identical manner; also, correspondingly – “shall my
heavenly Father do unto you.” To sum tip therefore, negatively:- that an
unregenerate soul, if only he forgives others, is accepted by God as therefore
himself a forgiven soul, is a doctrine nowhere contained in the Book of God,
and a fundamental overthrow of the Gospel.
The Debtor, therefore, is a child of Cod.
In
the background of the parable is the question of Peter which evokes it. He attempts to define the measure of grace in
a child of God:- “Lord, how often sliall my brother” - a brother, for Jesus has just been
regulating wrongs between disciples in the
But
the Saviour now unfolds the principle negatively, and He laboriously enforres, by a vivid illustration, our peril if we
refuse to pardon. Evervthing in the
parable rests on the pardon of its, chief actor; and the amount of the debt
remitted – anything between £1,250,000 and £3,000,000 reveals a civil servant
little less than a viceroy: it is such a. man and such a transgression as David
and his adultery. Every sin is a debt
incurred to God; and Jesus knew that the man who was questioning Him would
quite soon deliberately, publicly, completely disown Him: - “I know not the man.”
Who but God can, measure the enormity of such a debt? Prostrate in his secret chamber before his
Lord, in agony of soul the debtor confesses all; “and
the Lord of that servant, being moved with compassion, released him, and
forgave him the. debt.” No
transgression of a believer can be too great for the pardon of God: God
forgives our debts mounting into millions.
Now
comes our test. A fellow servant does
him an injury, a real injury; but the offending brother is penitent, and asks
his pardon; and he asks it in the identical terms with which he himself had
besought his Lord. But the debt is
incomparably less. Our Lord names a
fabulous sum as our debt to God, enormously greater than any wrong our brother
can do us - a matter of £3 or so: a slight, a snub, a slander, or even deeper
wrongs, which, compared with the countless motions of evil in us since we
believed, or the open transgressions God has forgiven us, “are as a drop of water to the boundless ocean” (Chrysostom). Unmelted by God’s boundless clemency to
himself, forgetful of his own eager acceptance of that pardon, and completely
oblivious of the enormously greater sum of his own guilt, the injured brother,
with implacable resentment, insists on the law taking its course. A child of God is to be “easy to be entreated” (Jas.
3: 17); and let us never forget that mercilessness in a believer is
wickedness: the Lord addresses him later as “thou wicked
servant.”
The
servant is now brought forward – “his lord called him
unto him”: such will be rapture - to face his account, in which he must
meet the reproach of his Lord; apparently totally
unconscious that his conduct is to be reported at all, and resting wholly on
the first pardon, as though any unabandoned sin intervening is covered by
forgiveness at conversion. His Lord
says:- “Thou wicked servant, I forgave thee all that
debt, because thou besoughtest me” - that is, solely on the
ground of compassion: “shouldest not thou also have had
mercy”* ‑ that is, remitted a real injury, on its confession; for mercy is renouncing our rightful
claims, in law, for wrong done us – “even as I had
mercy on thee?” So the principle
is definitely revealed. “Condemn not, and ye shall not be condemned”
(Luke 6:
37) - not because we have no counts against us, but because the law we
practise is the law we shall receive. On
the other hand James (2: 13) says:- “Judgment is WITHOUT MERCY to him that showed no mercy.” Thus we know exactly the principle on which
our Lord will act at the Judgment Seat.
[*
This single charge not only proves that the servant is a believer, since no unbeliever
will be charged on one count alone, and, moreover, an unbeliever’s fundamental
condemnation is quite other - that his name is not in the Book (Rev. 20: 15); but it is also decisive that a
believer’s unconfessed and unabandoned sin will appear at the Judgment-Seat of
Christ. It ought to be unutterably
startling to the believer who denies this truth that, if he acts in the manner
of this servant, these dread words will be addressed to him. “It is evident that
the Lord meant to apply the parable to them as Christians: these
fellow-servants are not merely fellow-men, in general, bat fellow-believers and
fellow-christians, in particular” (Greswell).]
The King now passes sentence. “And his lord was
wroth, and delivered hitn to the tormentors” - the angelic officers of
the Court: whether for punishment, or for custody only, we are told: probably
it is determined by the gravity of the debt – “till”
- for it is not an eternal sentence, and therefore not the judgment of an
unbeliever – “he should pay all that was due”:
not the former debt, which had been forgiven; but all debt incurred since. A full payment of its penalty is, in law, a
discharge of a debt. And so the Saviour
applies the moral. Foreseeing that the
Church of all ages would thus recoil from, explain away, or even deny the
application of this tremendous parable to ourselves, He clamps together, in His
words, the parable and the Church in words beyond all donbt for ever. “So” - in this
manner, and no other: with identical boundlessness of mercy, but identical
rigour of justice if that mercy is mishandled – “shall
also mu heavenly Father do unto you” – it might even be an
apostle refusing forgiveness to an apostle. for it is apostles who are
addressed - “If
ye forgive not every one his brother from your hearts.”*
[* When God forgives, He forgets: so must we,
otherwise it is not “forgiveness from our hearts.” “Their sins and their
iniquities will I remember no more” (Heb. 8:
12).]
So therefore we have won the priceless clue of which
we were in search. We children of God
have it in our power, and by a method exquisitely tender and divine, to cancel
the offences over which we have lost all control. How safe the prayer, and by a method
exquisitely tender and divine, to cancel the offences, over which we have lost
all control. How safe the prayer that
God will forgive all the wrongs ever done us, whether our pardon has been asked
or not!* “Whensoever
ye stand praying, forgive, if ye have aught against any one” (Mark 11: 25).
And the Son of God – the Judge – has pledged Himself absolutely to the
result. “For if
ye forgive men their tresspasses, your heavenly Father will also forgive you”
(Matt. 6: 14): “blessed
are the merciful, for they shall obtain mercy” (Matt. 5: 7): “forgive, and
ye SHALL BE FORGIVEN” (Luke 6: 37).
My pardon of my brother (if he is unrepentant) does not settle the case
between him and God, but it settles the case between him and me; and my own
pardon is assured. Live in forgiveness
and we live for forgiveness.
[* Strickly speaking, our Lord’s words (in this
context) imply the necessity of the offending brother’s repentance, and
confession of his repentance. “Forgiveness to the ungodly is absolute: but repentance may
be required forst when a brother-Christian is the injurer” (Govett).]
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FORGIVENESS
There are a variety of New Testament passages which
prescribe the forgiveness of injuries, subject to no condition whatever; which
positively enjoin the returning of good for evil; which conmmand Christians to
bless those that curse them; to pray for those who are persecuting and
despitefully using them all the while.
In these cases, the supposed repentance and regret of the party in fault
are altogether out of the question.
There is no selfishness in Christian charity; its forgiveness is purely
spontaneous, purely gratuitons; it is not bought with a price; it bargains for
nothing; it stipulates for nothing; it will receive nothing; it has
reserved nothing - in return for its proper act.
Without
compensation, without remuneration, without an equivalent of any kind, it will
do, as the consequence of its own liberality, what would otherwise be only the
effect of the most ample and stifficient redress; it will not retain even a
recollection of the past; it will treat the offender as if nothing has
happened, or nothing were remembered to have happened, to lower him in its good
opinion; to give occasion to the least difference of sentiment towards him,
from before. Forgiveness is to be given
from the
heart, if it is to be any
argument with our own Father and Judge for dealing leniently with ourselves.
-
EDWARD GRESWELL, B.D.