How Do I Know I’m Close to God?
How do you know you are close to God? Are you close to God when you pray, read your Bible, or go to church? While all good things, Jesus tells us that participating in these (as surprising as that may be) doesn't tell us anything about whether or not we have been transformed by God. He does, however, tell us how we can know that we have been truly changed by God. And He does this by telling us a tragic story about a man who has a powerful encounter with God that should have changed his life but left the man very much unchanged. So how do we know the man was unchanged? By how he treated those who had wronged him.
The parable in Matthew 18:21-35 is a tragedy. By all means, everyone in the story should have "lived happily ever after" but they don't. Like most of Jesus' stories, it is inspired by someone's struggle. In this case, Peter is struggling with how much he must forgive his brother. Like many of us, Peter has concerns that he might be taken advantage of if he is graceful towards the hardheaded people in his life. After all, a manipulative perpetrator could use Jesus' teachings around grace to avoid accountability. So he asks Jesus, "When my brother wrongs me, should I forgive him at least seven times?" We might not realize this, but Peter probably expected Jesus to be impressed with the number seven. The popular religious teachings of the day only suggested forgiving three times. Peter doubles the expectation. But Jesus responds by saying you should forgive seven times seventy. In other words, if "you are counting then you aren't forgiving" as one New Testament commentator put it.
Like many of us, Peter has concerns that he might be taken advantage of if he is graceful towards the hardheaded people in his life. After all, a manipulative perpetrator could use Jesus' teachings around grace to avoid accountability.
The number seven is significant because it represents wholeness and completeness. God created a whole and beautiful world in seven days that lacked nothing. So when Jesus invites Peter into a life of forgiveness, one where he forgives seventy times seven, he invites him to consider a world made whole and beautiful again. But for such a world to be possible, Peter, like all of us, must first grasp how much he himself has been forgiven.
To help Peter along, Jesus tells a tragic tale about a man who owes a king a great debt. The man owes the king ten thousand talents. This translates to roughly 600 million dollars. It is beyond reasonable that the man can pay it back. We must be careful to guard our hearts precisely here, however. It is easy for us, especially those of us with a more scrupulous nature, to slip into shame or fear of judgment because we have wronged God such an "unfathomable" amount. The doctrine of total depravity can quickly become, "I am not capable of anything good." We get locked into a spiral of shame and guilt, believing that even the good things we do amount to "no more than filthy rags" as Isaiah says. However, this is a harmful misapplication of what the Reformers called the doctrine of "total depravity".
When the man offers to repay the debt he owes the king, he clearly doesn't understand what he is asking for. It is a bit like offering to forgive the national debt in the US by paying Uncle Sam a couple hundred bucks a month. It is not even a conceivable way to approach the problem at hand. So is our guilt, shame, self-condemnation, and self-loathing when it comes to trying to convince God to forgive us. They aren't even conceivable approaches. Condemning ourselves does no more to make us worthy of forgiveness than a hundred dollars does to pay off the national debt. Likewise, our best and most determined moral efforts to earn approval in God's eyes, and our own, do nothing to pay off the fractured relationship we feel with God. Telling God you’ll do better next time by doing “XYZ” does no more to merit His goodness than paying off a hundred million dollars a few quarters at a time. Nothing but radical, complete, and unconditional grace can fix the problem. Nothing but complete and total release by the Generous King will absorb the debt and set us free.
When the man offers to repay the debt he owes the king, he clearly doesn't understand what he is asking for. It is a bit like offering to forgive the national debt in the US by paying Uncle Sam a couple hundred bucks a month. It is not even a conceivable way to approach the problem at hand. So is our guilt, shame, self-condemnation, and self-loathing when it comes to trying to convince God to forgive us.
The doctrine of total depravity in its correct application is similar to what Brené Brown calls the "gift of imperfection." Perhaps we should rightly rename the doctrine the "gift of total depravity". That is to say, when we realize we no longer have to be perfect (because we aren't capable of it anyway), we can find the freedom to be ourselves, to love well, and to be whole and wholly accepted by God. As Brené Brown says:
"Research shows that perfectionism hampers success. In fact, it's often the path to depression, anxiety, addiction, and life paralysis. Perfectionism is a self-destructive and addictive belief system that fuels this primary thought: If I look perfect, and do everything perfectly, I can avoid or minimize the painful feelings of shame, judgment, and blame.”
The doctrine of total depravity, rather than condemning us to shame, should free us to realize that we never needed to be perfect because our perfectionism cannot be a conceivable solution to the debt problem anyway. The point of this parable is not to highlight the precise nature of the man's debt, but rather the profound nature of the generous king's forgiveness. When Jesus tells them the servant owed the king ten thousand talents, there was no number past ten thousand in the language at the time. It is a debt amount by which they had no real numerical category anyway. In other words, the servant was not capable of understanding what was owed. But that's not important. What is important here is that he understands he was forgiven. Which, as we tragically will see, he does not.
The point of this parable is not to highlight the precise nature of the man's debt, but rather the profound nature of the generous king's forgiveness.
The forgiven servant then leaves and comes across someone who owes him a small amount of money, the equivalent of a couple of bucks. The servant orders that this man go to prison until he can pay back the small amount he owes. Of course, this rightly infuriates the other servants watching this happen. They report to the king what has happened. The king then orders that this servant be "tortured until the debt can be paid back." Jesus finishes the parable by stating that if we treat others the way this servant did, God will treat us the same way. At first, it might seem like Jesus is saying we earn God's forgiveness by forgiving others. But this goes against everything grace stands for. Once more, we've already established that the debt cannot be paid back by any effort of our own.
Rather, Jesus is pointing out that this man was unchanged by the mercy God showed him, and we know this by the way he treated others who owed him. While the man may have the appearance of having been forgiven, we know that he wasn’t actually changed by it. And this is how we know the quality of the man’s own spiritual life. A person who has been changed by God, someone who truly grasps the depth by which they have been forgiven and loved, will carry that love and forgiveness to others. What if we adopted this spiritual litmus test for our own spiritual lives? What if the primary way we measured our intimacy with God, was not by our religious activities, but rather by the quality of our love towards those who have wronged us? What if we measured our “closeness” to God, not by hours spent in Bible studies or by our perfectionism or by our morality, but rather by how much we "take pity" on our enemies? It is the spiritual litmus test Jesus offers us here.