God’s Loan

And forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors.  Matthew 6:12 NIV

Debts – The Greek term translated “debts” in Matthew’s version of the Lord’s Prayer is not a word that means “sins.”  It’s opheílēmata, from the root opheílō.  “Etymologically obscure, this word means ‘to owe someone something,’ e.g. loans, debts, sums, or rents. The things owed may be spiritual, and the word is also used with the infinitive for ‘to be under obligation to,’ ‘to have to.’ The word is common in respect of revenge or law. Transgressors are in debt to injured parties. Secular and sacral penalties are owed. God’s goodness also makes people debtors. This gives rise to the idea of moral obligation.”^[1]  This is not hamartía, the Greek term for “sin.”  And the fact that it isn’t hamartía is significant but very often ignored.  Why?  Because we commonly think that in this prayer we are asking for forgiveness of sins when, in fact, no such request is made.  The mistake is so common that the NIV, NASB, and other English Bible typically translate the verse as “forgive us our sins” (for example, the NASB in Luke reads “and forgive us our sins” when the Greek term is the same root, opheílō.  It should be translated, “forgive us our indebtedness.”  What’s the difference?  Ah, that’s a very big question.

Sin is a violation of a moral or ethical expectation or norm.  Sin breaks a rule.  Of course, not all rule-breaking is sin.  Sin is a religious concept so it requires religious rule-breaking, and in the Hebrew worldview, the rules aren’t arbitrary human constructions, they are the basis of maintaining a relationship with God.  Sins are very specific.  Perhaps that’s why there are 613 commandments, not “about 700” or “a few.”  The idea of sin is complex. “The Hebrew terms translated by hamartía and the like (for a full list see TDNT, I, 268–69) do not have an exclusive religious use, so that it is easy in translation either to import this or to weaken it. No uniform or self-contained concept of sin is present in the OT authors, and detailed questions of linguistic history further complicate the matter.”^[2]  These terms are connected with ideas like guilt, rebellion, and error.  In general (very generally), the idea of sin has something to do with a wrong action that causes disruption in relationship.

But this is not debt.  Debt is about obligation, not about errors or mistakes.  Hauck writes: “Jesus uses the illustration of debt to explain the human situation vis-à-vis God. The debt is so great that no good deeds can offset it. We are totally dependent on the divine mercy. Remission is a matter of grace, but it imposes a corresponding obligation to forgive others. Refusal to do this brings with it the severe judgment of God.”^[3]  Forgiving a debt is not the same as erasing a sin or removing guilt, because the debt does not depend on rule-infraction.  This debt, the debt we ask God to forgive, is the obligation we owe Him for life itself.  “ . . . ‘debts’ are determined by the loan that God had made to man, and the numbers of parables in which debts are spoken of emphasizes this breadth further.  But what has God given to man to form the basis of man’s debt to him?  The fact that one cannot and may not ask so definitely in the case of the relationship between God and man is the first element in which the concept of debt is distinguished from that of sin.  For there is nothing which God has not given to man; he feeds and clothes him, he counts the hairs of his head, he even demands the life. ‘the soul’, which he has given him (Luke 12.20).  So with all that he is and has, man is indebted to God, and there is no act and no thought, no glance and no word that is not owed to him.”[4]

“‘Debts’ are not individual details of man’s life, but man in his totality before God.”[5]  Moreover, the human obligation before God never ceases.  Sins are accounted to individuals (or groups of individuals).  The resulting guilt can be removed by sacrifice, ritual, or forgiveness.  But not so with debts.  Even if the debt is remitted, the relationship of obligation continues, now heightened because the party whose debt is remitted has an even greater, though different, obligation to the party who remitted the debt.  There is no such thing as not paying your dues.  As long as you’re alive, you owe.  Lohmeyer writes: “Whatever man is or says or does, he is and says and does as a loan from God, and life and action mean the repayment of this debt of existence to God or the payment of interest on it.”[6]

What we ask in the Lord’s prayer, then, is not removal of the individual accumulation of guilt from sins.  Translating the verse as “sins” or “trespasses” or the like is a grave mistake.  It is not “sin” that we must repay.  It is borrowed existence!  Luzzatto understood this implicitly when he suggested that we all have an infinite obligation to God for our very being.  Lohmeyer extends this point when he writes: “If all man’s life and action is the repayment of a loan made to him by God, this means that there is no end to the loan before man ends, and even when he does end there is a certain sense in which ‘our debts’ have not been paid, for life does not exhaust itself in the natural course from the cradle to the grave; it points to the divine ground from which it begins and the divine yield to which it leads; . .”[7]  In this sense, it is impossible for our debt to be “forgiven.”  Existence is a loan that cannot be repaid, even in death.

What does it mean, then, to ask God’s forgiveness?  Here the verb tense makes all the difference, something we also do not see in translation.  The Greek verb translated “forgive” is áphiemi (from áphesis).  Here it is an aorist, active, imperative.  What that means is that we are asking for (demanding?) a “once for all time” action, a fully completed event.  And, of course, man is incapable of such an action since his very existence extends the debt.  Only God can remit such an obligation.  Only God can release us (for that is what áphesis means) to be what we were intended, created to be.  The event is eschatological.  It will fully occur when the creation is restored, but now we ask that we be treated as if it has already occurred.  We ask that we may become ourselves through God’s grace.

“Forgive us our debts” is really “Release us, now and in the Kingdom, to be who You intended us to be.”  We’ll have more to say about this change, for sure.

Topical Index:  sin, debt, opheílēmata, forgive, Matthew 6:12

^[1] Kittel, G., Friedrich, G., & Bromiley, G. W. (1985). Theological Dictionary of the New Testament, Abridged in One Volume (p. 746). Grand Rapids, MI: W.B. Eerdmans.

^[2] Kittel, G., Friedrich, G., & Bromiley, G. W. (1985). Theological Dictionary of the New Testament, Abridged in One Volume (p. 44). Grand Rapids, MI: W.B. Eerdmans.

^[3] Kittel, G., Friedrich, G., & Bromiley, G. W. (1985). Theological Dictionary of the New Testament, Abridged in One Volume (p. 747). Grand Rapids, MI: W.B. Eerdmans.

[4] Ernst Lohmeyer, “Our Father”: an Introduction to the Lord’s Prayer (Harper & Row, 1952), p. 170.

[5] Ibid.

[6] Ibid., p. 172.

[7] Ibid., p. 173