East to West

 

Last week I wrote about David instructing his soul to worship God. Now I would like to point out a different thought from that same psalm (103). I absolutely love that David wrote, “As far as the east is from the west, so far has He removed our transgressions from us (v.12).” 

 

This is a wonderful thought about God’s forgiveness. He has removed our sin from us if we have put our trust in Him. The idea of removing sin was borrowed from levitical language. In Leviticus 16 Aaron was instructed to take a young goat and symbolically transfer the sins of the nation to the kid by laying his hands upon its head. The goat was then bearing the sins of Israel, as it was sent off into the wilderness, never to be seen again. That gesture was God’s way of demonstrating that the people would not have to bear their own sin if they called upon Him. 

 

David only had an elementary understanding of forgiveness, however. The king was grateful that God would remove his sin and send it off into the wilderness, but that didn’t fully satisfy sin’s demands. It was not until Jesus went to the cross as the Lamb of God that sin could finally be once and for all dealt with. Instead of symbolically putting our sin on the scapegoat, God put our sin on His Son. In this way, our sin can be forever removed from us.

 

How far away is our sin sent? David said it is as far away as the east is from the west. According to author Max Lucado, east and west become farther away from each other as one travels. If you leave your house and head east, you can spend the rest of your life going east, and with every step, west becomes farther away from your starting point. The same is true for the person heading west. However, that is not true for the person heading north or south. If you leave your house and head north, you will eventually reach the North Pole, and then you are automatically going south; if you head south, you will eventually reach the South Pole and then be heading north. 

 

North and south are only separated by just over 12,440 miles; that is the distance between the Poles. But east and west have no such dimensions. If they did, Satan could pack a lunch and a GPS, track down our sin, and bring it back to us. That is now impossible because God put our sin on the back of Jesus, and He has carried it away as far as the east is from the west.