Peter Asked for a Number and Got One That Cannot Be Counted

I have met a man who could tell me his number.

Not approximately. He had a figure, and he had arrived at it by a method he was slightly embarrassed to describe, and he told me it the way a man tells you his mileage: with a kind of grim accuracy and no pride at all.

He believed there was a ceiling. He was not stupid about it and he did not think God had published the number. He thought there was a point at which a person had used up whatever was reasonable, and that his own count had got high enough that he was probably in the last of it.

I have thought about him for years, because he was not being dramatic. He was doing exactly what a sensible person does with a limited resource, which is ration it and watch the level.

And there is a conversation in Matthew that starts with a man asking almost the same question out loud, and it is worth reading with him in mind, because Peter is being generous when he asks it and he is still asking about a limit.

The number Peter offers is already generous

Here is the exchange.

Then came Peter to him, and said, Lord, how oft shall my brother sin against me, and I forgive him? till seven times? Jesus saith unto him, I say not unto thee, Until seven times: but, Until seventy times seven. (Matthew 18:21-22, King James Version)

Peter is not being stingy. The teaching of his day generally suggested three. He more than doubles it and adds one, and he offers it as a sincere attempt to be big about it.

And the answer is seventy times seven, which is four hundred and ninety, and I want to be careful here, because the point is not the arithmetic.

Anybody keeping a tally to four hundred and ninety has stopped forgiving and started bookkeeping around the twelfth entry. The number is chosen because it destroys the practice of counting rather than because it sets a higher wall.

Jesus is not raising the ceiling. He is removing the instrument.

You are dealing with Somebody who removed the counting rather than raising the limit. Matthew 18:22 answers a request for a number with one that cannot be tracked. It is the Holy Spirit, John 16:13 the Spirit of truth, who makes a man see what is actually being said to him.

The parable He tells straight afterward is about the size of the debt

He does not leave it as a slogan. He immediately tells a story, and the whole force of it is in a comparison of two amounts.

A servant owes ten thousand talents. That is a deliberately absurd figure, more than the annual revenue of an entire province, a debt no person could carry.

Then the lord of that servant was moved with compassion, and loosed him, and forgave him the debt. (Matthew 18:27)

Forgave him the debt. Not restructured, not deferred, not reduced to something payable. Canceled outright, and the reason given in the text is compassion rather than any argument the servant made.

And the second half of the story, where that same man throttles a colleague over a hundred pence, is not a threat about how many chances there are. It is a picture of what happens when a person who has been forgiven an incalculable amount goes on running a calculator on somebody else, including themselves.

You have been forgiven an amount that was never going to be repaid, and the text says compassion was the reason. Matthew 18:27 has the debt canceled outright with no repayment plan. It is the same Spirit, Romans 5:5 shedding the love of God abroad in our hearts, who makes that arrive as compassion rather than as bookkeeping.

The psalm that asks the counting question directly

There is one line in the Psalms that asks exactly what the man with the figure was asking, and answers it in the next breath.

If thou, LORD, shouldest mark iniquities, O Lord, who shall stand? But there is forgiveness with thee, that thou mayest be feared. (Psalm 130:3-4)

Shouldest mark iniquities. The word is a word for keeping account, for recording marks against a name.

And the question is rhetorical: who shall stand. Nobody. Not the man with the high number and not the man who thinks his is low, which is the part the second man usually misses.

Then the answer: there is forgiveness with thee. Not: there is a quota with thee. Forgiveness is described as something present with Him, as a property of the place, in unspecified quantity.

You are standing somewhere forgiveness is kept rather than rationed. Psalm 130:4 says there is forgiveness with thee without one word about a quantity, and it is the Spirit of God, Ephesians 1:13 sealing us after we believed, who makes that a settled thing rather than a hope.

Every morning is a fresh delivery, which is a strange way to say it

Jeremiah, writing in the worst circumstances in the Old Testament, says something about the supply that has always struck me as oddly practical.

It is of the LORD'S mercies that we are not consumed, because his compassions fail not. They are new every morning: great is thy faithfulness. (Lamentations 3:22-23)

New every morning. Not: sufficient. Not: replenished when necessary. New, daily, and the word for it is a delivery word.

Which is a picture of a supply that does not draw down. A person watching a level is watching the wrong container: this one is filled overnight, every night, and the filling is described as an aspect of God's faithfulness rather than as a response to anybody's performance.

And that is why the man with the figure was so tired. Rationing a thing that is delivered daily is exhausting and completely unnecessary, and nobody had ever told him.

You have been receiving a fresh delivery every morning of your life without noticing it. Lamentations 3:23 says they are new every morning and calls it His faithfulness. It is His Spirit, Titus 3:5 named in the renewing, who does the renewing that nobody has to requisition.