The Three-Legged Chair Series

What’s your hurt this morning? Where do you need grace? I want to talk to you today about grace, about this strange, incredible three-legged chair God invites us to sit right down on and find the rest we are all looking for. I even hope that you will experience a bit of that rest this morning as we think about and talk about grace. And why are we talking about grace? Because we’re telling Kingdom Stories in this series – we’re looking at how Jesus described the Kingdom of God. I have already said grace is other-worldly and that it comes from God’s kingdom. Let’s look at what we can learn about that Kingdom through our study of grace today.

Our text comes from Matthew chapter 18, verses 23-35.

Matthew 18:23-35 (NIV)

23 "Therefore, the kingdom of heaven is like a king who wanted to settle accounts with his servants.

24 As he began the settlement, a man who owed him ten thousand talents was brought to him.

25 Since he was not able to pay, the master ordered that he and his wife and his children and all that he had be sold to repay the debt.

26 "The servant fell on his knees before him. ’Be patient with me,’ he begged, ’and I will pay back everything.’

27 The servant’s master took pity on him, canceled the debt and let him go.

28 "But when that servant went out, he found one of his fellow servants who owed him a hundred denarii. He grabbed him and began to choke him. ’Pay back what you owe me!’ he demanded.

29 "His fellow servant fell to his knees and begged him, ’Be patient with me, and I will pay you back.’

30 "But he refused. Instead, he went off and had the man thrown into prison until he could pay the debt.

31 When the other servants saw what had happened, they were greatly distressed and went and told their master everything that had happened.

32 "Then the master called the servant in. ’You wicked servant,’ he said, ’I canceled all that debt of yours because you begged me to.

33 Shouldn’t you have had mercy on your fellow servant just as I had on you?’

34 In anger his master turned him over to the jailers to be tortured, until he should pay back all he owed.

35 "This is how my heavenly Father will treat each of you unless you forgive your brother from your heart."

The first thing that is established in this parable Jesus told is the fact of our debtor status before God. In the story, a man owes the king ten thousand talents. The talent was the largest Roman unit of currency. In America our largest unit of currency is the $10,000 bill. $10,000 bills were printed until 1946 and then discontinued, and there are about 350 of those bills in circulation today. [$1000 bills are no longer made either, but you can go on eBay and purchase a $1000 bill – the bid when I checked on Friday for a $1000 bill was $2,501.00!] Anyway, just like the $10,000 bill is our largest unit of currency, the talent was the largest Roman unit of currency. But to make things even more interesting, ten thousand was the largest Greek number. So Jesus combined the largest Greek number with the largest Roman unit of currency and that’s how much money he said this guy owed to the King. Now in our system of numbers there is no absolute highest number, because you could always go up one more number, but the largest number that has been given a name is the googolplex, which is a 1 with 100 zeros after it. You can imagine that’s a pretty big number. So if Jesus were telling this parable to Americans today, he might say that a man owed a king a googolplex of $10,0000 bills. Now I decided not even to do the math there to figure out how much money that is. The point is that Jesus is telling us that this guy owed the King an absolutely, impossibly, ridiculous amount of money – more money than he could ever earn in a hundred lifetimes, actually more money than was even in circulation in all of Palestine at that time. Have I made the point? Jesus went out of his way to put this guy in a debt so huge he would never be able to repay it.