None can deny to God that He was entitled to lay this or any other command upon the man He had created, and it carried with it an obligation to absolute obedience. Directly God prefers a demand we are thereby constituted debtors to Him, since we owe unquestioning, unqualified obedience; and directly we fail therein we become defaulters who have brought ourselves under the penalty attached to its breach, which penalty God was equally entitled to impose. We are, everyone, then, debtors to God, because in the exercise of His inherent and unimpeachable authority He has been pleased to lay upon us certain commands, and we have everyone of us incurred the penalty, because we have failed to discharge these admitted obligations.
Our relations to Him as intelligent creatures of His hand, to whom He has vouchsafed to make known His will, involve the obligation to render Him perfect, uniform, and unceasing obedience. This constitutes the debt we owe to Him, an inextinguishable debt which attaches to our existence and nature in common with other intelligences, as angels, who are equally bound to obey His behest and for the same reason.
The fulfilling His will is obedience, the exercise of our own independent will is lawlessness, which is sin. Every defaulting debtor to God is undoubtedly a sinner, and every sinner has put himself under the penalty attached to his sin. To speak precisely, a debt to God is not in its nature a sin, nor is a debtor to God necessarily a sinner, because, as before remarked, men and angels are thus debtors simply because God has given to them His commands, whether they be broken or fulfilled. A defaulted debt becomes a sin, and a defaulting debtor a sinner, when God is the Creditor. Being by nature and by practice hopelessly sinners and irretrievably guilty, we are lost.
At this point grace comes in. Man's state being at its worst, God does His best, making demonstration that in the same act in which Jewish, human, and Satanic enmity are respectively raging, His sovereign goodness is laying a mighty and impregnable foundation for its supreme and eternal display. He gave His Son and was in Him reconciling the world unto Himself: the world received Him not! The Son of man must then be lifted up (and Christ gave Himself that they might do with Him as they listed). This brought in the cross! The climax of man's wickedness and hatred of God and goodness, and the climax of God's love to the ruined and the lost, coalesced there in Christ's obedience unto death. The one in whom was His eternal good pleasure, God's Lamb, who knew no sin, became sin for us, and in order that He might take away the sin of the world. The One who had never sinned nor could, being essentially “the Holy,” had laid upon Him the iniquities of us all; He bare our sins Himself in His own body on the tree, being accounted guilty for us, and thus bore the penalty under which we lay on account of being defaulting debtors, sinners, guilty, lost! Whatever that penalty was He must have endured its equivalent on the cross, or God were not the holy God that He is, and we were not as believers the ransomed ones that we are. Never yet has any sinner proved in his own person the full extent of the penalty of his sins, its experience being as yet restricted to Him who became our Substitute; never can any mere creature fathom what He endured under the infliction of God in righteousness. This however we do know, that the work done has finally discharged every claim of God against us on account of our sins, as effectually as it has glorified Himself to whom it was done, and every desire of whose heart has equally found eternal satisfaction in the blessed person of Him who was the doer of it.
The question now comes, What part has the love of God to us in this, and where does forgiveness come in? Forgiveness is the personal thing resulting from or consequent on our individual exercise of faith. Upon this God makes good to the soul the blessed and eternal consequences of the work done for us by another; as Paul says, “Who loved me and gave himself for me.”
The love of God was shown (1) in His embracing us in His eternal counsels as “vessels of mercy, which he had afore prepared unto glory;” (2) in having provided a ransom, even His own Son, and given Him that we might be saved; (3) in accepting Him as a substitute for us when He might have insisted upon our endurance of the penalty individually in our own persons; and lastly, in producing faith in our hearts unto eternal life—for this faith is the gift of God, as much as was the gift of His Son.
Where then this faith is found (God seen to be “light,” therefore requiring atonement, but also “love” and therefore giving His Son to render it; the shiner owning his guilt and the awful penalty thereof, but cast upon God in mercy for individual salvation), He makes good to the heart as a distinct personal act of divine favor or grace, the efficacy and the value of the work of the cross. This is divine forgiveness.
Nor is it that we have one kind of forgiveness for debts and another for sins; indeed, speaking with exactness, it would be more correct to say that while sins are forgiven, DEBTS NEVER ARE, for God does not cancel our obligations to Him. Since these obligations constitute our debts to God, it is clear they can never be liquidated because in their very nature they are as continuous as our relations to Him as His creatures; and grace, so far from invalidating this, has only established it upon the higher and eternal basis of what we more emphatically and fully owe to Him as being sons to the Father. For the same reason our debts being looked at simply as current obligations to God, they cannot be forgiven, inasmuch as there is no guilt involved therein: on the contrary, obedience to God and dependence upon Him, constitute the very perfection of a creature.
It must be evident, therefore that when scripture speaks of our debts being forgiven (see Matt. 6:12; 18:23-3512And forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors. (Matthew 6:12)
23Therefore is the kingdom of heaven likened unto a certain king, which would take account of his servants. 24And when he had begun to reckon, one was brought unto him, which owed him ten thousand talents. 25But forasmuch as he had not to pay, his lord commanded him to be sold, and his wife, and children, and all that he had, and payment to be made. 26The servant therefore fell down, and worshipped him, saying, Lord, have patience with me, and I will pay thee all. 27Then the lord of that servant was moved with compassion, and loosed him, and forgave him the debt. 28But the same servant went out, and found one of his fellowservants, which owed him an hundred pence: and he laid hands on him, and took him by the throat, saying, Pay me that thou owest. 29And his fellowservant fell down at his feet, and besought him, saying, Have patience with me, and I will pay thee all. 30And he would not: but went and cast him into prison, till he should pay the debt. 31So when his fellowservants saw what was done, they were very sorry, and came and told unto their lord all that was done. 32Then his lord, after that he had called him, said unto him, O thou wicked servant, I forgave thee all that debt, because thou desiredst me: 33Shouldest not thou also have had compassion on thy fellowservant, even as I had pity on thee? 34And his lord was wroth, and delivered him to the tormentors, till he should pay all that was due unto him. 35So likewise shall my heavenly Father do also unto you, if ye from your hearts forgive not every one his brother their trespasses. (Matthew 18:23‑35); Luke 7, &c.), the term is used in the more general way, as indeed uniformly in the word, namely, as defaulted debts, trespasses or sins which God forgives, as we have seen, because Christ has died and made atonement. Thus in the parables referred to we are seen not only as debtors, but as so thoroughly insolvent, so hopelessly bankrupt, that we have not a penny in the pound to offer. This is carefully noted in the words, “forasmuch as he had not to pay,” and again, “when they had nothing to pay.” Deliverance comes to us, then, not because God cancels the obligation, but because the penalty has been borne for us by the competent Substitute His own love had provided.
Here we may remark that we are never taught to forgive on the same theological principle as we are forgiven upon, but because we are forgiven, in like manner we are to forgive. Nothing is said as to the measure or as to the method. Who, for instance, could ask God to forgive in the same measure as he had forgiven his fellow-men? But in like manner he could. And as to the method or principle, God's ground of forgiveness is the righteous satisfaction He has received in the endurance by another of the penalty we had incurred, while our ground of the forgiveness of others is simply that God has forgiven us.
Further, upon this principle, God is righteous on His part, and to all the claims of His character in holiness and truth, in forgiving sins, and “He is faithful and just” to Christ, and to those who are His, in giving to our hearts the blessed sense of this forgiveness due to the value of the satisfaction rendered by that adorable One to God.
Finally; if any question be asked as to debts which may be defaulted in the future, or since we believed, the answer is plain, when the penalty was borne for me by another, every one of my debts was future. That penalty has been borne “once for all,” and thereby every defaulted debt of the believer forever discharged. The obligation of obedience can never be liquidated so long as God is God, but thanks be to Him, the penalty of every breach of it has been so borne or paid by the God-provided Substitute, that God is glorified in forgiving our sins, and has blotted them out of His sight forever. By paying the penalty Himself, Christ has discharged for faith every defaulted debt, and delivered from his Creditor's judgment every defaulting debtor who has believed unto salvation; the knowledge of which brought home to the heart personally, in sovereign goodness and divine power, is what scripture means by the forgiveness of sins. R.