vilest sinner may return.
Unutterable mercy! There is no sinner outside of hell so black that God cannot wash him white. There no one outside of the pit who is so guilty that God is not able and willing to forgive him; for he declares the wondrous fact — “I, even I, am he who blots out your transgressions.”
13. Notice once more, that it is a present forgiveness. It does not say I am he who will blot out your transgressions, but who blots them out now. There are some who believe, or at least seem to imagine, that it is not possible to know whether our sins are forgiven in this life. We may have hope, it is thought, that at last there will be a balance to strike on our side. But this will not satisfy the poor soul who is really seeking pardon, and is anxious to find it; and God has therefore blessedly told us, that he blots out our sin now; that he will do it at any moment the sinner believes. As soon as he trusts in his crucified God, all his sins are forgiven, whether past, present, or to come. Even supposing that he is yet to commit them, they are all pardoned. If I live eighty years after I receive pardon, doubtless I shall fall into many errors, but the one pardon will avail for them as well as for the past. Jesus Christ bore our punishment, and God will never require at my hands the fulfilment of that law which Christ has honoured in my stead; for then there would be injustice in heaven: and that is against God’s character. It is no more possible for a pardoned man to be lost than for Christ to be lost, because Christ is the sinner’s surety. Jehovah will never require my debt to be paid twice. Let no one impute injustice to the God of the whole earth: let no one suppose that he will exact the penalty of one sin twice. If you have been the chief of sinners, you may have the chief of sinner’s forgiveness, and God can bestow it now.
14. I cannot help noticing the completeness of this forgiveness. Suppose you call on your creditor, and say to him, “I have nothing to pay with.” “Well,” he says, “I can issue a distress order against you, and place you in prison and keep you there.” You still reply that you have nothing and he must do what he can. Suppose he should then say, “I will forgive all.” You now stand amazed and say, “Can it be possible that you will forgive me that great debt of a thousand pounds?” He replies, “Yes, I will.” “But how am I to know it?” There is a bond: he takes it and crosses it all out and hands it back to you, and says, “There is a full discharge, I have blotted it all out.” So does the Lord deal with penitents. He has a book in which all your debts are written; but with the blood of Christ he crosses out the handwriting of ordinances which is there written against you. The bond is destroyed, and he will not demand payment for it again. The devil will sometimes insinuate to the contrary, as he did to Martin Luther. “Bring me the catalogue of my sins,” said Luther; and he brought a scroll black and long. “Is that all?” said Luther. “No,” said the devil; and he brought yet another. “And now,” said the heroic saint of God, “write at the foot of the scroll: ‘The blood of Jesus Christ his Son cleanses from all sin.’ ” That is a full discharge.
15. III. Now, very briefly, the third thing — THE REASON FOR MERCY. Some poor sinner says, “Why should God forgive me? I am sure there is no reason why he should, for I have never done anything to deserve his mercy.” Hear what God says, “I am not about to forgive you for your own sake, but for my own sake.” “But, Lord, I shall not be thankful enough.” “I am not about to pardon you because of your gratitude, but for my name’s sake.” “But, Lord, if I am taken into your church I can do very little for your cause in future years, for I have spent my best days in the devil’s service, surely the impure dregs of my life cannot be sweet to you, oh God.” “I will not engage to forgive you for your sake, but for my own. I do not want you,” says God, “I can do as well without you as with you; the cattle upon a thousand hills are mine; and if I pleased I could create a whole race of men for my service, who should be as renowned as the greatest monarchs, or the most eloquent preachers, but I can do as well without them, as with them; and I forgive you therefore for my own sake.” Is there not hope for a guilty sinner here? It cannot be pleaded by any one that his sins are too great to be pardoned, for the amount of guilt is hereby put entirely out of consideration, seeing that God does not forgive on account of the sinner, but for his own sake. Did you ever hear of a physician visiting a man on a sick bed, when the poor man said, “I have nothing to give you for your attention to me.” “But,” says the doctor, “I did not ask for anything; I attend you from pure benevolence; and moreover to prove my skill. It will make no difference to me how long you live, I love to try my skill, and let the world know that I have power to heal diseases. I want to get myself a name.” And so God says, I desire to have a name for mercy; so that the worse you are, the more God is honoured in your salvation. Go then to Christ, poor sinner — naked, filthy, poor, wretched, vile, lost, dead, come as you are, for there is nothing required in you, except the need of him:
This he gives you,
’Tis his Spirit’s rising beam.
“For my own sake,” God says, “I will forgive.”
16. IV. Now to conclude — THE PROMISE OF MERCY. “And will not remember your sins.” There are some things which even God cannot do. Though it is true he is Omnipotent, yet there are some things he cannot do. God cannot lie — he cannot forsake his people — he cannot disown his covenant; and this is one of the things it might be thought he could not do — that is, forget. Is it impossible for God to forget? We finite creatures allow many things to slip, but can the Almighty ever do so? That God who counts the stars and calls them all by their names — who knows how many tiny creatures there are in the mighty ocean — who notices every grain of dust that floats in the summer air, and is acquainted with every leaf of the forest, can he cease to remember? Perhaps we may answer “No.” Not as to the absolute fact of the committal of the deed; but there are senses in which the expression is entirely accurate. In what sense are we to understand God’s forgetfulness of our sins?
17. First of all, he will not exact punishment for them when we can come before his judgment bar at last. The Christian will have many accusers. The devil will come and say, “That man is a great sinner.” “I do not remember it,” God says. “That man rebelled against you, and cursed you,” the accuser says. “I do not remember it,” God says, “for I have said I will not remember his sins.” Conscience says, “Ah! but Lord, it is true, I did sin against you, and that most grievously.” “I do not remember it,” God says — “I said, I will not remember his sins.” Let all the demons of the pit clamour in God’s ear, and let them vehemently shout out a list of our sins, we may stand boldly forth at that great day, and sing, “Who shall lay anything to the charge of God’s elect?” for God does not even remember their sin. The Judge does not remember it, and who then shall punish? Unrighteous as we were; wicked as we have been; yet he has forgotten it all. Who then can bring to remembrance what God has forgotten? He says, “I will cast your sins into the depths of the sea,” not into the shallows where they might be fished up again, but into the depths of the sea, where Satan himself cannot find them. There are no such things as sins recorded against God’s people. Christ has so taken them away, that sin becomes a nonentity to Christians — it is all gone, and through Jesus’ blood they are clean.
18. The second meaning of this is, I will not remember your sins to suspect you. There is a father, and he has a wayward son who went away that he might live a life of looseness and profligacy; but after a while he comes home again in a state of penitence. The father says, “I will forgive you.” But he says next day to his younger son, “There is business to be done at a distant town tomorrow, and here is the money for you to do it with.” He does not trust the returned prodigal with it. “I have trusted him before with money,” says the father to himself, “and he robbed me, and it makes me afraid to trust him again.” But our heavenly Father says, “I will not remember your sins.” He not only forgives the past, but trusts his people with precious talents. He never suspects them. He has never one suspicious thought. He loves them just as much as if they had never gone astray. He will employ them
