Mat. 18:21-22 ... "Then Peter came up and said to Him, 'Lord, how often shall my brother sin against me, and I forgive him? As many as seven times?' Jesus said to him, 'I do not say to you seven times, but seventy times seven.'"
The Pharisaic interpretation of the Mosaic Law was ultra-conservative, and imposed a style of observance upon the people that was, in most cases, far more restrictive than God ever intended it to be. Of the Pharisees Jesus said, "They tie up heavy burdens, hard to bear, and lay them on people's shoulders, but they themselves are not willing to move them with their finger," (Mat. 23:4). Jesus often ran afoul of Pharisaic scrutiny, not because He ever transgressed the Law, but because He transgressed their over extensions of it. In His teaching He instructed His disciples to look through some of those restrictions to see the liberty God had designed for them.
The Pharisees taught that three was the limit to the times one was obligated to forgive an offender. This was, however, their own interpretation and not the essence of the Law itself. Peter's vision had been elevated by Jesus enough to perceive something of the liberty in God's will for man. So he posed his question about one's duty to forgive in terms of that perception. He probably thought that to double the Pharisaic limit and then add one for good measure would attain to God's will.
Jesus may have surprised Peter when He took that "liberal" seven and multiplied it by seventy to show what God's will on forgiveness truly is. The essential idea is the absence of any limit! We are not to keep ledgers on each other with a column entitled OFFENSES paralleled by another entitled FORGIVEN. Also, there is to be no similar page ruled for three entries, or seven, or even four hundred ninety. Jesus laid down the guiding principle when He said, 'So also My heavenly Father will do to every one of you, if you do not forgive your brother from your heart," (Mat. 18:35). God's forgiveness of sinners is infinite, or else we would have used up our allotments long ago. Which of us transgresses God's will so little that we feel slight need to beg His mercy when we ask His forgiveness? To the contrary, each of us knows we sin many times every day and are always in need of God's mercy to pardon us again and again, often for the same offense.
The person who finds it hard (or impossible!) to forgive another is to be pitied. Jesus shows us just how pitiable in the parable of the servant who would not forgive, (Mat. 18:23-24). His master forgave him an astronomical sum of money which he owed, but the servant in turn refused to forgive a fellow servant even a mere pittance. When this was reported to the master, he called in this hardhearted servant and condemned him to the "tormentors." The parable teaches that if God forgives us of sins against Him that are black and shameful, we must forgive each other of offenses that do not compare to our sins against God. We show the extent to which the Spirit of Christ has penetrated our lives and transformed us when we find it within us to forgive an offender "from (our) heart."
One further word: True forgiveness requires the dismissal of the offense from the mind. When missionaries first preached among the natives of Labrador, they were hindered by the lack of a word in their language for "forgive." Finally, they constructed a word by compounding Labradorian terms that meant "not-able-to-think-about-it-any-more" as their word "forgive." You have not forgiven someone of a trespass if you bring it back up in one conversation after another to show people "what an awful thing that person once did to me." Although you may not be able literally to forget the offense, you can lock it away securely in the hidden recesses of your mind and treat its perpetrator as though he had never done it. Is not this what we desire from God?
