August 22, 2011
Recycling
To illustrate repentance for eight year-old David, his dad took a piece
of paper that he said represented sin, wadded it up and let it fall to the floor.
Walking away he explained that when our sins are forgiven they are nothing more
than a piece of discarded trash. Later that evening while getting ready for bed
David picked up the wad of paper and asked, “Daddy,
do you want me to recycle your sin?”
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2 comments:
Gail;
-----It is comforting to know that man does not forgive more than God. When Peter was fretting about how many times he might have to forgive a brother for sinning against him, Jesus told him seventy times seven would be appropriate. It’s also interesting that when Daniel called out to the Lord about Israel’s sin, Gabriel was sent to tell him, “Seventy weeks of years are decreed concerning your people and your holy city, to finish the transgression, to put an end to sin, and to atone for iniquity, to bring in everlasting righteousness, to seal both vision and prophet, and to anoint a most holy place.” (Dan 9:24 RSV) Now, seventy weeks of years is seventy times seven.
-----When I first read that Jesus had told Peter to forgive seventy times seven, it rather distressed me because I knew I had a few more than seventy times seven things needing forgiveness, and I wasn’t even old yet! But I later learned that seventy times seven was a Jewish expression of the day meaning countless and innumerable. I took more comfort in that.
-----However, the seventy times seven years allotted to finish the transgression, put an end to sin, atone for iniquity, bring righteousness, seal prophecy, and anoint a most holy place were no more just innumerable years than “seventy weeks of seven“ is the same expression as “seventy times seven“. The product and the mathematically written equations are the same, but the expressions are very different. These years are so real that Gabriel gave Daniel a formula which, by these seventy weeks, exactly pin-pointed the year Christ died. And with that year the clock on the seventy weeks of seven stopped ticking at the completion of the sixty-ninth week of years. The final week of years, that final seven years, that tribulation period in which the kingdom of earth becomes His kingdom waits breathlessly for God to start the clock ticking again.
-----Again we have similarity. Although the seventy weeks of years are a precisely defined period of God’s certain effect upon mankind, the completion of the effect has been on hold for nearly two-thousand years, and no one really knows how much longer it will be on hold. During this period in which the clock has not been ticking on God’s fixing iniquity and establishing righteousness, then what effects has God been working? Mercy. The indeterminable intermission is for His mercy, for the holding back of His wrath until the fullness of Gentiles have come to Him. It is for the seventy-times seven forgiveness.
Love you all,
Steve Corey
P.S. Jesus was a Bible scholar. He quoted from it copiously. When just a boy, he dazzled the Bible scholars themselves with His knowledge and wisdom. When He mentioned forgiving seventy times seven times, do you suppose maybe there was connection in His mind, at least a notice of similarity, with the seventy weeks of seven? He knew the manner of His death. He knew His Jewish history; He knew the date when Artaxerxes II gave Nehemiah the decree to rebuild Jerusalem’s walls and gates and that four-hundred-eighty-three years later was the year He, the Anointed One, would be cut off, effecting full forgiveness. And He knew the following seven years making four-hundred-ninety, seventy times seven, would come after the times of the Gentiles, would come certainly, and would end unrighteousness certainly and forever. He knew these four hundred ninety years were not a period-definite ending after a straight sucesion of four-hundred-ninety years, but were the total number of years God’s effective dealing in a certain manner for the certain purpose of putting an end to unrighteousness would take. Likewise, I wonder if He was thinking the four-hundred-ninety times forgiving is not about a succession of times forgiving, but is about a completeness of forgiving during aall times. Somehow, forgiveness defeats failure, and both four-hundred-nineties seem to buzz around something they have in common.
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