Hear these words, people of God: Micah 7:18 Who is a God like you, pardoning iniquity and passing over the transgression of the remnant of your possession? He does not retain his anger forever, because he delights in showing clemency. 19 He will again have compassion upon us; he will tread our iniquities under foot. You will cast all our sins into the depths of the sea. From Hebrews 8:12 For I will be merciful toward their iniquities, and I will remember their sins no more. And from the last book, Revelation 21:1: 1 Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth; for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away, and the sea was no more.
God forgives all of our sins. It seems too good to be true, but it is. Hear it again: God forgives all of our sins. And the Bible says there is an action on God's part that should speak to us. And this comes to us as a promise and as a help; God takes our sins and "cast(s) all our sins into the depths of the sea." Hebrews then adds God saying, "For I will be merciful toward their iniquities, and I will remember their sins no more." God has trouble with His memory, like us older types, God forgets those sins for which we have asked forgiveness. Here begs the questions, why don't we?
Memory is a great thing most days. It is precious to remember loved ones. It is priceless to remember good things done for us or that we have done for others. It is powerful to remember what God has done for us. Yet, memory sometimes comes to haunt us. We confess to God that we are sinful and ask for forgiveness. God forgives our sins, casts them into the sea, forgets that we had even sinned, and in Revelation we see that that part about all our sins being in the "depths of the sea" becomes even more powerfully absent because "the sea was no more." Yet, we scuba dive in our memories and remember things. It's part of our conscience to let those past sins creep into our thinking, but here is where grace overrides conscience. God forgives and forgets. Oh, if only we were so gracious ourselves. We hold grudges. We shouldn't. We say we can forgive but not forget. We declare ourselves, though we are children of God, to be anything but Godlike. And it comes back to haunt us when it comes to such words and actions, and our words and actions said or done against God or God's people. Still, we scuba dive. We go lurking in the depths of the sea every time we let a memory of a past sin come to haunt us. What do we gain from that? Absolutely nothing, except to come face to face, as the diver in this graphic, with a monster of the deep.
I have a dear friend and brother in Christ whose second home is the sea, the underwater part. And he takes beautiful photos of the deep and shares them with me and those who are his friends on Facebook. And in all the pictures and movies he has taken underwater, Rev. Virgilio Vasquez Garza has yet to show me my past sins. At least in photographs! ;) And were he to come face to face with his or anyone else's sins, that would probably be the day he quit going under there looking for beauty.
Say this to yourself: My sins are forgiven. My sins are forgotten. My sins for now are sleeping with the fishes, but the day is coming when they will be no more.
PRAYER: Thank You, Loving God, for Your mercy and grace. My prayer is that You would help me and those reading this as their own prayer, to rely on Your grace to forget our sins. We are a people sent, not sit or set; so help us move towards You. We ask this in Our Lord and Savior's name, Jesus Christ, amen.
Have a great and blessed day in the Lord!
Eradio Valverde
To see the photo of the scuba diver and this in another format: http://us5.campaign-archive2.com/?u=ddb0d8e9e8610bb92960afa4d&id=30c5e7a3b4
