Sermon On The Mount
Debts
Professor: Dr. R.J. Rushdoony
Subject: Conversations, Panels and Sermons
Lesson: 09- 25
Genre:
Track: 09
Dictation Name: Sermon on the Mount - 09
Location/Venue:
Year: 1980
Our Lord and our God we come to Thee who art the author of all good and in whose hands is the life of every living thing. We thank Thee that Thou hast made us, redeemed us and by Thy providential care guided and blessed us. Thou art oh Lord good unto us who so often cannot be good to ourselves and we praise Thee. Make us strong in Thy word, guide us step by step all the days of our life and make us a people filled with Thy spirit, faithful to Thy every word iand bold in Thy service. Grant us this we beseech Thee, in Jesus’ name, Amen.
Our subject this morning is Debt, in particular Matthew 6:12, we shall read verses nine through fifteen of Matthew 6. Our subject: debt.
“After this manner therefore pray ye: Our Father which art in heaven, Hallowed be thy name.
10 Thy kingdom come, Thy will be done in earth, as it is in heaven.
11 Give us this day our daily bread.
12 And forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors.
13 And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil: For thine is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory, for ever. Amen.
14 For if ye forgive men their trespasses, your heavenly Father will also forgive you:
15 But if ye forgive not men their trespasses, neither will your Father forgive your trespasses.”
Our concern is with the petition ‘forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors’. What does it mean? The word that is here used is very specific in the Greek, it is debt. The kind of debt you have when you buy a house or when you borrow money. There is no mistaking the meaning. Some churches however in using the Lord’s Prayer will say forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us.
Now it is clear that our Lord has that meaning partially in mind because we read in verses fourteen and fifteen a development of the meaning of verse twelve:
“For if ye forgive men their trespasses, your heavenly Father will also forgive you:
15 But if ye forgive not men their trespasses, neither will your Father forgive your trespasses.”
So our Lord very definitely here is talking about debt and yet has trespasses in mind. The word trespasses means a false debt, any moral deviation from righteousness and truth, but the word our Lord uses in the prayer is very definitely debt. Again, on another occasion Luke 11:1,2,3-4 records it, our Lord was also asked about prayer and again He summarizes basic prayer using most of the Lord’s Prayer as we have it in the Sermon on the Mount. Here however He says ‘and forgive us our sins’, hamartia. Of falling short, for we also forgive everyone, that is, indebted to us. So here too our Lord uses the word debt, very definitely. Though sins and trespasses are definitely included in the meaning the primary, the essential meaning of this petition, is debt. Why? Well, sin requires payment in the form of restitution. There must be restitution for restoration. All sin places man in the position of being required to make restitution to God and to restore God’s order. Now man is not capable of doing this and Christ does this for us. Moreover, in our relationship to our fellow men we are required to make restitution, restoration, when we sin against them.
So sin does incur a debt to God and to man. The context here of course is not with regard to Christ’s atonement, His restitution to God, it is not a salvation meaning but a sanctification meaning. He is talking to disciples. In the use of the same petition in Luke the reference is not to anomia, the sin of the unbeliever, but hamartia, the falling short of the Christian. This prayer is taught to the disciples and therefore to us. It sets forth our growth in relationship to God and how we should pray for that growth. Debt. This is a central subject in the Bible. Both in the Old and the New Testament a great deal is said about debt, we have of course basic to the Old Testament the doctrine of the Jubilee, the culmination, the Sabbath of Sabbath. Every seventh year there was to be a cancellation of debt. Bond servants were to be free and in every Sabbath of sabbatical years, the fiftieth year, there was to be a relief of bondservants, a restoration of land, and the cancellation of all debt. According to Isaiah 61:1-2 which our Lord quotes the savior is the Jubilee man. He declares:
“The Spirit of the Lord God is upon me; “
And what is his calling because the spirit of the Lord is upon him? To proclaim the relief, freedom for the captive, release of debt. Christ therefore comes as the great Jubilee man. And as the Jubilee man He begins the Jubilee of God, the great Jubilee was His death, atonement and resurrection. The great commission sends us out to be His jubilee people to all the world. We can see something of the meaning of the Jubilee in Leviticus 25:9-10.
“Then shalt thou cause the trumpet of the jubile to sound on the tenth day of the seventh month, in the day of atonement shall ye make the trumpet sound throughout all your land. And ye shall hallow the fiftieth year, and proclaim liberty throughout all the land unto all the inhabitants thereof: it shall be a jubile unto you; and ye shall return every man unto his possession, and ye shall return every man unto his family.”
Restitution is made by God at the Day of Atonement, all debts are cancelled and restoration follows. The fact that a portion of this verse ‘proclaim liberty throughout all the land unto all the inhabitants thereof’ is on the liberty bell should make us realize a certain thing. The men at that time knew the bible, they knew the meaning of the Jubilee, they had the doctrine of the Jubilee in mind and they saw this country as the Jubilee land, faithful to the Lord, faithful to His word concerning all things including debt. This is why within my lifetime debts were not long time debt, they were short term, six years. We still had the background of a belief in the Jubilee. Now this is what the Lord’s Prayer had reference to, it’s the framework, it declares that salvation means that we live as a Jubilee people and that is Christian reconstruction. This is a doctrine that the pagans never had. We have, it is very interesting, almost a parallel of a diabolical sort in this petition in our Lord’s Prayer forgive us our debt as we forgive our debtors. In the prayer of [unknown], a pagan philosopher and religious leader of the first century after Christ, apparently, perhaps he had heard of the Lord’s Prayer but his model prayer for all men was this: give me ye God what is my due, give me ye God what is my due. In other words instead of man by his sin being in debt to God, a debt which only Christ can pay, [unknown] sees God as the debtor to man. A very prominent English scholar at the beginning of the century wrote a most admiring book on [unknown] and that book was reprinted a few years ago in this country.
The book was originally published in England. This tells us something of the modern mentality. God in debt to man rather than sin making man in debt to God. We are told to pray forgive us as we forgive or in Luke our Lord says ‘for we have forgiven’! In other words in either case we are to be forgiven as we have forgiven, because it can be rendered as we have forgiven. Give us the Jubilee if we are already a Jubilee to the world. Now the doctrine of the Jubilee is a direct denial of a doctrine that was common to most of Asia and at that time, the time of our Lord, had infiltrated European thought. The doctrine of karma, k-a-r-m-a. We see it most clearly in India where it is still the prevailing doctrine to this day. The doctrine of karma is that our acts create a chain of hostility which governs us so that man is bound by the past and he must endlessly be reincarnated until finally he works out the punishment of karmas, or past sins, and then can die eternally. Now consider what this doctrine does. It is a doctrine of the most rigid causality and it says that this causality, the causality of sin, rules the world. Sin in other words becomes God, sin is the ruler of all things whereas for us it is not sin which is the determining causality but God and His grace. If it were sin, if Karma were the truth all of us would be governed by our past and our sins would be the determining power in our lives and we could never escape and go beyond them. But it is God and His grace which constitutes the governing force in all creation, the basic causality. And because this is true it is not karma but God’s grace that rules us and makes us jubilee men.
To play this petition is to declare that we believe in the jubilee of Christ and want to be living trumpets of His liberty. But look again at the word debt to understand its basic meaning, its economic meaning. In the ancient world the great empire was Babylon, the original Babylon which built its empire on debt. The ancient Babylonians were an intelligent people, they realized that there is nothing that destroys a people more as far as their morale and their morality is concerned then debt living. Debt living means we are governed by the past, that money we spent last year and five years ago and six years ago, all those debts are governing us today and controlling us. so that our life economically and morally is controlled by the past. Now, do we feel the relationships that our Lord is making when He uses the word debt and sin interchangeably? Debt and sin are the past governing us if we are not under Christ, if we are not out of debt, out of sin and in grace. So that if we are not going to have the karma of sin and the karma of debt we must live in terms of the word of God, in terms of His grace, in terms of His law word. Owe no man nothing save to love one another and debt is limited to a six year span because we are not to be a past bound, a past governed people. Certainly this is appropriate teaching from our Lord to any and every age and perhaps never more so than now when the world is more in debt than perhaps in all of history. Mark and I have been reading a book on the coming real estate crash, the thesis of which is that whenever a great mountain of debt builds up it sooner or later collapses and destroys everyone involved.
He foresees a time not too far distant when real estate values will begin to crumble dramatically day after day and sees it likely any time beginning now to ’84 or ’85. Whether he is right or not however or they, there are two writers, what our Lord says is true and it is true that ancient Babylon and then after Babylon Assyria used debt to destroy people. Their traders fanned out all over the world of the Mediterranean sphere giving easy credit controlled at all times by the Babylonian and then Assyrian empires so that people would be enslaved. The bible speaks of debt as slavery. And once they were enslaved by debt their morale and their morality would be destroyed and then their armies would begin to march after a few years into those countries and a debt enslaved people not being a free people had no real resistance to offer. Debt living is also a form of covetousness, it is practical atheism. This is why it is forbidden to believers. The social consequences of debt are covetousness, ungodliness and inflationary society. It gives us a closed future. The karma of debt and of sin from the past governs us. Debt is the word used by our Lord but He includes the meaning of trespasses, to harbor hatred and grudges, hostilities, vengeance. To do so is to be past bound. Then there is no forgiveness in us. Karma, the past, controls us. Forgive, let go.
The sacrificial system sets forth the meaning of sacrifice and restitution. In the sacrificial system a man comes forward with the gift of the sacrifice which he offers by faith. An offering of restitution, an unblemished offering which typifies Christ, and the charges against Him are dropped because satisfaction is rendered. We have a book in the Bible which illustrates this position, forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors, or forgive us our debts as we have forgiven or as we have forgiven those who are indebted to us. It is the book Philemon. The book of Philemon gives us a very, very sad episode with a very happy ending. Philemon was a Christian and a friend of Saint Paul’s. His brother was Onesimus, his brother by blood. Onesimus had used up his inheritance or whatever he had and had become a slave and his brother Philemon had bought him to prevent his brother from being a slave to strangers, but he had robbed his own brother, apparently, and had fled to Rome, there he ended up in jail. He met Paul. Paul not only converted him but he, Onesimus, became a blessing to Paul. Paul therefore sends Onesimus to his brother Philemon with the letter we have in the bible to tell him now you have a brother who is doubly your brother, not by blood only but by faith and forgive him. And if he owes you anything for what he stole put it to my account in case he doesn’t repay you. I, Paul tell you I will repay it. But of course you owe something to me for what I’ve done to you and I owe something to Onesimus for the blessing he’s been to me. Forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors.
What Paul is here telling Philemon is that God in Christ has forgiven us, here we have a situation where sin is involved and restitution needs to be made but in a marvelous way by the grace of God Onesimus has made restitution to me and I certainly have you in my debt so we have a debt here, a three way debt, that can be cancelled. This petition moreover, forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors, can be linked to the first great petition. Thy kingdom come, thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven. God’s kingdom is the world’s future; it must govern us, not past debts and sins, grudges and hatreds and hostilities. All men who choose the past and karma choose death. The world of debt is the world of karma, of the past but we have been called to be a people of the future, let us pray.
Our Lord and our God we thank Thee for Thy word and its plain speaking. Give us grace to live as the people of freedom, as the people of the future, as heirs of this earth. Bless us to this purpose in Jesus’ name, Amen.
Are there any questions now? Yes?
[Question Unintelligible]
[Rushdoony] Yes there is a relationship, definitely, between karma and purgatory. You see it’s a very mild form of what reincarnation requires. Yes?
[Question] Where is the principle of debt being allowed for maximum of six years found in scripture?
[Rushdoony] That is in a number of passages, it is limited to six years in several places in the law, let me see if…well the Sabbath law in Leviticus 26 of course and there are a number of passages in Deuteronomy. I have them listed in the Institutes of Biblical Law. Any other questions or comments?
If not that will conclude our meeting. Yes?
[Question Unintelligible]
[Rushdoony] April 8, this is the fifth today so it will be Wednesday of this week. So we should be in prayer for that trial.