Sin: What God Does With Our Sin

Posted 1/2/15 by Donald Barnhouse
LESSON IV
SIN: What God Does With Our Sins
 
What happens to a word erased from the blackboard?
  1. What God has done with the Believers sins - Isaiah 43:25; 44:22; Psalm 103:12; Isaiah 38:17; Micah :19; Colossians 213; Hebrews 10:17.
  2. What is the Believer's attitude toward sin because of this - Romans 6:1-2.

Object Lesson Illustration: Chalk, blackboard and eraser.

We write a word on the blackboard. When we have finished with it, we erase it. What becomes of the word? It disappears, does it not? It vanishes. You can never find it again, for it is gone. God has done a more wonderful thing than that with our sins when we have believed on the Lord Jesus Christ as our Saviour, and have seen that He died for us. He takes our sins away. He removes them from us. When the word is erased from the board, the particles of chalk remain on the eraser or fall down on the tray below the board, so that really the chalk that formed the word is all there. But when God takes away our sins, He takes them so far away that they can never be found again. God wants us to know this. He does not want us to be afraid all the time that someday they will come up and face us again. So He says many things about what He has done with our sins since we have believed. Each thing that He says is to show us that our sins are gone, and that we will never, never see them again, here or hereafter.
 
First, He says He has blotted them out (Isaiah 43:25). That is like erasing the word. Did you ever see a great cloud in the skies, and after a few moments look again and find that it was gone? That is what God has done with the great black cloud of our sins. He has blotted them out forever (Isaiah 44:22). In another place (Psalm 103:12) He says He has removed them from us as far as the East is from the West. How far is that? If you should begin going West out into space and I should begin going East out into space, we might travel a million miles a minute for a million years, but we would never get to the place we had started for, though every minute we would be farther apart. God has put our sins so far away from us that they never can be found again. Again God says that He has put our sins behind His back (Isaiah 38:17). Where is Gods back? We know that God is everywhere present, that there is "nothing hid from Him.” Where then could His back be? This means that He put our sins in a place that cannot be found. He says, too, that He has cast our sins in the depths of the sea. In some places the sea is deep, so deep that no one has been able to measure its depth. Our sins are as far away as that. Then He says He has forgiven them (Colossians 2:13), and that He will remember them no more (Hebrews 10:17). God knows everything, and the only thing He has ever forgotten is the sins of those who believe that Jesus died for them.
 
Since God has done all this for us, are we going to go on and sin all we want because we know how wonderfully He forgives? Of course not. A person who truly is born again by believing in Jesus, would never think of such a thing. We love Him because He first loved us, and because of His great kindness we desire to please Him (Romans 6:1-2).

STUDY QUESTIONS

  • If our sins are so bad, how can our sins be so far away from us? 
  • How does God put our sins behind his back?
  • Why is it so important to know God puts our sins away from us?
  • Does this change how someone should live? If so why and how?