Without the touch of a Forgiving God, we would perish in a moment!

Without the touch of a Forgiving God, we would perish in a moment!

How quickly we seem to overlook what the mercy of God is all about.  Once mankind gets up from the weight of sin he forgets from where he was and starts over again.  Moses warned the recently released Israelites from getting too bold in the eyes of prosperity.  “Be careful not to forget the Lord, your God, by neglecting his commandments and decrees and statutes which I enjoin on you today: lest, when you have eaten your fill, and have built fine houses and lived in them, and have increased your herds and flocks, your gold and silver, and all your property, you then become haughty of heart and unmindful of the Lord, your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, that place of slavery; who guided you through the vast and terrible desert with its seraph serpents and scorpions, its parched and waterless ground; who brought forth water for you from the flinty rock and fed you in the desert with manna; a food unknown to your fathers, that he might afflict you and test you, but also might make you prosperous in the end.”  (Dt 8: 11 - 16).

This is an exact condition that once we are forgiven the senses of freedom may overshadow our forgiveness and allow the attraction of pleasure back in control of our weaknesses.

Fortunately the same Spirit that brought his mercy to our waning heart is ready to convict our weakness and present a way out of failure again.  That is the divine compunction of God that will continue to pull us back from forgetting the mercy he already has blessed us with.

The irony of God’s mercy, even when we forget or overlook the first time he forgave our sins, he is waiting for us to return and ask, one more time for his mercy;  and a third time or an endless parade of visits to his compassion.  Then Peter approached and asked him, “Lord, if my brother sins against me, how often must I forgive him?”  “As many as seven times?   Jesus answered, “I say to you, not seven times but seventy-seven times.”  (Mt 18: 21 -23).

There is no limit to God’s mercy, for any one who seeks to be forgiven.  Even in an unbelievable situation the most heinous sins a person may commit, if there is true compunction in their heart and he seeks God’s mercy, God is compelled by his undying love to reach out with the hands of merciful love.  We are his creatures and he will go to extremes to accept us back, unscathed and reaching for a hand to pick him out of the gutter of ignominy and filth.  This is the God we love; one who forgets our sin once he forgives our transgression.

At the banquet in the kingdom of God, when Christ presents to his Father his Church, the saints who have been forgiven, there no longer will be room for those who won’t be as forgiving towards their brothers and sisters.  

While he was at table in his house (Matthew the tax collector) many tax collectors and sinners came and sat with Jesus and his disciples.  The Pharisees saw this and said to his disciples, “Why does your teacher eat with tax collectors and sinners?”  He heard this and said, “Those who are well do not need a physician, but the sick do.  Go and learn the meaning of the words, I desire mercy, not sacrifice.”  “I did not come to call the righteous but sinners.”  (Mt 9: 10 - 13).

This is the touch of a merciful God who has come to keep us from perishing because of a weakness that just won’t quit.  “The law entered in so that transgression might increase but, where sin increased, grace overflowed all the more, so that, as sin reigned in death, grace also might reign through justification for eternal life through Jesus Christ  our Lord.”  “Where sin abounds, God’s Grace abounds the more.”  (Rom 5: 20 - 21).  

Ralph B. Hathaway