Textual: There are no changes from the Matthean redaction.
The content and location of these two verses lend credence to the suspicion that the previous verse is a later insertion in the Lord’s prayer. These two verses pick up on the precise theme that is given in verse 11 (compare Matthew 6:12). Without the final line of praise to God, these two verses come much closer to their apparent context, which is an an expansion of verse 11. Matthew’s textual construction is elsewhere tightly controlled, and it would be unusual for Matthew to have left these two verses unconnected and unconnectable. Removing that final line allows these two verses to be what they appear to be, which is an expansion of the meaning of verse 11 (or Matthew 6:12).
The forgiveness of trespasses flows directly out of the forgiveness of debts. Rather than the debt of one man to another, our trespasses comprise our debt before God. Once again the principle that is taught is that the way we conduct our horizontal relationships will become the model for the way God conducts our vertical relationship.
With so much emphasis on this interesting relationship between man and God, it is important to take a moment and understand why it is so. If God judges according to a divine and eternal justice, how can he justly judge us according to our human judgments? Shouldn’t God judge us against some eternal truth rather than our actions?
The answer to this lies in understanding what it is that we are all about while on this earth. Unfortunately, too much or the language we use to describe heaven leaves us with the incorrect idea of what we are doing. We say, for instance, that God is testing us. That helps to understand some of the nature of agency, but it is ultimately an unsatisfying answer. Why should God test us if he already knows the answers? If God is omniscient, should he not already know what we will do before we do it? If so, doesn’t the very definition of God preclude him gaining any information from the testing?
The testing and the proving are not to prove ourselves to God. By definition, He already knows. Therefore the testing an proving must be for us. How are we tested and tried?
Psalms 66:10
10 For thou, O God, hast proved us: thou hast tried us, as silver is tried.
The proving of the silver does not test to see if it is silver or not. It truly is silver, even before the proving. The difference is the impurities. Those are burned out in the hot furnaces and the silver is tried. This life becomes for us the hot furnace that will prove the silver within us. We are children of God…
Romans 8:17
17 And if children, then heirs; heirs of God, and joint-heirs with Christ…
The true silver is already in us, but it needs to be refined. Agency is the process by which our incipient God-like natures are exercised against opposition so that we develop those attributes in the way that God has. We are to continue this process of refining our spiritual qualities until we have become “perfect, even as [our] Father which is in heaven is perfect.” (Matthew 5:48).