Seventy Times Seven, For Good Or Evil

When Cain slew Abel, the Lord declared that whoever harmed Cain would be avenged sevenfold. A Few generations later, a descendant of Cain murdered a young man and declared that he would be avenged seventy seven fold. The thing is, if you go around and murder seventy seven people in retribution for the one you lost, and if the friends and the relatives of those you murdered in revenge follow a similar proportionate response, you can see how one murder begets seven, begets seventy seven, begets four hundred ninety and on and on until the whole world becomes consumed with bloodshed and guilt and vengeance. Every time someone does something evil to you, and you allow that evil to anger you and cause you to return evil for evil, it is very hard to just stop at one. Anger doesn’t allow you to return evil for evil, you have to give what you got, plus interest. You have to avenge the hurt you received sevenfold, and then seventy times seven. But there is another option. You can forgive. Someone did evil to you and you didn’t deserve it and it wasn’t fair and it seems perfectly natural to make them want to suffer as much as you are. But the thing is, they already are suffering more than you do. They made your life worse for no reason other than that they were scared and in pain and looking to spread that pain and that resentment and bitterness around. And they shouldn’t have lashed out at you but they did. But if we forgive that person, the evil stops there. It doesn’t get to be passed on to seven other people who don’t deserve to be treated evilly either. Forgiving someone seventy times seven isn’t just about counting up the number of times one person sins against you until you get to four hundred ninety. By forgiving that person just the one time, you have cut off the spread of evil, so that there no longer need to be four hundred ninety other acts of evil. When Jesus gave the parable of the man who owed ten thousand talents and the man who owed fifty pence, you can see that the forgiveness of the ten thousand talents could have had a ripple effect, in which the first man, grateful that such a huge debt had been forgiven, he could have easily included the fifty pence in his calculations, which would have allowed the ruler to multiply his forgiveness out to a second person. Every time we choose to return evil for evil, we are multiplying the total amount of evil in the world. But every time we choose to forgive, we are multiplying the good in the world. Whether or not the world becomes more good or more evil depends on how we choose to react when evil comes our way.