3. The measure of the forgiveness. — Nothing of which we have any experience in ourselves or in others is more than as a drop to the ocean compared with the absolute fulness and perfect freeness and unwearied frequency of His forgiveness. " He will abundantly pardon." He will multiply pardon. "With him there is plenteous redemption." We think we have stretched the elasticity of long-suffering and forgiveness further than we might have been reasonably expected to do if seven times we forgive the erring brother, but God's measure of pardon is seventy times seven, two perfectnesses multiplied into themselves perfectly ; for the measure of His forgiveness is boundless, and there is no searching of the depths of His pardoning mercy. You cannot weary Him out ; you cannot exhaust it. It is full at the end as at the beginning ; and after all its gifts still it remains true, " With him is the multiplying of redemption."
The fault of all our human theories about forgiveness is that, in the process of explaining, we seem to narrow it ; and thus we turn back to words which are better than human, as they come from Christ Himself, when He speaks of the father, who saw his son a great way off, and ran and fell on his neck. In that there is a grand theological artlessness ; it seems to say that God forgives, not because a man is sorry, or because some condition or other is satisfied, but at the bottom of all, because, in His heart. He wants His son back again. And in three successive parables Jesus declared that God knows the human joy of finding things. " He will abundantly pardon."
We scarcely know what forgiveness is on earth. Even after a reconciliation relations remain clouded. Men may not quarrel, but something of the grudge remains ; and if they forgive it is for once or twice, for few have patience to go with Peter to the seventh time, and then the heart, with all its gathered rancour, gets its way. Forgiveness is a hard thing, hard to bestow and hard to receive, as most of us have found ; and so long as we
' Brother Lawrence, The Practice of the Presence of God, p. 19.
4o8 THE GREAT TEXTS OF THE BIBLE
think of God in the light of that human experience, it must be with reluctance. But His ways are not as ours ; when He pardons He pardons out and out, and He does not remember our sins.^
"We have just as much right to draw God's natural attributes to the scale of the monad as to draw His moral attributes to the scale of a man. If God forgives at all, He will do it with God- like freedom and grandeur. If He permits us to crawl across His threshold, He will not merely tolerate our return, but welcome us with music and priceless gifts. Alas ! alas ! we put into the matchless mind which delights in mercy poor Simon Peter's thought of a forgiveness stretched and strained to seven times, whilst all the time His mercy outsoars and outspeeds ours, as the path of a sun outsoars the track of a glow-worm in the ditch. His thoughts are not bound by our petty precedents of limitation.
If When Dr. Moffat began his labours in Africa, one of his earliest converts was a chief called Africaner. This Africaner was the terror of the colony. He had the ferocity of a desperado, and wherever his name was pronounced, it carried dismay. When Africaner was brought to the knowledge of the truth, it seemed such a great thing that it was described by those who knew him, as the eighth wonder of the world. But God is doing such work every day. Christ is charged to save to the uttermost. He does not improve, but renew. The stupendous thing is giving life to the dead.2
4. The method of it. — How utterly unlike to any means of man's devising are those which God has chosen for the recovery of His lost creatures to His favour the His image ! That God's Son should become incarnate and die on the cross for the world's redemption ; that God's Spirit should descend into the guilty and polluted hearts of sinners, and work out there a blessed transformation ; and that all this should be effected by the free and sovereign grace of God Himself, and laid open to the very chief of sinners, as the unconditional gift of His love, this, as universal experience attests, is something so far from having entered into the heart of man, that it needs incessant
^ W. M. Macgregor, Jesus Christ the Son of Ood, p. 95. 3 A. Philip, The Father's Hand, p. 182.
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effort to keep it before him, even after it has been once revealed.
The world had four thousand years to learn the lesson. God had made the outline of it known to His Church from the beginning. He had raised up a special people to be the deposi- taries of the revelation ; and He had taught them by priests and prophets, by types and signs without number. And yet when redemption came, how few received it, how few understood it ; so that when the Saviour was actually hanging on the Cross, and finishing the work given Him to do, it is questionable if so much as one, even of His own disciples, comprehended the design, or saw the glory of His sacrifice.