Skip to main content

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!


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Freewheeling

Merton never disappoints. Here's an excerpt from "Love and Living," a collection of individual writings collected after his death in 1968: "Life consists in learning to live on one's own, spontaneous, freewheeling; to do this one must recognize what is one's own—be familiar and at home with oneself. This means basically learning who one is, and learning what one has to offer to the contemporary world, and then learning how to make that offering valid." This short passage is pregnant with meaning and spiritual insight (would we expect anything less?). Let's start with the last few words: "…make that offering valid." The offering of ourselves, of our lives is our calling. We offer ourselves to assist the re-creation of Creation; the reconciling of Man to God. The validity of our offering is measured in how closely we mirror the work of God; to what extent our motivations are based on knowing who we are rather than a slavish obedience to p...
4 comments
Read more

Wineskins II

       In chapter 16 of Matthew, Peter ‘makes the great confession’ - Jesus he says is the Son of the Living God. At Covenant, when someone wants to become a member or to be baptized, we ask them who Jesus is and we expect this response. Peter is correct when he says this, but it is not clear that Peter (or the other disciples) understood the ramifications of his statement. Following Peter’s statement we find a series of incidents that make us wonder just how much Peters actually believed what he had said.      In the first instance, Jesus compares Peter to Satan. Jesus tells his disciples that he is going to Jerusalem and there he will die. Peter exclaims that he will not let that happen; Jesus will not be killed. Peter is expecting great things from Jesus as the Messiah, the Son of God on behalf of Israel and he cannot fit Jesus dying into his hope for a greater Israel under this Messiah. This cannot happen, he reasons. Jesus’s response is a harsh re...
Post a Comment
Read more

Wineskins

  Jesus comes from the Wilderness where the Spirit has driven him for testing, announcing the imminent coming of the Kingdom of Heaven. His message to the crowds calls them to repent because the “Kingdom is at hand.” The kingdom or the effective rule of God has come upon Israel and Israel’s expected response is to return to her God. A number of passages tell us the sorts of things God has against Israel or at least her leaders. They have the form of the People of God, but not the substance. He will call those opposed to him “white-washed tombs” to describe their religious and moral corruption. They look good but are dead. He calls these people to repentance, to return to “their first love,” to actually live as though they are the People of God. In another place, he will tell them that while they do well to tithe mint and cumin, they have missed the larger point of caring for people. In the judgment scene, he describes sending into a place of gnashing of teeth those who failed to gi...
Post a Comment
Read more