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God tells us that, through Jesus, he has removed the penalty of sin. But we find this hard
to accept at face value. We hear that our sins are forgiven, but we feel the need to
add a conditional “if.” We also understand that God’s love for us is unconditional,
and yet we still think there is a “but.” For some reason, unconditional love and forgiveness
seem “too good to be true.” Even in Old Testament times, some were able
to glimpse into the fullness of God’s desire to forgive and forget.
In Psalm 103, verses 11 and 12, David wrote: “For as high as the heavens are above the
earth, so great is his love for those who fear him; as far as the east is from the west,
so far has he removed our transgressions from us.”
At the time David wrote this, most people never travelled far from home. They thought
of the heavens as an inverted bowl in which the sun, moon and stars somehow moved.
Within their limited grasp of the cosmos, far East and West could have been just over
the horizon, and “as high as heaven” was somewhere above the clouds.
Nowadays, when we can fly far above the clouds to travel long distances, David’s analogy
may seem less impressive, but it shouldn’t. Recently, we had a reminder of how far beyond
our human grasp the cosmos really is. Voyager 1, the unmanned spacecraft originally
launched September 1977, has been back in the news.
It was launched on a trajectory that took it past Jupiter and Saturn. Voyager fulfilled
its mission brilliantly, sending back stunning pictures of these two giant planets.
But then, it kept on going–and it is still going, still beaming back information after
35 years. Voyager has travelled farther “from East
to West” than any other manmade object. It is now over 11 billion miles away, close
to the point where it will leave our solar system altogether and head off into interstellar
space. It will eventually come under the influence
of another star, but not for another 40,000 years!
Perhaps if David was writing Psalm 103 today, he might say something like this:
“For as far as interstellar space reaches away from earth, so great is his love for
those who fear him; as far as the Voyager spacecraft has travelled from east to west,
so far has he removed our transgressions from us.”
The point is, God’s love for us, and his desire to remove the guilt and stain of our
sins, is still greater than anything we humans can imagine, and it always will be.
I’m Joseph Tkach, Speaking of LIFE.