Psalm 103:12 “As far as the east is from the west, so far hath He removed our transgressions from us.”

On my Twitter account, I decided to go back and try and erase all of my tweets I made. Being caught up in a couple of political elections on behalf of pro-life candidates, I racked up an enormous amount and desired a clean slate since these elections were now over.  Manually removing them was an arduous task. One by one carefully  needed to go through 3 steps.  I managed to get help from a free program to help this process but it took days to remove just a couple thousand tweets over the course of 3-4 years.

While I was doing this, sin removal came to mind.  It is something we as human beings cannot do on our own. There is no program, no set of steps we can take to remove even the seemingly simple sin committed. It is stuck there in our account.  Imagine now having a million plus sins all lined up from our birth to see.  And with this knowing that in order to get to Heaven, one must not have any sins listed there.

World religions such as Catholicism see the glaring problem, but like one trying to delete a tweet which will not go away, they try in vain through a ritual called reconciliation/penance to do so. And if that doesn’t work, a fictional place called Purgatory might work.  In this human experiment they employ what I call “beat the clock”.  Believing that confession/penance actually does absolve their account, a devout Catholic will continually try to beat the clock before death so as there are to be no sins, a clean slate.  A Catholic priest will administer what they call “Last Rites” on a person’s death bed to try and clean that slate.  Sacraments are participated in diligently to make sure God knows the effort in this.

We know this is not what God promised nor will it ever clean just one sin off an account. No matter the effort on our part, no matter the deeds, no matter the guilt we feel, no matter how bad we want our slate clean, no matter the ritual or ceremony, those sins are STILL stuck there.    It would like be going through all the steps I explained above to delete a tweet, and after all of this, the tweet remains.

So what is the remedy? If there a magic program we can use? The only One who can remove those sins of which He did, is Jesus Christ.  By His one offering on the Cross He died on, He wiped His children’s sins clean.  Those who have faith in this, shall never die but live with Him eternally.  Because of this, on Judgment Day the account of the saved sinner will not show their sins, but Jesus Christ’s righteousness.  Is it that simple? Yes, this is why we call it the Good News!

Many will immediately scoff at this based on self-righteousness. It is almost like they are saying “how dare Jesus pay for my sins, how dare He wipe my account clean”.  Why this is? I can only speak from my former life is that some want to take the credit.  The Roman Catholic really wants some type of pat on the back knowing they helped Jesus out.  But as they will sooner or sadly later discover, He never needed their help.  Our help to Him as sinners was and is always useless.  God sees this help as “filthy rags” (Isaiah 64:6)

Why did Jesus say “narrow is the way to eternal life”?  It is because our self-righteous deep seeded pride.  It is submission to Him in all respects, allowing He to be the Savior. That we must give up all humanly attempts for sin removal and rest in Him, we weren’t there when He atoned for us but He had us in mind, that this faith in Him saved us.  How great this grace from God!  How joyful we are that He sent His only Son Jesus Christ to clean our slate filled with sin!

Stop searching for a religious remedy, stop trying to help Jesus out, just rest in His redemption! And that my friend is the Good News!