"Is It madness To Believe Such A Thing?"

 

¹³And when he forgave us all our trespasses, ¹⁴erasing the record that stood against us with its legal demands. He set this aside, nailing it to the cross.(Col 2)

The word “erasing” has once again caught my imagination.  

In the Greek the verb — erasing — is: to dissolve, blow out, turn or switch off, extinguish and douce.

I am thinking this morning of how unbelievable this erasing is to the majority of the Christian world, not to mention the entire universe. 

Is there a God who is so gracious and understanding?

Is there such a God who actually said:  

as far as the east is from the west, so far he removes our transgressions from us.    

Or: ....for I will forgive their iniquity, and remember their sin no more. 

¹⁰ He does not deal with us according to our sins,
   nor repay us according to our iniquities. 
¹¹ For as the heavens are high above the earth,
   so great is his steadfast love towards those who fear him; 
¹² as far as the east is from the west,
   so far he removes our transgressions from us. (Ps 103)

31 The days are surely coming, says the Lord, when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and the house of Judah. ³²It will not be like the covenant that I made with their ancestors when I took them by the hand to bring them out of the land of Egypt—a covenant that they broke, though I was their husband, says the Lord. ³³But this is the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel after those days, says the Lord: I will put my law within them, and I will write it on their hearts; and I will be their God, and they shall be my people. ³⁴No longer shall they teach one another, or say to each other, ‘Know the Lord’, for they shall all know me, from the least of them to the greatest, says the Lord; for I will forgive their iniquity, and remember their sin no more. (Jeremiah 31)

Does this truly mean that the most horrible of sins can be erased?  

Gone forever?

To quote a famous theologian in his book, ‘A Room Called Remember, ’ Frederick Buechner writes:  “Is it madness to believe such a thing?  That is a serious question.  Is it madness to believe in God at all let alone in a God who speaks to us through such obscure and fleeting moments as these and then asks us to believe that these moments are windows into the truest meaning and mystery of the cosmos itself?  It is a kind of madness indeed.” (p.28)

Now to clarify, Buechner was  talking about the Exodus 3 text. When God spoke to Moses out of burning bush.  When God ask Moses to go and save the Israelites from Egyptian’s oppressive slavery.

None-the -less, erasing sins is as impossible as having God talk to us from a burning bush after all. 

Or anywhere else for that matter. 

                                                  Right?

And yet, as I sit and think about all of the centuries that have past since God talked to Moses, and Paul wrote to the Colossians.  And our world is still looking to the hope offered from the story of a God who came to earth in Jesus skin. 

There is still a thing called worship that draws all kinds of people to come and to hear the word of God spoken.

Down through the ages the madness -- God’s truth -- still pulls at people’s hearts and minds.

So there must be something to this madness after all.

Don’t you think?