Your Individual Sins

 It occurs to me that the reason we're told that God doesn't remember our sins is that He never really took note of them as specific events anyway. What He looks at - what He has always looked at is your heart, your direction, your desire. All he needs to know is what sort of person you are; not your specific litany of wrongs. 

Now don’t get me wrong, God is capable of listing our sins if that’s what He wants to do. Clearly, he has done that on a number of occasions when addressing Israel and her seemingly persistent intractability. A short perusal of the prophets and God’s complaints contained within them will quickly reveal that if God wants to recall what we’ve done, He is no slouch in that ability.

What is interesting though is that God sent Israel into exile not because one or two—or several Jews stole some bread or cheated their neighbor. As long as the behaviors were not characteristic of the nation as a whole, making the correct sacrifices and worshiping YHWH was seemingly sufficient. It wasn’t until Israel became corrupt “from head to foot” that God decided that exile was what was needed. It wasn’t that the Israelites couldn’t sin—they did. Rather, it was when their national character had become such that God could characterize her as corrupt, putrid, dead from the king on down to the lowest farmer or craftsman that exile became the option.

At that point, the specific sins that may have been committed were lost in the great mass of sinfulness that had come to characterize Israel and as Joshua had warned, God would upend the nation to the same extent that he had blessed her; that He would remove her from the verdant land that He had given to her.

I think a similar reality applies to you and me.  No doubt you and I have managed to miss the mark on more than one occasion and yet we don’t anticipate that God is going to send us away from His presence on that basis. Oh yes, He could; He would be justified in doing so in His holiness. But we don’t expect that He will.  We often remind ourselves that we are in Christ, that we are co-heirs and children of God and that brings us reassurance and well-grounded expectation.

But what might we think if it were true that individual, discrete sins weren’t really the deal-breaker we often think it is? What if God knows we are human and we are going to mess something up sooner or later—or multiple somethings? What if God is willing to treat us as the human beings we are, looking into our hearts to see if we are people who desire to be like He is, to be the images of God He made us to be?

Yes, this wouldn’t excuse our sins but it would allow God to accept us as imperfect people who are not putrid with fully corrupt beings. Just as God called Israel back to Himself repeatedly, He does the same for us without worrying about what that specific sin may have been last week or yesterday or this morning. What God wants to know is Whose are we? Who do we seek to follow? How are we attempting to live and the character of our lives? If our lives are aligned with God’s, then He has no reason to remember our discrete sins because they don’t paint the primary picture of our lives. God wants people He can trust to do what He would do. If we are those people, the blood of Jesus cleanses us. 

Praise God for His wonderful grace and patience with us!