Assurance

 

Each Sunday as a part of our worship we have a place where we confess our sin and receive God’s words of assurance of the forgiveness of our sins. It works like this: I give an invitation for silent, personal confession. After a brief time to allow people, including myself, to confess I lead all of us in reciting a prayer of confession that is printed in the worship bulletin. And then I pick up my Bible and read a passage that speaks to the assurance of forgiveness that we can rest in, usually adding some comments about how that passage assures us.

I have a collection of prayers of confession that I rotate through in planning worship. I also have a collection of Bible passages that assure forgiveness that I rotate through. These two collections are unequal in number and so there is almost always a different pair each Sunday morning. Every once in a while my Bible reading brings something to my attention that would serve as words of assurance and I add that passage to my collection. And that is happening this Sunday with Deuteronomy 4:31, which reads:

“For the Lord your God is a merciful God. He will not leave you or destroy you or forget the covenant with your fathers that he swore to them.”

What, you may ask, does that have to do with the assurance of forgiveness?  The ‘sin’ word is not even mentioned, and neither, for that matter is Jesus. Pastor Brad, what gives? 

In writing these words Moses has a few things to say about God, most noticeably being that he is merciful and faithful. He has made a covenant, a solemn promise, to hold the Hebrews as his own people, and he intends to keep it. That covenant is not dependent on their behavior, but solely relies on God’s word to them.

Their behavior, frankly, is often very ungodly and fully deserving of God’s wrath. But instead of wrath God gives mercy. Instead of giving them what they deserve he does the exact opposite, being merciful in forgiving their sin. Without mercy on God’s part he could not be their God and they could not be his people.

That mercy for God’s people is fully seen in the death-and-resurrection of the Lord Jesus. Moses points God’s people far ahead to the wrath of God against sin poured out on the one person who can bear it, something Jesus does freely, out of love, for all the people of God living at all moments of human history. He takes our sin and its punishment and gives us his sinless nature. The one sacrifice of Jesus to take away our sin, forever. This is the greatest expression of mercy in all of human history, and in it, alone, all who believe in Jesus can be assured that their sin is forgiven. Every last bit. Amen. 

 

Scripture quotations are from The Holy Bible, English Standard Version® (ESV®), copyright © 2001 by Crossway, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers. Used by permission. All rights reserved.