LIVING WATERS
For the proclamation of the Gospel and the edification of the Body of Christ
The Lesson of Forgiveness
The lesson of forgiveness that Christians are to have for one another occupies an important place in the 18th chapter of Matthew, and its teaching is extraordinarily well illustrated in the parable of the two debtors.
Here appear a king, a servant and a fellow-servant. The servant is indebted to the king, and the fellow-servant to the servant. The king is the Lord and the servants are us. The servant is in such great debt that he is literally unpayable. He owes ten thousand talents, which is equivalent to about 255,000 million Chilean pesos, or about 474 million American dollars today.
To better understand the amount of this amount, let's graph it a little. With 255 billion pesos you could buy 8,500 houses of 30 million pesos each, or 42,500 vehicles of six million pesos. Now, if we were to pay that debt in installments, with monthly installments of two hundred thousand pesos, it would take us 1,275,000 months to pay, that is, 106,250 years - about 1,500 lifetimes. If someone were to say: "I have a lot of money, I want to pay that debt monthly for life", (let us suppose, seventy years), he would have to pay more than 300 million monthly.
Thus, the servant really had nothing to pay with. Therefore, that lord ordered to sell him and his children and all that he had to pay the debt. And so, since it was quite impossible, when the servant humbled himself, his master forgave him the debt.
And that is what the Lord has forgiven us. So great was the debt we owed him. Our sins were so many and so horrendous, and our separation from God so abysmal, that only the blood of the Lord Jesus could bridge the gap that led us from our fall to reconciliation with God. Blessed is the Lord Jesus Christ, precious is his blood!
But how much did the fellow servant owe? One hundred denarii. A denarius is approximately the same as a drachma, or about 4,250 Chilean pesos, or about 8 dollars. In total, the debt amounted to 425,000 Chilean pesos, or about $800 today, a little more than a tenth of a 6 million vehicle (the wheels perhaps?). And it was for that insignificant amount that the servant strangled his fellow servant, and even more, threw him in jail until he paid the debt.
It seems clear that there is a big difference between the two cases. So we can conclude that always the debt that a brother owes us is infinitely less than the debt we owed to the Lord. No matter the size of the sin, no matter what offense our brother has inflicted on us: everything we can imagine, however serious, is less than what the Lord forgave us, and from which he cleansed us with his precious blood. Therefore, if we were mercifully forgiven, we must also mercifully forgive. May the Lord help us not to hinder the Lord's forgiveness towards us!