‘But your iniquities have made a separation between you and your God. And your sins have hidden His face from you so that He does not hear.’
- Isaiah 59:2 -
There was no perfect prophet, priest, or king before Christ came and flawlessly fulfilled each role. We tend to view prototypes of Christ like King David with rose-tinted glasses. We recall his stunning defeat of Goliath, refreshing melodies, and soul-knit bond with Jonathan, but we forget how David killed his ten thousands versus Saul’s thousands. And so, after years of ruling Israel, God refused for David - a man of blood - to construct His temple in Jerusalem. The king even confessed this sad news to the nation: “I had it within my heart to build a house of rest for the ark of the covenant…but God said to me, ‘You shall not build a house for My name because you are a man of war and have shed blood’” (1 Chron. 28:2-3).
We can argue that David’s warrior spirit guarded and unified Israel for a time, but we must not forget or excuse that King David unleashed a torrent of sin from his God-given throne. Most notoriously, David stole Bathsheba in adultery, then made his own army complicit in her husband Uriah’s death. So God sent Nathan to rebuke David with a parable about murderous greed. The king got the message and repented right away: ‘Then David said to Nathan, “I have sinned against Yahweh.” And Nathan said to David, “Yahweh also has taken away your sin; you shall not die.”’ (2 Sam. 12:13).
When David saw the weight of his wickedness, he didn’t beg Bathsheba for forgiveness. No, the king of Israel cried out only to God: ‘Against You, You only, I have sinned and done what is evil in Your sight’ (Ps. 51:4). David’s psalm of regret and disgust weighed his inherited depravity as a son of Adam against God’s singular ability to ‘blot out all my iniquities’ (51:9). It shows that David – a man after God’s own heart (1 Sam. 13:14) – knew God well enough to know that all sin is against our Maker. Isaiah put it this way: ‘Your iniquities have made a separation between you and your God, and your sins have hidden His face from you so that He does not hear’ (59:2). Sin, simply put, is sacrilegious. It separates us mere creatures from our holy Creator.
Scripture calls sin lawlessness; an affront to the holy Lawgiver. God hates sin so much that Habakkuk says of Him: ‘Your eyes are too pure to see evil, and You cannot look on trouble’ (1:13). God (figuratively) shuts His eyes and turns His back when we sin. Therefore we must repent when we grieve God and rejoice that He is gracious by nature and doesn’t eviscerate us in blinding righteousness when we stumble. Our Father may turn His back for a time to chastise and sanctify us, but no one in Christ is ever forsaken. As John tells God’s elect: ‘If anyone sins, we have an Advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous’ (1 John 2:1). We must lean on God’s grace, not try to deal with sin apart from His mercy. If we reject God’s way of cleansing or try to act as our own savior, we only widen the separation sin creates.
The tale of the rich man and Lazarus is all about near and far. The rich man knows earthly nearness and is clothed in fine linens, hosting friends at his table while their crumbs feed poor Lazarus who sits afar off. The only nearness Lazarus knows in this fallen world is from the dogs who come to lick his sores. The great reversal occurs when both men die. Right away, the once untouchable Lazarus is ‘carried away by the angels to Abraham’s bosom’ (Luke 16:22), a place of perfect nearness to Israel’s venerated patriarch. Meanwhile in Hades, the man of physical riches ‘lifted up his eyes, being in torment, and saw Abraham far away and Lazarus in his bosom’ (16:23). All he could do was cry out from the depths of death itself, begging far-off ‘Father Abraham’ for mercy that could never come.
Abraham’s reply is far from comforting. He says that nearness and comfort are absent on the rich man’s side of the eternal divide, saying: “Between us and you there is a great chasm fixed, so that those who wish to come over from here to you are not able, and none may cross over from there to us” (Luke 16:26). Not once, but six times in Matthew, does Christ call hell a place of ‘weeping and gnashing of teeth.’ Does this mean the damned will forever weep over rejecting God’s grace? No. The fact that Christ pairs weeping with gnashing of teeth implies they will forever rage at their God for denying them blessed nearness. There is neither repentance nor removal of sin in hell, as God’s absence (and therefore the absence of all goodness) means sinful rage only deepens the separation that sin originally created.
Sin started separating all the way back in Eden. Our first parents marched headlong into separation when they doubted God’s goodness and ate the forbidden fruit. The result was immediate and obvious: ‘The eyes of both of them were opened, and they knew that they were naked; and they sewed fig leaves together and made themselves loin coverings. Then they heard the sound of Yahweh God walking in the garden in the cool of the day, and the man and his wife hid themselves from the presence of Yahweh God in the midst of the trees of the garden’ (Gen. 3:7-8). Our first parents fell to Satan’s deceptive downgrade and desired to merely be ‘like God’ (3:5) rather than remain in ‘His own image’ (1:27). This separation from their Maker even caused Adam and Eve to foolishly try to hide from the very Creator of heaven and earth.
Adam blamed Eve. Eve blamed the serpent. This lack of accountability for sin remains a thorn in all our sides. Yet despite our parents’ fall, God’s goodness shined through with the first offer of gospel hope. A deliverer would come and crush the serpent (Gen. 3:15). But until that final victory, God’s prophets were to preach that sin would be dealt with by repenting and retreating to God. And so when David reckons with his own sin, he realizes God can not delight in animal sacrifices if repentance is missing: ‘The sacrifices of God are a broken spirit; a broken and a contrite heart, O God, You will not despise’ (Ps. 51:17).
This warning is all over Scripture. God commissions Isaiah to condemn sacrifices that lack heart-rending repentance: ‘Bring your worthless offerings no longer, incense is an abomination to Me…My soul hates your new moon festivals and your appointed times, they have become a burden to Me’ (1:13,14). How tragic that God’s covenant people turned prescribed practices of His holy law into odious abominations. Isaiah teaches that God has always required a turning from sin in order to be saved: ‘Remove the evil of your deeds from before My eyes. Cease to do evil, learn to do good’ (1:16-17). So can the wicked ever pull themselves up by their own bootstraps? Absolutely not! The only way is God’s grace, culminating in Christ’s sacrifice on the cross.
Having brought heaven down to earth with powerful preaching and miraculous signs, Christ cut the ribbon on this road to redemption. All He requires is earnest admission of guilt against a holy God. Take that step and the Spirit will empower you to keep turning from sin and inherit the warm embrace of forgiveness. Luke’s history of the early church is replete with admissions of sin, but there are two distinct types of turning that occur after. The first type is a tragic warning: “Judas turned aside to go to his own place” (Acts 1:25). This is the proud and foolish turn to perdition that leads to eternal separation from God. Judas thought he knew better. He felt that God was cruel and incapable of forgiving his betrayal of Christ. But Peter, who also failed Christ by denying Him, had a truer knowledge of God and His grace.
When the Spirit descends at Pentecost and Peter preached to all Jerusalem, the newly-empowered and forgiven apostle presents gospel hope to the very sinners who killed Christ. Peter tells these blasphemous masses that their separative sin can be removed as “God raised up His Servant (Jesus) and sent Him to bless you by turning every one of you from your wicked ways” (Acts 3:26). This is the true path to saving grace. Admit your guilt, turn to Christ, and delight in His eagerness to forgive. May we all heed Peter’s call to turn from sin and marvel that Christ alone closes the chasm back to God!
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