Forgiveness

Psalm 32:5 And what follows confession? God forgave the sin. That's the last bit (says David) - and you forgave the guilt of my sin.

David had sinned and so he was guilty. He deserved to be punished. But what did God do when David confessed? God forgave him. He removed David's sin and so with it the guilt and the punishment due. David escapes both.

When a person is forgiven it is as though all their sins have been washed away from them.

The huge debt they owe is cancelled. It no longer stands on the account books. A great PAID stamp comes down on the page and no more payment is required.

It is as though the criminal record listing all your sins that is kept on the police computer is wiped clean. It is gone!

Oh what a glorious thing to be forgiven! What can match it? It leads to the joy of fellowship with God and complete amazement at his goodness towards us.

Confess your sins now and find that forgiveness and joy today.

Darwin Awards and their equivalent

The world has a thing it calls the Darwin awards. This is a supposed award given to people who in their words “contribute the most to the evolution of humanity by removing their genes from the gene pool.” For example, two men in Kenya, Leonard Tonui and Michael Shikuku, were capturing selfies with a wild elephant when they were trampled to death by the irate beast who proceeded to bury the corpses with brush. The two men were actually touching the elephant's face while taking the photos.

A similar sort of award could be made to people who every day endanger their immortal souls simply by doing the very opposite of what the Bible urges us to do.

They refuse to repent. They will not trust in Christ. They say this life is all there is. There is no more.

We who believe must not fall into such foolish ways.

The best teacher and little by little

Psalm 90:12 Teach us to number our days, that we may gain a heart of wisdom.

Consider the sort of request to make – to be taught. The verse begins Teach us. This sort of thing comes up often in the psalms. A request for teaching assumes ignorance on our part and that is right. By nature we don't know how to live. We need to learn how to do that. Who better to teach us that than God himself. When serious people who know what they are doing go off to university, they find out who are the best teachers and apply to those universities. The best teacher of all is God himself. Go to him and learn. Here then is something we need to learn, something we need to learn from God. It may well not come easy but we must learn it anyway. God is able to teach us.

Understand what it is that Moses wants God to teach us – to number our days. So what is it that Moses wants to learn from God? He asks that we will learn to number our days. We learn to count when we are very young. We start with addition then substraction then move on to multiplication and division. Next come fractions and equations. The highest mathematics there is, is learning to number your days. We need to learn to number our days. What does that mean? He has spoken about death and the brevity of life and the regular manifestations of God's wrath against the people. Every person has only a limited time here on this earth. We may live 70 years or 80. However old we get, we die. What Moses requests then, and it is something that we should all seek, is that we may be able to have the right approach to our lives. It is not that we forget about the past completely but that we focus on the day ahead. He is not asking to know how long he has left but to be able to discern how quickly the days pass, the fact that death can come at any time and that life on earth will certainly end at some point. No doubt he also has in mind that judgement that follows death. If we are to number our days as we ought to then we'll be aware of the coming judgement and we'll order our days in the light of the coming judgement. You read sometimes of people who have managed to lose millions. They once were rich but now they are poor. How does it happen? Probably not overnight. Usually it is little by little. In the same way, we learn to live wisely little by little, day by day. Here is a good prayer for all of us. Ask God to teach you, to help you understand how to live – not thinking we have all the time in the world but realising life passes by quickly and death can call at any time. Ask him to help you prepare for the coming judgement in the right way.

From everlasting to everlastig God

Psalm 90:2 and 4 Before the mountains were born or you brought forth the whole world, from everlasting to everlasting you are God. ... A thousand years in your sight are like a day that has just gone by, or like a watch in the night.

Think of mountains. Some of you have been up Snowdon or Ben Nevis. You have heard of Scafell Pike or the Alps or Kilimanjaro and K2 and Mount Everest. They have just always been there. You know that silly joke about Mount Everest. What was the world’s highest mountain before the discovery of Mount Everest? It was still Mount Everest (it doesn’t matter whether it had been discovered or not!). It's like the world itself. It feels like it has always been around. Of course, as Moses shows us in Genesis, the mountains and the earth had a beginning. Now before all that, he says, God was there. From everlasting to everlasting you are God which means that God has no beginning and he has no end. He is eternal. He is the God of the ages. And because he is eternal, for him a thousand years is just like a day gone by or a watch in the night. Moses records the ages of the early men. Before the flood some reached quite amazing ages. Methusaleh was famously 969. None lived a thousand years though. But for God it is like a day gone by. If you are up at night, the hours can seem to drag but when you sleep a watch or two can appear to go by very quickly. For God that is like a thousand years or more slipping by.

One way to think of it is if you think of the long years like a long line of cars. Say each car in the jam represents 10 years. Then a thousand years would be represented by a hundred cars. If you are in car 50 then you can only see so far back and so far forward but if you are up in a helicopter you can see all the way to the front and all the way to the back. That is something like how it must be for God. He can see it all in one moment.

Astronaut Food

You know that the Bible is to be read in many ways like you would read any other book – begin at the beginning and read on to the end. However, because it is also a very special book there are certain places where we find what we might call astronaut food – concentrated rations – or nuggets of gold in the ground or cherries in a Genoa cake. I refer to the way that certain texts can be isolated and great truths can be seen in them. Not all verses of the Bible lend themselves to such a treatment by any means but many do, (Examples John 3:16, Romans 3:23, Galatians 2:20, etc).

Three Rs of sin - recognition, repetition, reputation

1. Recognition. If you have never realised that a certain thing is a sin then you are not likely to feel convicted.

If you don't know that it is a sin to worry or a sin not to keep the Lord's Day special then your conscience will not convict you. It is only when you see such things are sins that you are likely to come under conviction.

2. Repetition. Even when we know something is sinful, we may not feel convicted about it because we have done it so many times so much so that we are hardly aware we are doing it.

Think of a person who feels guilty about swearing or making rude jokes at first but gets so used to it that 

he does not notice it any more. The same with gossip, lying. and other sins.

3. Reputation. As for reputation, we are ashamed of some sins just because we know what others will think of us.

A person may be quite happy to steal or to do something spiteful or malicious to another or to cheat on his wife – as long as no-one else knows about it. The very fact that he may be found out often stops a person from committing a sin and when he does, the reaction of others to it can bring deep conviction.

A great clean up of stumbling blocks

Zephaniah 1:2, 3 "I will sweep away everything from the face of the earth," declares the LORD. "I will sweep away both man and beast; I will sweep away the birds in the sky and the fish in the sea-- and the idols that cause the wicked to stumble." "When I destroy all mankind on the face of the earth," declares the LORD, 

(1. Who is going to bring about this judgment? The LORD himself)

2. What will be its chief characteristic?

You notice the repeated idea of sweeping away. It begins "I will sweep away everything from the face of the earth," declares the LORD. Then there is some itemisation "I will sweep away both man and beast; I will sweep away the birds in the sky and the fish in the sea - and the idols that cause the wicked to stumble." If there is any doubt about what such sweeping away by God entails, the phrase "When I destroy all mankind on the face of the earth," declares the LORD makes it clear.

Just as when someone takes a brush and sweeps the rubbish up across the floor so God will come one day and he will sweep away all unrighteousness. It's a great clean up.

When I was a child my mother would have a big clean up in the house, which was fine but sometimes there were things that I treasured that she would throw away because they were cluttering up the house. It is something like that when God is at work.

In doing what he says he will do, God will destroy the whole earth including the unrighteous, consigning them to hell. The New Testament speaks of this (2 Peter 3:10) But the day of the Lord will come like a thief. The heavens will disappear with a roar; the elements will be destroyed by fire, and the earth and everything done in it will be laid bare.

3. What will be swept away?

In verse 3 Zephaniah enumerates who will be swept away. It is like Genesis 1 in reverse. There we read of the creation of man and before that of the beasts and before that the birds and the fish. Here he says I will sweep away both man and beast; I will sweep away the birds in the sky and the fish in the sea …. All of creation is going to be swept away when this great day of judgment comes. He adds - and the idols that cause the wicked to stumble. On the fourth day God made the sun, moon and stars, which people have made idols of. But they also will be destroyed.

These idols that cause the wicked to stumble really are stumbling blocks. They get in the way of true worship and cause people to fall into sin. When someone trips over something in the street we say he has hit a stumbling block. That literal thing is a picture of the way idols get in the way and cause people to fall. But they will not last.

It all reminds us of Jesus's own words in Matthew 13:40, 41 As the weeds are pulled up and burned in the fire, so it will be at the end of the age. The Son of Man will send out his angels, and they will weed out of his kingdom everything that causes sin and all who do evil.

The whole thing may sound negative but in fact it is very positive for this will mean the end of idolatry and all the wickedness associated with it when God judges all the earth. This drive against idols has already begun but it will be completed when Jesus comes again.

(4. How ought we to react? Be holy)