Forgiveness and Resetting the Board

       Last week, Thursday, God opened my eyes to something I had never seen before. It's about the fact that the Earth's magnetism periodically switches polarity; the magnetic north pole becomes the magnetic south pole and vise versa, so north becomes south and east becomes west as the magnetic field goes through this strange flip or reversal. Stranger still, God showed me how this relates to forgiveness.

       You can read for yourself in the Bible in Psalm 103:12, "As far as the east is from the west, so far hath he removed our transgressions from us." I don't know what David was specifically thinking when he wrote this; most people would interpret it as God forgiving and cleansing our sin so completely that we'll never see it again, just as you can head east for as far as you want and you'll never be headed west, which doesn't work for north and south directions of course. The phrase forgive and forget is also used a lot by people who would like others to not use people's past (forgiven) mistakes against them so they never have to even hear or think about them again. But such thoughts are false and shallow interpretations of the power God has shown us in His forgiveness. For one thing, there's no way anyone is forgetting king David's greatest sin, his adultery with Bathsheba; that story has in fact become an integral part of any Christian's heritage. as for the "east and west" thing, science itself can show you that east becomes west and west becomes east because God periodically flips the compass, just on a physical level.

       Spiritually you can see God do this with David. Just in case you aren't familiar with the story of king David's greatest sin, it's very simple: one night, king David sees Bathsheba bathing on her home rooftop, seduces and sleeps with her, gets her pregnant, and then has her husband Uriah (yes, she was married already) killed so he can marry her and make the pregnancy look legitimate. Basically, the only reasons Bathsheba is in the picture to begin with is because of lust, lying, adultery, and murder. However, God forgives David (very generous) and Bathsheba in fact becomes the mother of the next (God-ordained) king of Israel, Solomon, the wisest man who ever lived and who led Israel into its golden age. Bathsheba also becomes the great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great grandmother (that's 25 greats) of Jesus Christ, although if you look in the first chapter of Matthew, it does not name her in the lineage but rather it refers to her as the wife of Uriah (apparently it was difficult even for the writers of the Bible to understand why God let this happen). Lust, lying, adultery, and murder were the only reasons Bathsheba was in the picture to begin with, but she becomes such an important part of history; you could in fact make the argument that were it not for lust, lying, adultery, and murder, the king Solomon would never have been born, and (by long extension) you could make the argument that were it not for lust, lying, adultery, and murder, the Lord Jesus would not have been born. Of course I am not advocating these horrible sins; please don't do these things ever, they've always been awful and always will be. But that right there demonstrates how profound the power of God and His forgiveness really is. For king David, a man after God's own heart, God changed the game, reset the board, and flipped the compass; what was totally unacceptable, God accepted, and what was so horrendous and wicked and awful, God made it into one of the greatest, most uplifting stories history can tell.

       Now think about how this might apply to yourself and to the people in your life. God can transform your deepest sin into highest praise. He can turn your weakness into strength. He can take your longest, hardest, darkest personal struggle and turn it into your favorite testimony which you won't let anyone forget. God can take that moment in which you fell short of the grace and the glory of God and use it to show everyone just how glorious He is. It of course makes no sense to the natural mind, but such is the power of God and the power of forgiveness. So the next time you see someone (this includes yourself) struggling with the darkness or making some sort of horrific mistake, forgive them as soon as you can, and you can access the transforming power of God to completely turn things around. Perhaps a good way to look at this is that God, as moral as He is, does not see things in terms of right and wrong; He looks at it in terms of life and death, and then He does the thing that promotes life. Really that's what forgiveness is all about: conquering death and giving life.

       I hope you found this helpful. I just love when I can spend an afternoon meditating on something given to me directly from God. And I'm not kidding about that by the way; I didn't even try to put all this together, God gave it to me. But anyway, that's all I have for now. Until next time, God bless!