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Hebrews 10: 17 “Their sins and lawless acts I will
remember no more.” (NIV)
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If you’re telling yourself you don’t deserve a second chance, remind yourself you didn’t deserve the first one either.* |
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If you have been a Christian for a long time, you have
probably reached an understanding of God’s forgiveness: we don’t deserve it but
he does it. But most of us still have that little nagging doubt about the
limits of his forgiveness. We’re afraid that one day soon, God will finally
reach his breaking point and say, “That’s it. You have blown all your chances.”
We forget that God doesn’t count chances. To him, your second and third and 100th
chances are your first one.
Today’s verse is from a passage in Jeremiah, quoted in the
book of Hebrews. Sometimes we mistakenly apply Old Testament passages to
ourselves when they were actually being addressed to a specific audience, but
this one serves a dual purpose – then and now. The writer of Hebrews assures us
that the Holy Spirit testifies to us about this, tying it to Christ’s one-time
all-atoning sacrifice (verses 14 and 15).
Does God really have no memory of your past sins? Or does he
just “forget” the penalty for them? Does it really matter? As it is written:
“And where these have been forgiven, there is no longer any sacrifice for sin.”
(verse 18). It’s a done deal.
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As Christians, we can’t fully understand the New Testament or the work of Christ without the vocabulary of the Old Testament Law: sacrifice, atonement, unclean, holy, curse, blood.* |
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