Jesus's Teaching on Prayer, Part 7

Forgive Us Our Debts

Matthew 6v12a

17^th October 2025

We come this week to the fifth petition in the Lord's Prayer, which is the second petition about ourselves. Having prayed for "our daily bread", asking God to provide us with the means to stay physically alive, we now pray for forgiveness. Both the ESV and the NIV translate this petition:

Matthew 6v12
"And forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors."

This is different from what I and, I'm sure, many of my readers were taught when we were young, which was "Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us".The modern translations are more accurate here. There is a difference between a trespass and a debt. We should also take account of the fact that Luke's account of Jesus teaching this prayer uses a third word, "sins":

Luke 11v4
"Forgive us our sins, for we also forgive everyone who is indebted to us."

Briefly, to sin is to do anything contrary to the will of God or the character of God. To trespass is to transgress, to step over a line between what is consistent with God's character and law and what is inconsistent with them, to step out of where we're allowed to be into where we're not allowed to be. In Matthew's account, Jesus is saying that when we sin, when we trespass, we incur a debt.

God's Law, as given to Moses, is a law of restitution. If you're found to have stolen somebody's ox or sheep, or anything else, you have to give it back, together with a penalty. Depending on the crime you've committed, you have to pay four or five times what you took:

Exodus 22v1
Whoever steals an ox or a sheep and slaughters it or sells it must pay back five head of cattle for the ox and four sheep for the sheep.

According to God's law, if I sin against you by stealing from you, I owe you what I stole, plus a penalty. If I steal your ox, I owe you five oxen. English law doesn't work like that but Biblical law does. Also, there are some crimes where exact restitution is impossible. If you're found to have seriously injured somebody, you can't make restitution, you can't give back the good health or wholeness of body you're taken from them, but you still have to suffer a penalty:

Exodus 21v23-25
... if there is serious injury, you are to take life for life, eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot, burn for burn, wound for wound, bruise for bruise.

The guilty party and the victim can, however, negotiate a financial settlement which allows the guilty to avoid mutilation or death, and the victim to have some form of recompense. For example, in some cases:

Exodus 21v30
... if payment is required of him [the guilty party] he may redeem his life by paying whatever is demanded.

We can extend this principle to all sins against other people. For example, if I sin against you by trashing your reputation, I have a moral obligation to restore your reputation. I need to go to people and say "I shouldn't have said that. It wasn't true." And I should apologize to you.

As St Anselm of Canterbury said in the 11th century, "For as one who imperils another's safety does not enough by merely restoring his safety, without making some compensation for the anguish incurred; so he who violates another's honour does not enough by merely rendering honour again, but must, according to the extent of the injury done, make restoration in some way satisfactory to the person whom he has dishonoured."

There is always a price to pay for breaking God's law. Whenever we sin against other people, we incur a debt to God because we've broken His moral code. We cannot replay that debt. We need Jesus to pay it for us. When Jesus died on the cross, He died in your place and mine. He died so that our sin might be forgiven. That is, He died so that the ledger of our debts might be erased. I racked up a lot of debt before I got saved. Maybe you did too. And the day that I believed in Jesus Christ and His redeeming sacrifice, God took that ledger of all the crimes I'd committed and all the debts I'd incurred and He wiped it clean.

We could never pay back to God all that we owe Him for the sins we've committed. That's why we need to pray, "Forgive us our debts. We can't pay them back." If they're not forgiven, they'll hang over us for all eternity. At the cross Jesus took the penalty that our debts might be cancelled for ever. Hallelujah!