Daily Encouragement: Year 2, Day 91
From Handbook to God’s Promises
GOD’S PROVISION FOR FORGIVENESS OF SINS
Who Is a God Like You?
Read Micah 7:18–20
A hardened, sword-wielding, South American slave trader is on a pilgrimage to find forgiveness. The penitent sinner climbs cliffs and slogs through dripping jungles, dragging behind him a huge rope net filled with the remnants of his past—swords, armor, guns, and the like. His goal? To reach the simple jungle Indians whose tribe he has decimated, and to find pardon at their feet. He nearly kills himself by dragging the huge weighted net behind him; it is a symbol of who he was and of the burden he carries. As a man who has lived by vengeance and the sword, his penance is to punish himself until he can reach those who alone can forgive him.
When the slave trader finally reaches the tribe, he is nearly dead from the exertion of his penance. The Indian leader, recognizing this man’s face, approaches with knife in hand. On his knees from exhaustion, the trader doesn’t know whether he will live or die. But instead of cutting the trader’s throat, the Indian cuts the thick rope that has bound man and net together. In a powerfully symbolic gesture, the leader pushes the remnants of the slave trader’s past over a cliff into a turbulent river far below.
While this portrayal of forgiveness—from The Mission, the Cannes Film Festival’s Best Picture of 1986—is powerful, Hollywood didn’t invent the concept. God has been extending forgiveness for millennia.
Once, at a time when the Israelites had made slave traders look noble by comparison (“The best of them is like a brier, the most upright worse than a thorn hedge”—Ouch!—Micah 7:4), God still forgave them. Then and now, people marvel at the nature of God to forgive: “Who is a God like you, who pardons sin and forgives?” (7:18).
The Indian leader may have hurled the tools of the slave trader over a cliff into a river, but God hurls “all our iniquities into the depths of the sea.” He delights in showing mercy if we will but bring our burden to him.
God’s Promise: It may be your nature to sin, but it is His nature to forgive.