Sunday Morning Meditation: Psalm 103:8-13

“The Lord is compassionate and gracious
slow to anger, abounding in love.
He will not always accuse,
nor will he harbor his anger forever;
He does not treat us as our sins deserve
or repay us according to our iniquities.
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.
As a father has compassion on his children,
So the Lord has compassion on those who fear Him.”

Sometimes we walk into worship shouldering a terrible debt. Sometimes we enter prayer nursing a hidden wound. We wonder, will He hear me today? Will he see me? Is this the day He finally realizes how dirty, how utterly screwed up I am? We fear this is the day the Lord finally casts His full gaze upon our lives and comes to His senses, rejecting us once and for all.

We know the truth: Our secret thoughts haunt us, and our ugly open words betray us. Our spouses know, our children know. Wherever we go our sin and guilt are right beside us, taunting us, and even in worship and prayer we are sometimes unable to find freedom. Where can we find freedom?

The Psalms are not the songs of the clean and religious; they are the poetry of the barroom and the jail cell. David, the man who sings this song, is no self-righteous zealot; he is an adulterer, a murderer! He is broken and bloodied from his sin, and bearing upon his frame a terrible guilt, and with it, the penalty of judgment. Yet here, in this song of praise to God, he finds freedom from his shame and cries out from the very beginning,

“Praise the Lord, O my soul;
And forget not His benefits
Who forgives all your sins
And heals all your diseases.”

David has found freedom, not just from his guilt but also in spite of his guilt. How? Because, David sings, the Lord is the God who forgives and heals, the God who is slow to anger and rich in love, not the God who receives repayment. David is no longer concerned with paying his debt, because his is a debt he can never repay. The price is too great, the sin too grievous. Rather than paying what he owes David realizes, God “does not treat us as our sins deserve, or repay us according to our iniquities.”

We do not worship an invisible debt collector in the sky, and God is no mere accountant of sin, dispensing punishments and rewards. Instead, God has reserved for himself a role in the universe of far greater majesty and nobility. The Lord is a God of mercy, He does not collect your debt, He pays it! The Lord is a God of compassion, He does not look past your festering wounds, He heals them!

Perhaps harder to grasp, from God’s perch of eternity this work is finished and complete the moment we have placed our faith in him. Hence, David helps us lay hold of this truth by painting for us a picture of the incredible depth and breadth of God’s goodness, sketching distances so great they cannot be measured. How large is God’s love for us David? As high as the heavens are above the earth. How far removed from our sins have we become? As far as the East is from the West.  Tell us David, what is God’s love for us really like? It is like a fathers compassion for his children. “So the Lord has compassion on those who fear Him…”

It’s one of the fantastic paradoxes of Christianity that as long as we fear God, we need not be afraid of Him any longer. When we enter in humility, we enter into grace. However, when we enter in arrogance or self-righteousness, we enter into judgment. When we insist on carrying our own debts, we are insisting on our pride, but Christ died to pay our debts and all that is left for us is humility and eternity. Cast your sins upon the Lord, humbly accepting his gift of mercy, boasting in nothing whatsoever except the grace of Christ Jesus and you will find that your debts are as far from you as the east is from the west, and you will be able to agree with Paul, that “in Him and through faith in Him we may approach God with freedom and confidence” (Eph 3:12).

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