His fear based on his prejudice. ‘I was afraid and went away and hid your talent in the ground’. Matthew Henry comments, ‘He speaks as if it were no great fault; nay, as if he deserved praise for putting it in a safe place.’ ‘Note’, he says, ‘it is a very common matter for men to make light of what will be the grounds of their condemnation in the great day.’ How true this is! Men trot out excuses now about their lack of response to God, that in the full light of God’s presence will render them self-condemned. They tell themselves that God cannot really see the heart or look past their thin deceits.
Why does he give his one talent back? It is a proud idea that something I have done ought to be good enough. I have lived a good enough life, God ought to be pleased with it. This more or less means you choose your own basis of judgement. You come saying that you have kept the Ten Commandments, or you have lived a moral life. God will show the unbeliever, even on his own terms, how far short he fell. The liberal says, no need of commotion and about repentance conviction. Imagine his own decency will pass, feed the poor, Oxfam shop, doing good to others, and immoral for God to earn his salvation.
What hope is there for the man who can look upon God’s greatest offer of kindness in the gospel and see only a hardness in God that wants to take from us? If he cannot recognise and mercy and grace here, how will he ever recognise it? Ultimately God has nothing left to say to us if we reject the gospel, for it comes from the last messenger that he will send to us – His beloved Son.
In some ways the task of a preacher is like someone who pleads on behalf of a mutual friend, whose character – totally without cause – has begun to be suspected. You make the greatest mistake in seeing God as severe and rigid when the opposite is true of him. There never was anyone so gracious and kind, so willing to forgive and so completely to wipe out all record of your sin.