Greeting Members and Friends
It time once again for our weekly Sunday School preview so thanks for joining me and welcome back. The Summer Quarter entitled “Justice in the New Testament” focuses on ways God demonstrates His justice and ways His people should follow His example. The July unit is entitled “Jesus Calls for Justice and Mercy,” has five lessons that explore Jesus’ teachings on God’s justice in the books of Matthew and Luke. Included is Jesus’ demand for leaders to practice justice as well as to understand the universality of God’s justice and mercy.
This Sunday’s lesson is entitled “Parable of the Unforgiving Servant” or “To Forgive and Be Forgiven”. In this week’s lesson, Jesus teaches us the importance of mercy and forgiveness. Mercy and forgiveness is not something people easily do and is contrary to human nature. People are so busy and use to trying to get ahead and keeping what they have, until they have little tolerance for anything that get in the way of that or helping others to maintain or get ahead.
Mercy can be described as the act of postponing, delaying or declining to impose an act that will have negative consequences upon an individual or group even though one has the power and/or right to do so. Forgiveness releases a person from the debt or injury they caused to or inflicted upon another person. Both of these attributes are divine in origin and are required in the people of God. If fact, they are so essential that salvation cannot be received without them. Jesus uses a parable to illustrate this point.
In the parable, the first man represents our huge debt to God that is impossible for us to pay and God’s willingness by His mercy and grace to forgive us our debt. The second man represents our fellow man who is indebted to us. The major difference between the amount of the two debts comes from who has been offended. For a man to offend another man is one thing, but for man to offend God is not even close to being on the same level. This is why the first debt is so much greater than the second and makes the fact that the first man wouldn’t forgive the second man so grievous.
Therefore, Jesus is teaching us that our offense against God is so great that we can’t pay it and no matter what our fellow man’s offense is against us it’s not as great as ours against God. Furthermore, if we desire God to forgive us then we must forgive others as a condition for forgiveness. There are some pretty awful things one man can do to another man. But as awful as all these things are nothing rises to the level of offense of man against God. For man is only a fellow creature, but God to the creator and sustainer of them both.
Judgement is therefore left to God, not us, to punish or have mercy upon the man that has offended both Him and his fellow man. We must defer to God’s judgement by having mercy and forgiveness for what our fellow man does to us. Finally, Jesus taught us to pray by asking God to forgive us in the same manner or as we forgive everyone else. Well, that’s all for this week’s preview. Be sure to join us in Sunday School this week for a fuller discussion of this lesson and the general topic of Justice in the New Testament. So, until then
Grace and peace
Pastor Jordan
