Tuesday June 4, 2024

Psalm 103:12
As far as the east is from the west, so far does he remove our transgressions from us.

I remember a lawyer making this remark about a man’s will, that if he were about to leave all his property to some one person, it would be better not to make a recapitulation of all that he had, but merely to state that he bequeathed all to his legatee, without giving a list of the goods and chattels, because in making out the catalogue he would be pretty sure to leave out something, and that which he left out might be claimed by some one else. Indeed he gave us an instance of a farmer, who, in recounting the property he devised to his wife, intending her to have had all, actually omitted to mention his largest farm and the very house in which they lived. Thus his attempt to be very particular failed and his wife lost a large part of the property. We do not want too many particulars, and I am thankful that in this text there is a broad way of speaking which takes in the whole compass of enumeration; God has ‘removed our transgressions’. That sweeps all ‘our transgressions’ away at once. If it had said ‘our great transgressions’, we should have been crying out, ‘How about the little ones?’ We should have been afraid of perishing by our lesser faults even if the huge crimes were pardoned. If it had said ‘our transgressions against the law’, we should have asked, ‘What shall we do with our transgressions against the gospel?’ If it had said ‘our willful transgressions,’ that would have been very gracious, but we should have said, ‘But what will become of our sins of ignorance?’ If it had said ‘our transgressions before we were converted,’ then we should have exclaimed, ‘But how shall we escape from our sins since conversion?’ But here it is—‘our transgressions’—God has removed them all. They are all gone—from the cradle to the tomb, sins in private, sins in public, sins of thought, word and deed—they are all removed. The moment you believe in Jesus, they are all gone!

C. H. Spurgeon and Terence Peter Crosby, 365 Days with Spurgeon (Volume 1) (Day One Publications, 1998)
Scripture for opening text taken from The Holy Bible, English Standard Version®, ESV © 2016 by Crossway Bibles.
Used by permission. All rights reserved.