God Restores
There is one truth you must hold onto when you feel you have turned from God. When you’ve sinned in the way you never thought you would. When you look at yourself in the mirror and say: “Who have I become?”
What is this one truth? The fact that God restores.
J.I. Packer speaking on the topic of God restoring says in his book, Knowing God:
This truth has many applications. One of the most startling is that God actually uses our sins and mistakes to this end. He employs the educative discipline of failures and mistakes very frequently. It is striking to see how much of the Bible deals with godly people making mistakes and God chastening them for it. Abraham, promised a son, but made to wait for him, loses patience, makes the mistake of acting the amateur providence, and begets Ishmael—and is made to wait for thirteen more years before God speaks to him again (Gen 16:16– 17:1). Moses makes the mistake of trying to save his people by acts of self-assertion, throwing his weight around, killing an Egyptian, insisting on sorting out the Israelites’ private problems for them—and finds himself banished for many decades to the back side of the desert, to bring him to a less vainglorious mind. David makes a run of mistakes—seducing Bathsheba and getting Uriah killed, neglecting his family, numbering the people for prestige—and in each case is chastened bitterly. Jonah makes the mistake of running away from God’s call—and finds himself inside a great fish. So we might go on.
But the point to stress is that the human mistake, and the immediate divine displeasure, were in no case the end of the story. Abraham learned to wait God’s time. Moses was cured of his self-confidence (indeed, his subsequent diffidence was itself almost sinful!—see Ex 4:10-14). David found repentance after each of his lapses and was closer to God at the end than at the beginning. Jonah prayed from the fish’s belly and lived to fulfill his mission to Nineveh. God can bring good out of the extremes of our own folly; God can restore the years that the locust has eaten.
In the darkness of regret what often seems loudest is guilt and shame. We can feel that we have ruined our life and irreversibly ruined God’s work. God is not that weak though. Is God’s power and wisdom so shallow that the sinful choices of man would ruin His plan? Is this not the very point of the cross? That though sin may be deep and powerful, though men and women make choices that go against God and His plans in this life, God is more powerful than sin?
We ruined the world by choosing sin over God, God overcame sin by the cross.
Isaiah 53:5: But he was pierced for our transgressions; he was crushed for our iniquities; upon him was the chastisement that brought us peace, and with his wounds we are healed.
Colossians 2:14: He erased the certificate of debt, with its obligations, that was against us and opposed to us, and has taken it away by nailing it to the cross.
God is more powerful than sin. What does this mean?
That God has the power to restore you from your sin. It does not get the last word in the story, He does. God restores what we have broken.
Thankful for restoration,
Josh.
