“And when he had begun to call them to account, one was brought to him, who owed him ten thousand talents (that is in our terms ‘many billions').”
One servant was brought before Him whose debt was so large that it was larger than the gross national product of many smaller countries. It was ‘ten thousand talents'. The talent was not so much a coin as a unit of monetary measurement (a little like having ‘a million pound bank note'). In one measurement it was the equivalent of two hundred and forty gold coins. Gold coins were rarely in use apart from by the very rich (although see Matthew 10:9 which suggests that some disciples came from fairly wealthy backgrounds). And ten thousand talents was the equivalent in this case of two million four hundred thousand gold coins. It was a fabulous amount. It was over three times more than was in David's treasury at the highest point of his reign (1 Chronicles 29:4), when he was fabulously rich, and more than all the gold used in building and furnishing the Temple of Solomon (1 Chronicles 29:7).
This huge debt was Jesus' indication of the huge debt that each of us owes to God at the moment of our repenting and believing. It is basically incalculable (‘ten thousand' is a round number based on the fact that ‘a thousand' usually indicates a large incalculable number. Thus ten times a thousand is even more incalculable). It symbolises a debt that can never be paid off. There is no idea here of our good deeds being able to balance off the bad. Rather the opposite is the case. It is that our good deeds cannot even remotely approach the level of our bad deeds. For in the end our so-called ‘good deeds' are only really the doing of what we should do anyway (Luke 17:10). There are therefore no ‘good deeds'. So this man's only hope was ‘forgiveness' of the debt.