“The Lord is merciful and gracious, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love. He will not always chide, nor will He keep his anger forever. He does not deal with us according to our sins, nor repay us according to our iniquities. For as high as the heavens are above the earth, so great is His steadfast love toward those who fear Him; as far as the east is from the west, so far does He remove our transgressions from us. As a father shows compassion to his children, so the Lord shows compassion to those who fear Him. For He knows our frame; He remembers that we are dust.” – Psalm 103:8-14 {ESV}
Perhaps one of the greatest risks for the followers of Jesus Christ is for us to forget what God never does. The Psalmist takes a moment to remind us of wondrous comforts that come gushing toward us as children of the New Covenant. Our God is merciful, he writes. He is gracious – not spiteful. He will not remain angry with us nor will He leave us in open controversy (chide) on a perpetual basis. We are reminded that God does not deal with us according to our sin – if we did we would be in the pit of destruction right now instead of reading these words. We begin to rejoice as we ponder the grace of our Lord and then we find ourselves impossibly limited in giving Him proper praise because the Psalmist declares that His love toward us is immeasurable, as high as the heavens are from off the earth! Our guilt before God has been purged so as to never be fully experienced; God Himself has removed our sins and disposed of them through infinite forgiveness. This is no mere judicial act of God, devoid of feeling. No, fellow pilgrim, this is the result of a Father’s compassion for His children! It is not a detached judge before whom we live but, rather, an involved Father who emotes to us from the storehouse of a fathomless heart. This is the nature of God that your flesh resists you to believe. The devil himself seeks to keep the saints from these truths. The shackles of fear and guilt press tightly around our hands, feet and throats so that we cannot move and breathe in freedom. God thunders from Heaven that we must believe in His goodness! We must rest in His gentleness! We have no other recourse for our folly than to behold our God and trust that He has sufficed us.
“For He knows our frame; He remembers that we are dust.” – Psalm 103:14. This is what we so often forget.
I should always be good. I am not.
I ought always to be spiritual. Trust me, there are times where I sense nothing but unholiness in my heart. I have wondered more than once how a man like me could be saved.
I easily sin far too often.
If you are prone to let your mind wander here to concern yourself with what sins Jeff might wrestle with, please pick a more profitable way to spend your time. Let us make it as heinous as it could be and then ask ourselves if what we have read from the Psalmist is still true. If I am a murderer, does God not still stand as He has been described? If I am a thief, is He not still lavish in mercy? Paint me an adulterer or an idolater – are my sins now closer to me than what has been testified in Psalm 103? Is the goodness of God contingent upon the worthiness of man? Now, courageous saint, place your own folly before His eyes and ask these same questions. What we must comprehend is that God knows what we are made of and has no illusions that we are more than dust. Paul wrote that not one good thing dwelt in His flesh (Rom. 7:18). We sometimes think that we are more than dust and that is why we know little of how to properly respond when we fail God. We seek self-atonement, self abasement, self-induced penance, self-deception and self-assertion. We sew our contemporary fig leaves and seek to pop up from behind the bush to declare to God that we have handled it all ourselves in some foolish attempt to make things right. How pitiful of us to hang our heads, ratchet up our righteousness, prime our pumps of good works that they might pour forth in a cleansing flow…
For me…I need desperately…to look to Calvary…and fall silent.
This is the glory of grace, dear one. Rest easy in Him or continue to strive with the torture of making yourself fit before Him. I am always giving up this paltry pursuit but finding it tenaciously stubborn in my heart. Something within in me longs to have a part in my justification before God. It just feels reasonable that I should participate. I obviously don’t yet understand the full ugliness of my iniquity. Oh God, let us hate our sin so badly that we stop trying to atone for it! May God grant me (and you) the immediate spiritual impulse to look to His mercy and sacrifice when we transgress. No bargains. No promises. No affirmations of our intentions. Let there be only a long and lasting look to the Lord and may we be lifted from our dust in Him alone.
As always Jeff, thank you. A timely and apt reminder against wallowing in guilt and regret, and the legalism that inevitably results as we end up practising an ‘atonement plus’ theology, as if Christ’s death was somehow not enough either to save us or to cleanse our consciences…thank you for the reminder simply to rest in His love.