Compassion and Judgment "Are we talking about the same thing?"
Micah 7:19 “Once again you will have compassion on us. You will trample our sins under your feet and throw them into the depths of the ocean!”
Micah is a old farm boy that lives in the countryside. He is a prophet that pronounces God’s judgment upon Samaria and Jerusalem. He comes onto the scene at around the same time as Isaiah and perhaps even heard Isaiah speak in Jerusalem. If we think of Isaiah as the voice from Raleigh then Micah would be the voice from the cornfields of rural North Carolina. In this verse Micah is ending his writing by the proclamation that God will display compassion in the midst of His judgment. Perhaps God’s judgment is God’s compassion and it is through this judgment that the sins of the jews will be cast into the depths of the ocean.
I’m thinking of a couple of different things this morning concerning this scripture. The first is about God’s judgment being God’s compassion. What if the sending of Jesus, His dying on the cross, and rising from the grave is the ultimate act of God’s judgment toward our sins and what if that ultimate act of judgment is also God’s ultimate act of compassion towards us? The other thing I’m thinking about this morning is this image of casting our sins to the depths of the ocean. What if we really believed that? So many times we act as if the cross only casts our sins into the shallow waters and we hurry in those waters to pick them up again. If we really believed that our sins were cast into the depths of the ocean we would know that there is no way to pick them up again; they are gone forever. Do we really love our sin so much that we only want them cast into the shallow water so they can resurface in our lives? Perhaps we need to ask God to cast away the sin of “loving our sin” into the depths first and then God can begin to remove the other sins of our lives.
Lord Jesus I come to you this morning confessing my love for my sin. Please forgive me for those times that my love for sin is greater then my love for you. I pray Lord that you would send my love for sinning into the depths of the ocean and make space for my love for you to grow. May my love for you grow and continue to weed out the areas of sin in my life that I may grow closer into being the man that you desire for me to be. Amen.
Through God’s compassion/judgment my love for sin is cast into the depths of the ocean.
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