Deuteronomy 15:1-2 At the end of every seven years you must cancel debts. This is how it is to be done: Every creditor shall cancel any loan they have made to a fellow Israelite. They shall not require payment from anyone among their own people, because the Lord’s time for canceling debts has been proclaimed.
What kind of God would call for a system that cancelled people’s debts every seven years?
A generous one, I would say. One who believes in second chances. One who doesn’t box people into definitions of success and failure, winners and losers. A God who exudes redemption.
So it’s no wonder the Lord’s Prayer instructs us to ask God to “forgive us our debts as we have forgiven our debtors” (Matt. 6:12). We can’t live in a fallen world without experiencing the brunt of other people’s “fallenness.” But we, too, need forgiveness for our own fallenness.
Not one of us lives outside the need to forgive and be forgiven.
A few years ago, the uncle of one of my students abducted and killed an Amish teenage girl as she walked home from church. The impact of such evil affected the whole community. It’s hard to wrap your head around the blatant snuffing out of innocence. But as my student relayed the story, one factor stood out….
The love and grace the Amish extended to her family was overwhelming. Within hours of her uncle’s arrest, an Amish woman and her four children showed up at their door with a bouquet of hand-picked flowers. This small act communicated the one thing my student’s family most desperately needed: forgiveness.
The heart of the Judeo-Christian faith rests in forgiveness. Forgiveness that extends beyond financial debt. As C.S. Lewis writes, “To be a Christian means to forgive the inexcusable because God has forgiven the inexcusable in you.” He says forgiveness is a lovely idea until we have to practice it. But practicing forgiveness has the power to bring good out of the most egregious of sin.
My student’s uncle, who committed such an inexcusable crime, will spend the rest of his life in prison, and rightly so. But even behind prison walls he can find freedom and forgiveness of his great debt.