Scripture: Matthew 18:23-34; Isaiah 40:1-5; Joshua 13:15-20; Exodus 10:17; Ruth 4 Series: 2022
Part of a series on the Apostles’ Creed, this sermon unpacks ‘I believe in the forgiveness of sins’ through the biblical language of debt and economics. Drawing on Aramaic where the word for sin literally means debt, the Lord’s Prayer (‘forgive us our debts’), and the parable of the unforgiving servant in Matthew 18, the preacher argues that forgiveness is a concrete economic reality, not an abstraction. God practices a ‘divine economics’ that defies moral hazard and worldly efficiency by wiping clean our ledger of sin, even when we are junk-rated and undeserving. To believe in the forgiveness of sins is to believe in the radical possibility of transformation, and the ‘as we forgive’ of the Lord’s Prayer compels us to extend that undeserved mercy to others.
Illustrations: ut-economics-major, worldly-philosophers-heilbroner, boaz-redeemer-ruth, columbus-debt-instruments, roman-empire-debt-collapse, scaled-debt-forgiveness, moral-hazard-2008, junk-bond-rating, oprah-you-get-a-car
January 22
I believe in the forgiveness of sins
Comfort, comfort my people! says your God. Speak compassionately to Jerusalem, and proclaim to her that her compulsory service has ended, that her penalty has been paid, that she has received from the Lord’s hand double for all her sins! A voice is crying out: “Clear the Lord’s way in the desert! Make a level highway in the wilderness for our God! Every valley will be raised up, and every mountain and hill will be flattened. Uneven ground will become level, and rough terrain a valley plain. The Lord’s glory will appear, and all humanity will see it together; the Lord’s mouth has commanded it.” Isaiah 40:1-5
When I started at UT as a freshman, my first major was economics. The reason was quite practical. It is one of the few practical things I’ve done in my life, it didn’t hold, but I started in the right direction. I had read a book in high school called The Worldly Philosophers by Robert Heilbroner. It was about, David Ricardo, Thomas Malthus, Adam Smith and early economists. I thought that if I studied economics, there would be more job prospects than studying philosophy. I could think rigorously and be compensated for it. Or maybe go to law school.
So that was the original plan. God got in the way of it. But I was still interested enough in economics to be able to keep up with different literature over the years. As I took my call to ministry more seriously, I started studying the scriptures in a more serious and rigorous way than I had before. It was at that time that I started seeing all the economic language that exists throughout the Bible. For example, Joshua 13 begins a long series of chapters about land distribution among the children of the tribes of Israel.
“Moses provided for the clans of the Reubenite tribe. Their territory ran from Aroer by the rim of the Arnon Valley and the city in the middle of the ravine, and the whole plateau as far as Medeba. It included Heshbon and all its cities that are on the plateau: Dibon, Bamoth-baal, Beth-baal-meon, Jahaz, Kedemoth, Mephaath, Kiriathaim, Sibmah, the Zereth-shahar highlands, Beth-peor, the slopes of Pisgah, and Beth-jeshimoth.” Joshua 13:15-20 CEB
It goes on for a while. We have the fine print of the covenant here. These are real places. Real land that is given to people based on God’s promise. I think it is amazing that passages like this are found in the Bible. A lot of it reads like old fashioned titles and contracts. Not a lot of sermons or devotionals look at biblical real estate. We can always read it with apathy: “what does this have to do with me?” “I don’t care about ancient Jewish contract theory.”Or, we can read it humbly and realize that God cares about such things.
Another example from the Bible is the language of a redeemer. For instance, in the Book of Ruth, the reason why Boaz is a redeemer is that he is the closest relative of Naomi’s husband. You can’t sell land to anyone in Israel. It has to stay in the family. There were no real estate agents. The redeemer is someone who has a claim over the land, that is, Naomi’s husband’s estate and her son’s estate. Redemption wasn’t about eternal salvation but a highly functional economic transaction.
Another example is debt. Debt and debtors are found throughout the old testament. Usury, or any interest bearing loan, is universally condemned in the Bible. But the more prominent example is in the Lord’s Prayer. In the more literal translation of the Lord’s Prayer. Forgive us our debts as we forgive those who have a debt against us.
Jesus isn’t just talking about metaphorical debts. It’s actual debts. And as we think up how this line in the creed: I believe in the forgiveness of sins, if we get too far away from the language of debt, transaction and economics, then we are no longer in the world of the Bible.
Series Intro
My friends, we are continuing our series on the apostles creed, that historic doctrinal statement of the faith. We are going to look at how the creed encapsulate scripture and offers it to us in a way that shows us what has been revealed from God about who God is, how the world is, why we are in need, how Jesus saves us, and what we should do about it.
Today, I believe in the forgiveness of sins.
The root of the word economics comes from the Greek word for the home. It’s the study of like goes on in the home in these kinds of ways. Basic expenses in a way, right? Like how much flour does a home need? And over the last 600 years, innovations in accounting, probability, and in investment instruments have continually taken place. Economics is not just an innovation over the last hundred years. There were incredibly complicated economic influences 500 years ago. For example, Christopher Columbus’s journey to America was funded through a series of complex debt instruments. In some ways, they were more complex than loans today because they had to get around usury laws and so they couldn’t explicitly give someone an interest based loan.
Economics of the ancient world was also very complicated. One of the better theories for why the Roman Empire collapsed has to do with the collapse of economic communication and taxation between regions. They could no longer withstand the levels of debt leverage that had been going on for 2 or 300 years due to disruptions in communication. It wasn’t because the Empire converted to Christianity. It had to do with some over leveraged individuals who no longer could communicate with their investments.
Debt is complicated in the ancient world and we need to hold onto this language of debt when we talk about sin and the forgiveness of sin.
In Aramaic, the language Jesus spoke, “the word for a debt that one owes a lender, hôbâ, is the standard term denoting sin.”1 This also works with forgiveness. Exodus 10:17 says “Now forgive my sin once more and pray to the Lord your God to take this deadly plague away from me.” In Aramaic, it reads “remit the debt of my sins.”2
Sin as debt is found especially in the Parable of the king in Matthew 18.
Therefore, the kingdom of heaven is like a king who wanted to settle accounts with his servants. When he began to settle accounts, they brought to him a servant who owed him ten thousand bags of gold. Because the servant didn’t have enough to pay it back, the master ordered that he should be sold, along with his wife and children and everything he had, and that the proceeds should be used as payment. But the servant fell down, kneeled before him, and said, ‘Please, be patient with me, and I’ll pay you back.’ The master had compassion on that servant, released him, and forgave the loan.
“When that servant went out, he found one of his fellow servants who owed him one hundred coins. He grabbed him around the throat and said, ‘Pay me back what you owe me.’
“Then his fellow servant fell down and begged him, ‘Be patient with me, and I’ll pay you back.’ But he refused. Instead, he threw him into prison until he paid back his debt.
“When his fellow servants saw what happened, they were deeply offended. They came and told their master all that happened. His master called the first servant and said, ‘You wicked servant! I forgave you all that debt because you appealed to me. Shouldn’t you also have mercy on your fellow servant, just as I had mercy on you?’ His master was furious and handed him over to the guard responsible for punishing prisoners, until he had paid the whole debt.
“My heavenly Father will also do the same to you if you don’t forgive your brother or sister from your heart.” - Matthew 18:23-34
It is easy to make sin abstract. But when we talk about the forgiveness of debt, we get concrete really quickly. If a friend is rude to you one evening, it is easy to move on. If a friend owes you money, it is much more difficult.
As well, if you owe someone 50 bucks and they say it’s good, it’s one thing. It’s nice. If you borrow 50 bucks, it’s nice, you know, great. They forgive the debt and you are a little freer.
If you owe someone $500,000 and they say, “don’t worry, you’re good. I’m gonna write it off.” There is a different sort of forgiveness going on. Or let’s look at a house in the area. 2.35 million. I saw this week on Zillow. Right down the road. Buy the house, get it, thanks. Bank then says, “actually, you know what? You don’t owe us anything.” That’s a pretty remarkable situation to be in. You thought you were in the position where you owed this much money. It turns out now that the loaning institution says you don’t owe it anymore. They’ve redeemed your debt and they have wiped it clean.
Now, one of the ways that this might be discussed in economic language is the problem of moral hazard. Moral hazard is this idea that if you just keep on forgiving, bailing out institutions, they’re going to start counting on that bailout. And so they’re gonna act in a reckless way that damages the financial infrastructure of the country. You heard the language a lot in the news, especially during the 2008 financial crisis.
So you don’t want to fall prey to moral hazard in modern economics. And yet, if we did what we say in the Lord’s Prayer: (forgive my debts as I forgive those who have debt against me); this would seem to be exactly what causes moral hazard. The hinge of the gospel now comes down to the response: what do we do now that that debt is wiped away? Do we act in such a way as contemporary economic theory would assume? That is, after forgiveness, do we act in a reckless way knowing that God will bail us out no matter what? Do we do whatever we want because we know there won’t be any consequences?
Or do we change, do we receive the possibility of change?
To believe in the forgiveness of sins is to believe in this radical possibility of change, to believe in the radical possibility of transformation. That my giant ledger of sin, what I owe God, what I owe others, will be taken away. My whole life, I’ve just been building up debt. I’ve been taking out loans. I’ve been taking out loans of sin. I’ve been taking out these sin loans. I’ve been not loving, avoiding loving people, I’ve been not praising God in all things, I’ve been building up a ledger. And the act of faith is that it’s going to be wiped away clean. Like a debt that you no longer owe. Now, that’s a different sort of economics than the world in which we live. Divine economics is different from American economics or the global economic system. A bank that forgave every loan would not be a bank very long. A car dealer that pulled an Oprah every week and said, “you get a car, you get a car, you get a car,” would not be in business for long. But God shows us, in the life of Christ and in the forgiveness that he offers us, this incredible inefficiency of divine justice. It’s not fair. I mean, I deserve to be punished for my sins. I deserve to be punished for the ways that I have harmed others, for the ways I’ve ignored others, for the ways I have turned my back on other people in my life, for the ways I’ve passed people on the street, for the ways I’ve rationalized my life choices, ignoring the consequences of my actions. This is not self hatred but reality. Justice demands it.
The forgiveness of sins is not just the letting go of a few little things here and there, but it is a radical transformation of how we view ourselves and how we view the world. More than anything, how we view God. “Wait, God is willing to bear the risk of forgiving me. What if I’m not worth it? What if I don’t deserve it? What if I’m not good on it? I can’t pay back this note, God?” God is willing to, to bear that risk. Even if my bond rating is junk, I’m junk status, fairly junk status, and yet God is willing to bear it.
Then God asks for the next big thing: to bear others. As we pray in the Lord’s prayer, forgive us our debts, as we forgive.” That as we is enormous. God offers us forgiveness but compels us to offer it, as well. This is the crux of the parable I read earlier from Matthew 18. It is hypocricy to receive mercy and then to go and not give it. It may be a good business practice to seek the forgiveness of your loans but not to forgive another’s loans. It may be good business practice but it is not how God offers us life. Mercy is not a cudgel to be held over our neighbor but a gift none of us deserve.
May you remember that whatever debt you are carrying in your soul, whatever you think is too much, it is not too much for God. If you think you are not worth it, you’re worth it to God. This is what it means to believe in the forgiveness of sins. It is not just a good notion; it is a radical act of faith,
Let us pray,
God of compassion, you have reconciled us in Jesus Christ who is our peace: Enable us to live as Jesus lived, breaking down walls of hostility and healing enmity. Give us grace to make peace with those from whom we are divided, that, forgiven and forgiving, we may ever be one in Christ; who with you and the Holy Spirit reigns for ever, one holy and undivided Trinity. Amen.
When I am mean, and hurt my friends, lord forgive my sins. When I hold back from loving my kin, lord forgive my sins.
As I forgive others who have hurt me, Will you forgive me from my inconsistency. As I forgive others will you, lord, forgive me.