A Reminder of God's Grace in the Aftermath of Sin

Devotional

You did it again.

Maybe it was the thing you swore off last week. Maybe it was the word that came out before you could stop it. Maybe it was something nobody knows about and you'd like to keep it that way. And now you're sitting in the aftermath, and the aftermath has a voice. It says, you knew better. It says, how many times. It says, don't bother going back to God until you've cleaned yourself up a little.

I know that voice. It sounds reasonable. It's a lie.

Micah asks the only question that matters right now. "Who is a God like you, pardoning iniquity and passing over transgression?" Don't read past that. Micah's looking at a God who has every right to be done with his people, and what he finds is a God who pardons. And then the reason why. "He does not retain his anger forever, because he delights in steadfast love."

Delights.

God isn't a reluctant forgiver. He isn't gritting his teeth and letting you off the hook one more time. Mercy is the thing he enjoys. It's the thing he loves to do. And look at the verbs that follow. He will "tread our iniquities underfoot." He will "cast all our sins into the depths of the sea." Trampled. Drowned. Not filed away for later.

Psalm 103 puts a measuring tape on it. "As far as the east is from the west, so far does he remove our transgressions from us." Think about that for a second. North and south meet at the poles. East and west never meet. You can travel east forever and never arrive at west. That's the distance. David could've said "as far as the north is from the south." He didn't. He picked the one direction that has no end.

Now, 1 John 1 is where the aftermath turns. "If we say we have no sin, we deceive ourselves." So don't minimize it. Don't explain it. Name it. "If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us." Notice those two words. Faithful. Just. Not merely kind. Just. Which means forgiving you isn't God bending the rules. It's God keeping them. Because the debt has already been paid.

This is the part you have to see clearly in the aftermath. "The wages of sin is death." Sin earns something. It earns a wage. And that wage got paid out in full. Not to you. To Jesus. On a cross. When he said "it is finished," that was the word for a paid invoice. Your sin, this one, the one from today, was on the bill. And the bill is stamped.

So God isn't ignoring what you did. He looked straight at it and crushed his own Son for it. That's how seriously he takes it. And that's how completely it's dealt with.

Here's what this means for the next five minutes. You don't wait. You don't do penance. You don't go quiet on God for a few days until you feel worthy to pray again. You go now. In the mess. With the thing still fresh. You confess it plainly and you receive the free gift, because that's what it is. "The free gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord."

The aftermath of sin is not the absence of God. It's the exact place he shows up with mercy in his hands.

Who is a God like that? There isn't one. Go to him.