The following is Part 1 of 2 on Debt and Deliverance. (It's an excerpt from my book, which should hopefully be coming out in 2024!) Part 2, Deliver Us From Evil, should come out first week of 2024...
Debt and Deliverance, Part 1
Forgive us our debts
Give us this day our daily bread,
And forgive us our debts,
As we forgive our debtors
(Matt 6:11-12 NKJV)
Why is there an ‘and?’ What links forgiveness of debt with daily bread? I would suggest that relying on God’s provision ties the two together. In the spirit of Sabbath, for six days God provided bread for Israel in the wilderness, and on the seventh day there was enough. As we pray the Lord’s prayer we are asking for God to provide daily - not to give us so much that we don’t need to rely on Him, but just enough for the day - our daily bread.[1] Each day we rely on God to provide, and because we know God will provide, we have no cause to keep our debtors indebted to us, we can daily forgive and release them from their bondage.
And here is where we must ask the question, what debt do we owe? In my church, and for as long as I can remember we have always prayed “forgive us our sins, as we forgive those who sin against us.” But you won’t actually find that version of the Lord’s prayer in your Bible. When we say “those who sin against us,” we are following a tradition rather than Scripture. So is it ok to swap the word sin for debt?
When Wycliffe translated the Bible in 1384 he went for the word debt, “And forgiv us oure dettis, As we forgiven oure dettours”. In 1526 Tyndale took poetic licence with the word trespass: “and forgeve us oure treaspases, even as we forgeve them which treaspas us.” The iconic King James Version of 1611 reverted back to debt language with “debt” and “debtors,” but when the Book of Common Prayer came out in 1662 we were back to “forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive them that trespass against us.”[2] Then the updated prayer book for Australia appeared in 1978, swapping the archaic word trespass to sin, and so we were left with “Forgive us our sins as we forgive those who sin against us.”
While the prayer book version isn’t precisely a great Greek translation, the word “sin” is not entirely without merit, because Luke’s version does contain the word sin. But only once, not twice
And forgive us our sins, For we also forgive everyone who is indebted to us (Luke 11:4 NKJV)
Matthew further complicates things when he adds yet another word at the end of the Lord’s prayer as Jesus says “For if you forgive men their trespasses, your heavenly Father will also forgive you” (Matt 6:14 NKJV). So what’s the relationship between trespasses, debt, and sin? One answer is they all appear with a request for forgiveness, nevertheless I was prompted to do some proper investigating, and what I found properly surprised me.
Even though the words of Jesus were written down in Greek, Jesus didn’t speak Greek. Jesus spoke Aramaic, and in Aramaic, debt and sin are the same word! It could be that when Matthew and Luke wrote down in Greek what Jesus said in Aramaic they had to make a choice; did Jesus mean debt or sin? It’s a possibility, but the more I looked into it, the more I realised it wasn’t as controversial as I suspected. The concept of debt and sin are actually so intertwined that for Jesus’ culture they were the same thing. I wondered whether this mingling may have been an ancient concept that has been lost to us today. Or perhaps it’s merely modern Westerners who see sin and debt as separated? Well, I properly had my mind blown when I learned that for Germans today, they have one word which means both debt and guilt: schuld. So no, it’s not just a Western thing. Maybe it’s only an English speaking problem. Perhaps English has unhelpfully separated what is really a unified idea? Perhaps taking a closer look at how Jesus talks about forgiveness will help.
When Peter famously asks Jesus how many times he should forgive, Jesus replies seventy times seven (Matt 18:22). Then Jesus tells a story as a direct response to Peter’s question about forgiveness: a king had a slave who had a debt that was so enormous he could never make a dent in it. It was a burden he could not remove by himself. The slave pleaded with the king for mercy who “felt compassion and released him and forgave him the debt” (v 27). That’s it. The king just cancelled the debt without requiring it to be paid by someone else. The good king was living out Deuteronomy 15 “every creditor shall release what he has loaned to his neighbor; he shall not exact it of his neighbor and his brother” (Deut 15:2 NASB95). The story goes on to tell how this slave did not follow the example set by his king. He was given the opportunity to show mercy as he had been shown mercy, to forgive as he had been forgiven, but unfortunately, since he was unable to show forgiveness, he was also unable to receive forgiveness, finding himself again bound by his debt and in need of release.
Release isn’t a tangential issue for Jesus, it is central to His mission. When Jesus proclaims ‘release for the captives, and liberty for the oppressed’ Luke 4:18-19, isaiah 61:1-2) He is using a word aphesis - release - which actually gets translated as ‘forgiveness’ every other time it appears in the New Testament (NASB). So when we pray forgive us our debts, are we asking to be released from debt? What debt do we owe? Does God need to get paid? According to Jesus’ parable, God’s definition of release requires no payment. God just cancels debts. Tossing them away, as far as East is from West. I explain elsewhere that Biblical sacrifice was not a payment. Pagan sacrifice may have been, but sacrifice in God's eyes was not a transaction - and it was definitely not a required payment for forgiveness or release.
This is vitally important because too often ransom has been conflated with sacrifice. People begin with the assumption that sacrifice means giving something up, therefore when they read that Jesus gave His life as a ransom, they come to the conclusion that Jesus' death was a sacrifice that paid a price. There may have been a payment. There may have been a sacrifice. But Biblical sacrifice is never a payment. Not in God’s economy. God’s economy is not the same as the world's greed. God is in need of nothing. God freely gives. And God cancels debts.
“I have wiped out your transgressions like a thick cloud
And your sins like a heavy mist.
Return to Me, for I have redeemed you.”
(Isaiah 44:22)
Throughout the Greco-Roman world in which Jesus and His disciples lived, being bound by a debt was a reality for many people. Jesus' parable of the unforgiving servant speaks to this very issue; if some unfortunate person had a bad year or a bad crop, there was no government support, no pension, no social security. In this scenario it wasn't uncommon to sell a son or daughter into slavery until they could pay off the debt, or to find your whole family under bondage until you could work off the debt. This is where the term debt slave or debt bondage comes from, defined as a state of indebtedness to a landowner or a ruler.[3] Many families found themselves caught under a weight of debt that they could never repay, their debt being too big to shift without help. Debt bondage was even passed on from generation to generation, so your grandchildren could find themselves born into a life of debt bondage, with absolutely no ability to free themselves unless someone else removed the burden of debt. Any Jew listening to Jesus would surely have been reminded of the familiar story of Elisha and the woman who pleads for help after her husband died while he was still heavily in debt, saying “the creditor has come to take my two children to be his slaves” (2 Kings 4:1).[4]
This, I think, is more what we should be thinking when we ask for forgiveness from debt: release us from our debt as we also release everyone who is indebted to us. Think of debt less as something we owe, but rather the state of being held in bondage, as a debt slave to another master, caught under a burden we cannot remove by ourselves.
In all this however, we are assuming the ruler or the king is a reasonable human being. Paying a debt is not going to work if the master we are indebted to is unwilling to release us, in which case we now need to be rescued from the grip of an evil tyrant. Case in point: Pharaoh, where we find the origin of Israel's identity as released slaves, and God’s identity as Redeemer. Pharaoh was just such a tyrannical taskmaster who refused to release.
This is why you're reading about redemption and debt. Biblical sacrifice is not a transaction, nor was it used as a release payment for Israel’s redemption. Really, think about it, if God’s principle is to release freely, would God have feasibly paid a ransom price? Who would He have paid it to? Pharaoh? Egypt’s gods? Rome? Satan? Surely it’s not God’s habit to pay off evil.[5] Did God need to be paid Himself? Careful now, you can’t have principles about cancelling debt, freeing slaves, redemption from enemies and also a God who requires a ransom payment. Many years ago, in about AD 380 Saint Gregory of Nazianzus was grappling with this same question
Now, since a ransom belongs only to him who holds in bondage, I ask to whom was this offered, and for what cause? If to the Evil One, fie upon the outrage! If the robber receives ransom, not only from God, but a ransom which consists of God Himself, and has such an illustrious payment for his tyranny, a payment for whose sake it would have been right for him to have left us alone altogether. But if to the Father, I ask first, how? For it was not by Him that we were being oppressed; and next, On what principle did the Blood of His Only begotten Son delight the Father, Who would not receive even Isaac, when he was being offered by his Father, but changed the sacrifice, putting a ram in the place of the human victim? Is it not evident that the Father accepts Him, but neither asked for Him nor demanded Him; but on account of the Incarnation, and because Humanity must be sanctified by the Humanity of God, that He might deliver us Himself, and overcome the tyrant, and draw us to Himself by the mediation of His Son…
Part of the problem is assuming that a ransom must be a payment, so if we are to understand the ancient mindset around redemption perhaps it would be helpful to do a quick survey of this theme throughout the Bible. In Leviticus the firstborn of every animal and human belongs to God, but if they are not given to God they must be redeemed by giving God equivalent compensation. Or if someone has dedicated something to God but they later change their mind, they have to redeem it and add a fifth of its value (Lev 27). In the story about Ruth we observe Boaz who becomes a kinsman redeemer; someone who is responsible for acting on behalf of a relative who is in trouble or needed rescuing. In the Bible however, this idea can be applied more broadly to any desperate situation: redemption from death and Sheol (Job 5:20, Ps 49:15, Hos 13:14), from the hand of tyrants (Job 6:23), from troubles (Psa 25:22), from the wicked and violent (Jer 15:21), and from enemies (Ps 69:18, Mic 4:10). And this of course is why redemption is a term that becomes synonymous with God’s rescue from Egypt.
Over and over throughout the Bible the language of redemption is used to describe how God brought his people out of slavery in Egypt. Psalm 106:10 for example; “So He saved them from the hand of the one who hated them, And redeemed them from the hand of the enemy.” Or Deuteronomy 13:5; “God who brought you out of the land of Egypt and redeemed you from the house of slavery.” The language of redemption is used, but this kind of redemption did not involve a payment
“For this is what the LORD says: “You were sold for nothing, and you will be redeemed without money”” (Isa 52:3).
You may have heard the phrase “Jesus paid the price.” And for me, this is really where the rubber hits the road because, who did Jesus pay? The phrase finds its way almost weekly into sermons. I hear the line ‘Jesus paid it all’ sung in more than a few hymns. I had always been a little confused as to who needed to be paid. And do you know what? You won’t actually find the verse “Jesus paid the price” or “Jesus paid it all” anywhere in your Bible. I know, I was just as shocked as you are! I assumed it must be there somewhere and I searched really hard to find it. I did however find similar ideas like “you were bought with a price” (1 Cor 6:20 & 7:23), and the verse where Jesus says that He Himself came to serve others and to “give His life a ransom for many” (Matt 20:28, Mark 10:45).
The words ransom, redemption, redeemer are all related words in the Greek, all formed from a word meaning… you guessed it: release! The Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament defines ransom as “the means or instrument by which release or deliverance is made possible.”[6] So the means of release could be a monetary payment. But the word ransom could also be used to describe bulk cutters, the instrument used to release a prisoner. Thus when we hear Jesus saying He will 'give His life as a ransom for many' we could understand Him as saying His life will be the instrument and the means by which many will be liberated (Mat 20:28).
In fact in 1522 when Martin Luther translated the verse “to give his life as a ransom for many,” he translated ransom as erlösung - which means… (you’ve got this…) release! (or deliverance/salvation). Thus, Jesus is the means through which redemption is achieved, or more specifically, Jesus' blood is the instrument of release. Jesus' blood is the bulk cutters.
you were not redeemed with perishable things like silver or gold from your futile way of life inherited from your forefathers, but with precious blood, as of a lamb unblemished and spotless, the blood of Christ. (1 Pet 1:18-19)
This should give us a clue as to what we are being released from, because if our release involves blood associated with an unblemished lamb, this is a clue we are in purification territory. This seems to be how Paul understands the rescue process too, when he writes about “our Saviour Jesus Christ; who gave himself for us, that he might redeem us from all iniquity, and purify unto himself a peculiar people” (Titus 2:13-14 KJV). Redemption and purification seem to be key components to this rescue operation. Perhaps we are being held captive by something impure or unclean. Remember what made Israel impure was anything outside its proper domain, or anything associated with death. If humanity is outside the Garden, separated from the Tree of Life, exiled into the domain of death, perhaps we are in debt bondage to death? Death after all is something inescapable.
As in the Old, language of redemption in the New Testament however, refers primarily to rescue from evil forces. This is why Zechariah can prophesy about redemption as an accomplishment, not a payment.
“He has visited us and accomplished redemption for His people, And has raised up a horn of salvation for us… Salvation from our enemies, And from the hand of all who hate us” (Luke 1:68-71).
Who then is the enemy from whom we have been redeemed? Who had captured us in a death-like grip? What evil tyrant spread a death disease on us all, leaving us sick and impure? To whom were we enslaved?
Footnotes:
[1] Proverbs 30:8-9
Give me neither poverty nor riches;
Feed me with the food that is my portion,
So that I will not be full and deny You and say, “Who is the Lord?”
And that I will not become impoverished and steal,
And profane the name of my God.
[2] In 1549 the first Book of Common Prayer in English used a version of the prayer with "trespasses". This became the "official" version used in Anglican congregations. (History of the Lord's Prayer in English - Wikipedia)
[3] Encyclopedia Britannica article on debt slavery
[4] According to Josephus, the woman’s husband was Obadiah, who hid a hundred prophets of the Lord from Jezebel, the implication being that Obadiah borrowed huge amounts of money to hide and feed all of God’s prophets.
[5] “...how can anyone enter the strong man’s house and carry off his property, unless he first ties up the strong man? And then he will plunder his house” (Matt 12:29)
[6] Johannes P. Louw and Eugene Albert Nida, Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament: Based on Semantic Domains
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