|
“And forgive us our debts, as we forgive
our debtors. “For if ye forgive men their trespasses, your
Heavenly Father will also forgive you.
“But if ye forgive not men their trespasses, neither will your
Heavenly Father forgive your trespasses.” — Matthew vi. 12, 14, 15
In these words our Lord brings us face to face with the only
obstacles which oppose our complete and eternal happiness. The Lord
created all worlds, all living beings, and all material things to
minister to human good; and He gave to man capacities to receive good in
some form and measure from everything He has made. He created man in a
Divine order; made all his faculties both physical and spiritual, to
harmonize with all substances and forces, so that they can act upon him
and flow through him, become component parts of his own nature, call all
his faculties into harmonious play, and by their own action enlarge
their capacities and perfect their qualities for the reception of more
exquisite happiness.
Sin has disturbed this order, changed these harmonies into discords,
arrayed force against force, and brought man into conflict with nature
and the Lord. It has induced weakness, paralysis of his spiritual
faculties, disease, pain, misery, and death. Sin has inverted the whole
order of his nature, and perverted the essential form and substance of
his being. As man stood in the heavenly order of his creation he was
endowed with a keen and delicate perception, a kind of spiritual
instinct, by which he gained intuitive knowledge of the relations of all
things to himself and the service they were created to render him. The
hot breath of sin has withered and destroyed that faculty. In his normal
condition man's heart was full of love to the Lord and man, and all his
faculties were vivified, made fresh and sweet, and filled with a serene
and joyful activity; sin has changed that love into enmity, poisoned the
currents of that “river of life,” and turned it into an instrument of
torment and death. Man was made to be a help, a comfort, and a joy to
man; sin has made him an Ishmaelite, a tyrant, and a curse. Every evil
which human beings suffer is caused by sin; every good from the
immeasurable fountain of life which man fails to obtain is withheld by
sin. Sin opens the gates of hell, sin shuts the gates of heaven, sin is
the only bar between man and the Lord.
Such being the hostile and deadly nature of sin, there is no question of
so vital interest to every human being as how to escape its power and
destroy this deadly enemy. Our Lord directs us to the only sufficient
Helper, and He gives us the only conditions on which that help can be
obtained, “Forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors.” Let us try
to understand what this prayer is; what desires, what knowledge, what
action it implies; what we ask of the Lord, and what it demands of us.
Sin is called by different names to designate the different points of
view from which it is regarded. It is called a debt because we are all
the subjects of immutable law. We are a part of the order of the
universe, and only by acting in obedience to the laws of this order can
we obtain happiness. These laws have their origin in the Divine nature;
they are the order and methods according to which the purposes of the
Divine love and wisdom are carried into effect. Man is folded in their
arms; they are the paths of the Lord, in which He comes to man and sends
him life and good. Man owes them obedience because he can only gain the
true end of his being by living according to them. So far as he fails in
obedience he becomes a debtor to the law and the Lawgiver. He does not
give what he owes to them. This relation of debtor to the law is
generally acknowledged, and is familiar to every one. We say a man owes
his success to his industry, to his talents, to his skill, or he owes
his failure to the want of these qualities or to some mistakes he has
made. Health is due to obedience to the laws of man's physical nature.
Disease and pain are due to violations of those laws. Thus the idea of
debt runs through all human relations. But we must guard against the
fatal error of taking commercial indebtedness as the measure and form of
all debt. When we violate a law of the Divine order embodied in our
natures, or in human society, we do not owe the penalty to the law or
the lawgiver in any other sense than we owe the good we receive to the
same cause when we obey a law. The penalty is not inflicted for
violating it, nor is the reward conferred for obedience. Each follows as
a necessary consequence. What every human being really owes to the Lord,
and consequently to all the laws of His order, is obedience. It is not
penalty or reward. We owe allegiance to the Lord because that is the
only way in which He can bestow upon us the blessings He created us to
receive. When our Lord teaches us to ask Him to forgive our debts, then,
He does not instruct us to ask for the remission of the penalties of
sin, but for the remission of the sin itself.
Sin is also called a trespass. To trespass a rule or law is to go beyond
it, to do what it does not allow. Transgression has the same meaning.
But the word which our Lord used means stumbling. It does not seem to be
so much a direct and positive determination to live contrary to the
Divine laws, as ignorance of their nature and requirements, and a lack
of spiritual power to walk erect and with a firm step, without any
deviation or stumbling in the paths of the Lord. We are drawn aside by
the illusions of the senses, we have never been taught what these laws
are, we have become cramped by evil habits, we are weighted with many
cares under whose burden we bend and fall. There are many obstacles in
the way over which we stumble. How often those who are trying to live a
good life stumble and fall, like little children who are learning to
walk. How many are groping around in the dark! They stumble over unseen
obstacles, they are led astray by others. We all have to learn to walk
twice, first naturally, then spiritually, and the second lesson is by
far the most difficult. But the difficulties consist wholly in our sins.
They are the only stumbling-blocks. If man had never sinned it would
have been as easy for him to live a heavenly life as it is for flowers
to blossom and birds to sing. He would have been led on in the paths of
the Divine truth, he would have been borne along in the currents of the
Divine forces. All his faculties would have unfolded in a natural order
by processes of delight. Sin is the only hindrance.
We must distinguish between sin and sinful acts. Sin is a disease of
man’s moral nature; it is derangement and perversion of the faculties of
his spiritual organism, producing the same relative effects upon them
that natural diseases cause in our physical organs. The real, essential
prayer, then, must be that Our Father will restore us to spiritual
health. The remission of the penalty is not the forgiveness of sin; it
has no relation to it. The penalty of sin cannot be remitted while the
sin remains, because it is inseparably connected with it. The penalty
cannot be borne by another. That is as impossible as it would be for one
man to be afflicted with disease and another to bear the pain and suffer
the weakness. It is true that the sins of one man will bring suffering
upon many others. It is true that we may undergo many hardships, endure
severe labor and suffer pain of body and agony of mind in our efforts to
relieve others from the penalties of their sins both physical and
spiritual, but our sufferings do not help them. It is what we do for
them, and not what we suffer. Society is organic. Individuals are
members of the same body, and if one member is diseased, every member
suffers but the suffering does not cure the disease.
Our Lord suffered and died for us but not in our stead. He took upon
Himself our diseased and perverted nature. He went from village to
village, from city to city, healing diseases, instructing the ignorant,
and comforting the sorrowful. He wrestled in agony with man's spiritual
enemies in Gethsemane, was crucified on Calvary, died, and rose again.
It was necessary that He should assume our nature, for in no other way
could He come into the material world, gain access to human beings, and
bring His Divine and saving power to bear upon them. Only through this
perverted organism could He come in conflict with the hosts of man’s
spiritual enemies and overcome them. The conflict and the agony were in
the plane of the imperfect nature He assumed from Mary. That conflict
was waged during His whole life upon the earth, and was attended with
the most acute and awful agonies, agonies which forced the blood from
His veins and wrung from Him the despairing cry, “My God, my God, why
hast Thou forsaken me?” By these conflicts He glorified the nature He
assumed, and made it the perfect medium of communicating His Divine
power and life to men. The suffering did no more effect the work than
the pain of a surgical operation contributes to its success. The
suffering was caused by the work; it was itself an effect of it.
Suffering has no saving efficacy; but the conflict with sin cannot be
waged and the victory won, without exhausting labor and intense pain.
The Lord’s sufferings and death were not vicarious in the sense of being
a substitute for the penalties which man brings upon himself by
violating the laws of his nature.
What, then, is the forgiveness of sin? The answer to this question will
depend upon what we understand by sin and its forgiveness. If we
regarded sin simply in a commercial way, payment of the debt would be
forgiveness, and this could be done by any one as well as by the debtor.
If the penalty of sin is arbitrarily affixed by the lawgiver, like that
which is attached to an act of the Legislature, it can be remitted by
the same authority that enacted it, and on any conditions the legislator
may determine. If a man commits murder and the law condemns him to
death, the executive in whom is invested the pardoning power may remit
the penalty. But the effect upon the man's character, the moral penalty,
cannot be remitted by the mere good pleasure of man or the Lord. If one
man assaults another, and in the conflict loses one of his eyes, he
might be imprisoned, and afterwards pardoned; but no executive clemency
or power could restore his eye. That is a penalty of the conflict which
cannot be forgiven. A legal penalty may be forgiven, but those penalties
which follow as the effects of violating an organic law of man's nature
cannot be borne or remitted by others.
If we regard sin as a spiritual disease, as corruption in the will,
blindness and disorder in the understanding, derangement and perversion
of man’s moral nature, then the forgiveness of sin consists in curing
him of his spiritual diseases. It is the purification of his affections,
it is the restoration of the understanding to its original order and
normal condition, it is curing his spiritual blindness, giving him ears
to hear the words of the Lord, and eyes to perceive the delicate and
exquisite harmonies of the Divine order; it is putting all his faculties
into right relations to each other and to the source of life. When this
is done, and so far as it is done, the penalty also is remitted, for the
penalty goes with the disease. When a musical instrument is out of tune
the penalty is discord. Tune it and the penalty disappears. The Lord
came into the world to restore our disorderly faculties to their normal
condition, to bring them into harmony with the order of His own nature,
to conjoin them to Him, as the branch to the vine, that the life-giving
forces of His own nature might flow into them, cleanse them of their
impurities, vivify them with His love, and cause them to bear fruit
abundantly. When, therefore, we pray to the Lord to forgive us our
debts, we must think of our own sinful natures, our diseased and dying
condition, and the burden and purpose of our prayer must be that the
Lord will heal our diseases, save us from the death they threaten, and
conjoin us to Himself.
We must ask the Lord to forgive our sins, because He is the only Being
who can do it. He is the Author of our nature, He organized its
faculties and adjusted all their relations to one another, to the
outward world, and to Himself. He only has the wisdom and power to
restore them to their original soundness and order. He knows the only
remedies that are efficacious, and the only conditions in which those
remedies can be effectively applied. He is the only Physician who can
cure us. We must go to Him in the spirit, with the same directness and
urgency that we go to a physician when we are suffering from some severe
bodily disease. When a man is filled with pain which has come upon him
as the penalty for violating some law of his physical nature, he does
not go to his physician as a mere formality, and ask him for help in the
lifeless and meaningless way we too often utter the words of our text;
he is in earnest. He knows what he wants. When the physician has heard
his prayer, and tells him what to do and how to do it, he listens
attentively, asks him to repeat the directions if he has any doubt about
them, and then obeys them. We should go to the Lord in the same spirit,
and be faithful in doing what He tells us to do. Let us take heed to the
only conditions on which the Great Physician declares we can be
forgiven. He does not ask us to pray for unconditional forgiveness.
“Forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors.” He does not teach us
to say, “Forgive us our debts,” because the Saviour has cancelled them.
He does not teach us to say, “Forgive us our debts,” because the Lord
Jesus Christ has suffered and died for us. There is no intimation of any
vicarious work having been performed, no appeal for mercy on the ground
of the merits of another person. The only conditions are that we forgive
others:
“For if ye forgive men their trespasses, your Heavenly Father will also
forgive you; But if ye forgive not men their trespasses, neither will
your Heavenly Father forgive your trespasses.”
From this declaration, which is presented in an affirmative and a
negative form to make it as clear and strong as possible, we are taught
that the Lord will only forgive us as we forgive others. It is of
essential importance, therefore, that we understand what is meant by the
forgiveness of others. Our salvation depends upon it. We cannot suppose
that nothing more than the common idea of forgiveness is implied in
these conditions; that the Lord will not punish us for our offences
against Him if we do not punish others for their offences against us.
There must be some law of the Divine wisdom involved in this condition,
some reasons founded in the essential relations between the Lord and
man. Let us try to discover what they are. It will help us to come to
just conclusions if we keep in mind what forgiveness essentially is not.
It is not the remission of the penalty. The Lord does not say to men, If
you will not punish others, I will not punish you. The forgiveness of
sin has no direct reference to its penalty. The penalty is the effect,
the mere shadow of the sin. It does not consist in cherishing a feeling
of complacency and friendship for those who have injured us; we cannot
do that. We are, indeed, commanded “to love our enemies, to bless them
that curse us, do good to them that hate us, and pray for them which
despitefully use us and persecute us.” But we may love our enemies
without feeling a personal affection for them. We really love others
when we desire to restrain them from evil and help them to overcome it.
The form our love takes will depend upon the condition of others. We may
seek their punishment from the kindest regard to them. To forgive others
consists “in regarding them from a principle of good,” that is, from a
desire to do them good, and so far as it lies in our power, in doing
them good as we have opportunity.
We must forgive their trespasses. By trespasses, as we have seen, are
meant stumblings in the way of life, falling into error, wandering from
the true path, failure in duty. To forgive others when they stumble
consists in removing the cause of stumbling, whether that cause is in
ourselves, as is often the case, or in them. This is the essential part
of the work, and it should begin with ourselves. We sincerely and
effectively offer this petition when we so regulate our actions by the
commandments that they will not be the cause of offence or stumbling to
those with whom we associate. By our conduct we exercise a much greater
power over others to help or hinder them in the way to heaven than we do
by our words. A good life is the best sermon; it is a constant influence
which tends to restrain, to guide, to cheer; it is generally regarded as
the best evidence and test of the truth of the doctrines professed. On
the other hand, men and women who do not live up to their profession, or
are not in the constant efforts to do so, are a stumbling-block to every
one within the circle of their influence. They cause the value of truth
to be depreciated, they awaken doubts with regard to the value of a
religious life, they cause the simple to err, the irresolute to falter,
the weak to fall. Every one who lives a pure, truthful, upright, and
useful life is forgiving the trespasses of others, is offering this
petition in a sincere and effective manner, and is complying with the
only conditions on which his own trespasses can be forgiven.
But we must not only set good examples, we must do all in our power to
communicate the truth to others. Genuine truth is the path which leads
to heaven. It is a luminous path shining with its own light. Ignorance
is darkness, error is a false way, and those who follow it wander in
darkness. Trespasses are specifically sins against the truth, they are
false principles. The only effective way to forgive men their trespasses
is to lead them into the truth. Parents offer this prayer for their
children when they instruct them in the doctrines of the church. Every
faithful Sunday-school teacher is laboring to forgive the trespasses of
the children he teaches. Whenever we converse with others for the
purpose of correcting an error by giving the truth, every book we lend,
every tract we distribute for the purpose of making known the truth, we
are trying to forgive the trespasses of others.
But everything we do or say will be far more efficient in forgiving
others when we act from love to them. Love gives warmth, power, life to
what we say and do. It gives wings to our words, it endows our example
with a winning and attractive power, it disposes the mind to listen to
our words, to read attentively what we offer, it gains the listening
ear, and tends to soften and open the affections to receive what we have
to give. The ways in which we can forgive others are innumerable, and
some of these ways are within the reach of every one. As we use the
means we have, we are complying with the conditions on which the Lord
forgives our trespasses.
Such being the clear and emphatic teachings of the Lord in His Word,
every thoughtful and rational mind must desire to know why the Lord
makes these conditions? Does He base His action upon ours? Does He make
our love for others the measure of His love for us, our action towards
others the guide of His action towards us? He is love; we are only the
contracted and perverted forms of receiving it. Our love to His is not
so much as the drop to the ocean. His wisdom is infinite; our light
compared with His is not so much as the faintest ray to the unclouded
sun. He possesses infinite power; we are weak and frail, the most
helpless of created beings. Why, then, should He condition His action on
ours, and measure what He will do for us by what we do for others? A
satisfactory answer to this question can only be found in a true
knowledge of what we are and of our relations to the Lord and to men.
We are only recipients of life. All our faculties are organic vessels
for the reception and transmission of life in the forms of power,
wisdom, and love. No vessel can receive more than it can contain. No
organ can receive a different quality of life than that which it was
formed to receive. The eye cannot hear, the tongue cannot see, the heart
cannot admit the atmosphere. The Lord cannot give us any more than we
can receive. As He cannot give us any more light than the eye can admit,
so He cannot give us any more truth than the understanding can receive.
The limit of every material organ to bear the influx of heat is soon
reached. If we pass beyond it, the organization is destroyed. So, if the
Lord should pour His Divine love, which is substance and power in their
very essence, with full intensity into our affections, we should be
consumed in a moment. He cannot give us any more love than we can
receive. He cannot give it to us in any higher and purer forms than we
can receive it. He is, therefore, limited both in the quality and
quantity of His gifts or of what He can do for us, by our capacities of
reception. Omnipotence cannot give us what we cannot take.
We are not merely passive recipients of life; if we were, the Lord would
fill every vessel full to the extent of its capacity. We are voluntary
recipients; we can close our hearts against the currents of the Divine
love; we can shut our understandings against the truth, as we can close
our eyes against the light. The Lord has endowed us with this power. He
has made us free agents. Moral freedom is essential to our humanity. The
Lord always respects it. He teaches us the truth, and He tries to lead
us to a heavenly life by all the influences He can bring to bear upon
us; but He always leaves us in freedom to act of ourselves, for only
what we do in freedom is our own act. If we will not live according to
the commandments which are laws of life, He cannot compel us. Here again
we can see that there is a limit to what the Lord can do for us. He can
only give us what we are willing to receive. Let us consider another
point and then we may be able to see why the Lord will not, or cannot,
which is the same, forgive us our trespasses unless we forgive others.
It is evident that, if man receives all his life from the Lord as a
constant gift, his faculties must be adjusted to the influent forces of
life with the most exquisite precision. Any deviation from their true
order would interrupt or derange the currents of these forces and
disturb their normal effects. It would destroy their qualities; it would
change good to evil, truth to falsity, light to darkness, harmony to
discord; it would invert the order of man’s life, bring him into hostile
relations to the Lord. This must be so in the nature of things. Man’s
spiritual faculties are adjusted to spiritual forces, in the same way
that his material faculties are adjusted to material forces. Any
derangement or deviation from the order of its forms fills the eye with
pain, and if the trespass continues entirely incapacitates it to receive
the light. The same law applies to every organ in the body. How can the
eye be forgiven its trespasses? Evidently by restoring it to its normal
condition and true relations to the light. There is no other way. The
same wise and inexorable law of the Divine order applies to the mind,
which is a spiritual organism. If its forms are deranged by misuse, its
trespass can only be forgiven by restoring them to their true order and
tone. The two fundamental laws of spiritual life are love to the Lord
and man. This is the true order of his life. Our faculties were made by
infinite wisdom to act in that way. And our Lord declares this in the
most explicit manner:
“|Jesus said, The first of all the commandments is, Hear, O Israel, the
Lord our God is one Lord: And thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all
thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind, and with all
thy strength.
“And the second is like unto it, Thou shalt love thy neighbor as
thyself. On these two commandments hang all the Law and the Prophets.”
When a man loves himself supremely he sins, he stumbles and falls away
from true order; he trespasses against the Lord and his neighbor; he
inverts the whole order of his nature, makes that the supreme end of
life which was intended, in the constitution of his faculties, to be
secondary and instrumental. His affections become corrupted, his
understanding darkened. Disorder, confusion, and anarchy are introduced
into the mind. The ideas are distorted, and all the criterions of right
are destroyed. We become subject to illusions, we wander from the true
path, we stumble and fall. This disorderly and evil condition can only
be changed by a change in the organization of the mind. These trespasses
against perfections of the Divine order embodied in man's nature can
only be forgiven by replacing the diseased faculties with new, sound,
and orderly ones. We must be born from above, we must be regenerated and
made anew.
But this can only be done by our co-operation. We are not in the Lord’s
hands like a block of marble in the sculptor’s. Our freedom must be
respected; we must be led by sufficient motives “to cease to do evil,”
and we must learn to do well. This is the process and condition in all
changes in our characters. We must learn the truth, and then we must
cease to think and do what it forbids, and we must understand and do
what it commands. In this way the old, perverted, corrupt forms of the
mind are removed, and new faculties, fashioned according to the laws of
the Divine order, take their place. As this work of transformation goes
on our iniquities are blotted out, our debts, trespasses, transgressions
are forgiven, our sins are remitted. This work of healing and
restoration is effected by the Lord, by the forces of life which
constantly flow from Him, as light and heat from the sun. But it can
only be effected while man cooperates with Him. He cannot forgive our
sins while we continue sinning; He cannot fill our hearts with love to
Him and the neighbor while we continue to love ourselves and the world
supremely. It is evident that He can only forgive—that is, give up and
put away—our sins as we turn to Him and try to put ourselves in right
relations to Him.
Now we may be able to see why the Lord can only forgive us as we forgive
others. When we begin to regard others from love and a sincere desire to
help them to overcome their evils, to teach them the truth, to lead them
back into the path of life, to remove so far as lies in our power all
causes of stumbling, to lift them up when they fall, to strengthen them
in their weakness, to encourage them when they despair; when we feel
kindly towards others, whatever may be their character and condition,
and stand ready to help them according to their needs and our ability;
in a word, when it is the purpose and effort of our lives to forgive the
trespasses of others, we are coming into true relations to them and the
Lord. The currents of the Divine love which, like the blood in the body,
contain all cleansing, healing, invigorating, and perfecting substances
and forces, begin to flow through us, and forgive our trespasses. They
organize a new will, create a new understanding, and restore to us the
lost likeness and image of our Heavenly Father. This is the way in which
the Lord forgives us our debts, as we forgive our debtors. We offer this
prayer when, and only when, we forgive the debts of others, and the Lord
forgives us our trespasses as much and little as we forgive others. Our
forgiveness of others is the measure of His forgiveness of us.
|
