Matthew 6:12

_ _ Fifth Petition:

_ _ And forgive us our debts — A vitally important view of sin, this — as an offense against God demanding reparation to His dishonored claims upon our absolute subjection. As the debtor in the creditor’s hand, so is the sinner in the hands of God. This idea of sin had indeed come up before in this discourse — in the warning to agree with our adversary quickly, in case of sentence being passed upon us, adjudging us to payment of the last farthing, and to imprisonment till then (Matthew 5:25, Matthew 5:26). And it comes up once and again in our Lord’s subsequent teaching — as in the parable of the creditor and his two debtors (Luke 7:41, Luke 7:42, etc.), and in the parable of the unmerciful debtor (Matthew 18:23, etc.). But by embodying it in this brief model of acceptable prayer, and as the first of three petitions more or less bearing upon sin, our Lord teaches us, in the most emphatic manner conceivable, to regard this view of sin as the primary and fundamental one. Answering to this is the “forgiveness” which it directs us to seek — not the removal from our own hearts of the stain of sin, nor yet the removal of our just dread of God’s anger, or of unworthy suspicions of His love, which is all that some tell us we have to care about — but the removal from God’s own mind of His displeasure against us on account of sin, or, to retain the figure, the wiping or crossing out from His “book of remembrance” of all entries against us on this account.

_ _ as we forgive our debtors — the same view of sin as before; only now transferred to the region of offenses given and received between man and man. After what has been said on Matthew 5:7, it will not be thought that our Lord here teaches that our exercise of forgiveness towards our offending fellow men absolutely precedes and is the proper ground of God’s forgiveness of us. His whole teaching, indeed — as of all Scripture — is the reverse of this. But as no one can reasonably imagine himself to be the object of divine forgiveness who is deliberately and habitually unforgiving towards his fellow men, so it is a beautiful provision to make our right to ask and expect daily forgiveness of our daily shortcomings and our final absolution and acquittal at the great day of admission into the kingdom, dependent upon our consciousness of a forgiving disposition towards our fellows, and our preparedness to protest before the Searcher of hearts that we do actually forgive them. (See Mark 11:25, Mark 11:26). God sees His own image reflected in His forgiving children; but to ask God for what we ourselves refuse to men, is to insult Him. So much stress does our Lord put upon this, that immediately after the close of this prayer, it is the one point in it which He comes back upon (Matthew 6:14, Matthew 6:15), for the purpose of solemnly assuring us that the divine procedure in this matter of forgiveness will be exactly what our own is.