Seventy Times Seven

Seventy times seven.  Occasionally, a line in a book or a sermon stops me in my tracks. This week there were two. “In an age in which everything is permitted, and nothing is forgiven,” Tim Keller writes, “forgiveness is a form of voluntary suffering. In forgiving, rather than retaliating, you make a choice to bear the cost” (Forgive: Why Should I and How Can I?, p. 6). Ooof! Alistair Begg lands a similar punch, “We’ve become experts at asking forgiveness for things we had nothing to do with 200 years ago, and we fail to ask forgiveness for what we did 20 minutes ago.” Ouch!

As I mull over the words by these two modern communicators, it is Jesus who occupies the premier position for surgically dividing truth from opinion. During a contentious age, typified by rabbinical teachers, forgiving someone once was considered extraordinarily pious. But Jesus turned the opinion of piety completely upside down with the truth. “Then Peter came up and said to him, ‘Lord, how often will my brother sin against me, and I forgive him? As many as seven times?’ Jesus said to him, ‘I do not say to you seven times, but seventy times seven’” (Matt. 18:21-22). Peter’s insertion of seven times is generous in his own right; seven times forgiven is unthinkably often. But Jesus shatters all comparative examples of piety when he assigns seventy times seven, basically an unlimited number, to forgiveness.

Seventy times seven was uttered once before. After Cain killed his brother, Abel, God exiled Cain but kindly marked him and vowed to protect him, murderer though he was. “If anyone kills Cain, vengeance shall be taken on him sevenfold” (Gen. 4:15). Yet, seven generations after Cain, Lamech vowed seventy times seven, an unlimited number, to his vengeance as a fist in God’s face. “I have killed a man for wounding me, a young man for striking me. If Cain's revenge is sevenfold, then Lamech's is seventy-sevenfold” (Gen. 4:23-24). When Jesus speaks of unlimited forgiveness, he taps a reservoir of generosity that neither Cain nor Lamech nor we (in our flesh) could conceive—for only God is unlimited in his forgiveness. That’s the point. Only God is unlimited in forgiveness. We have asked him to forgive us unlimitedly: “and forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors (Matt. 6:12). We who have been forgiven have been also transformed by the God who forgives to such a degree that a disconnect with forgiveness is likely a symptom of a disconnect with God. “As the Lord has forgiven you, so you also must forgive” (Col. 3:13).