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FORGIVE OUR DUST

There’s a priceless old anecdote gathering dust behind a file cabinet someplace. Actually, it’s probably on quite a few hard drives out there — just not any of ours here at the Voice of Prophecy. I’ve got the line . . . but not who said the line. If you have it, let us know, and we’ll send you a nice present along with an on-air credit line when we rerun this broadcast a ways down the road. But a great Christian woman — I’m leaning toward Clara Barton or Corrie ten Boom — suffered a great injustice once. A certain person had been unbelievably cruel and unfair to her. Years later, though, when a friend of hers began to stoke up the fires again, reminding her about the grievous sin, our heroine claimed that she couldn’t remember it at all. “I’m sorry,” she said, shaking her head, “I just . . . I don’t recall.”

“Oh, come on,” the friend protested, eager to enjoy the flash of verbal swords, eager to pull the scab off and see some fresh blood on the floor. “It was horrible! You’ve got to remember that!”

And the reply came back with quiet force. “No,” she said. “I distinctly remember forgetting that.”

Isn’t that marvelous? It reminds us of the classic song loved by both Christians and Jews, found in the 103rd Psalm by King David:

“He will not always accuse, nor will He harbor His anger forever; He does not treat us as our sins deserve or repay us according to our iniquities. For as high as the heavens are above the earth, so great is His love for those who fear Him; as far as the east is from the west, so far has He removed our transgressions from us.”

I love that powerful metaphor of God taking our sins, and deliberately — with that omnipotent mind of His — deliberately forgetting them. He blanks them out. We studied just a few weeks ago the great Bible texts which tell us that when a person comes to God, he or she “crosses over”; they have, at that very moment, eternal life. Their sins are gone. God takes them as far away as the east is from the west.

In his new book, The Bible Jesus Read, Philip Yancey delves into some of the fascinating Old Testament passages which have baffled Christians for centuries. And in commenting about Psalm 103, he teaches us an Egyptian word: Hapiru. That’s what the Egyptian masters called their Hebrew slaves: Hapiru, “the dusty ones.” And of course, the very next two verses in Psalm 103 go like this:

“As a father has compassion on his children, so the Lord has compassion on those who fear Him; for He knows how we are formed, He remembers that we are dust.”

And then Yancey gives us our theme line for this Thursday:
“We have a God who consciously forgets our sins and consciously remembers our frailty.”

Well, friend, how is that for a blueprint? Of course, most of the time you and I do it exactly opposite from that. We consciously remember – we deliberately focus on — our neighbor’s misdeeds toward us. We don’t consciously forget them; we consciously and carefully and methodically chisel them into the marble fresco of our mind. We rehearse them, we write poems about them, we enthusiastically relate them to our friends and relatives and even to the wrong-number telephone callers who get us out of our easy chair during Monday Night Football. And we certainly ignore God’s pattern on the second half of that equation too, where the Bible says, “He remembers that we are dust.” We, on the other hand, consciously ignore the other person’s frailty. We give no points whatsoever for dust or cobwebs, or background, or lack of education, or our enemy’s private hurts and sorrows. The phrase, “extenuating circumstances,” is totally foreign to us. Except applied to ourselves, naturally.

The great Dale Carnegie tells the story about how Mary Todd Lincoln, wife of our 16th president here in the United States, used to rant and rave and almost foam at the mouth about those people in the South. How could people hold slaves? How could anybody be so backward? She nursed her grievances until Lincoln must have almost wanted to leave her alone in the Lincoln Bedroom and go sleep on a couch down the hall. But, as Carnegie tells the story, President Lincoln finally said to her, very calmly, “Dear . . . don’t criticize them. They are just what we would be under similar circumstances.” In other words: dust. Dust born and bred in the deep south, where plantations and slave chains and segregated Sunday Schools were how little boys and girls had been brought up for generations. They had grown up in dust, and dust is what they were. That didn’t excuse evil, but it did help a person to understand why evil was there.

I guess we’re reminded right away — and ironic that King David is involved in this story too — of that famous verse where Samuel is looking for a new king for Israel, and God says to His prophet:

“The Lord does not look at the things man looks at. Man looks at the outward appearance, but the Lord looks at the heart.”

Certainly, you can take that verse two ways. Sometimes a person can wipe away the dust on the outside, leaving a smooth and shiny surface . . . and the Lord looks into the heart and sees the evil there, the hidden dirt. But our loving God is also able to see past our mistakes, the thin veneer of our shortcomings, and see the hardships, the frailties that we’re battling. And friend, before you and I are tempted to nurse a grudge, to remember past hurts and forget the dusty deficiencies which led to those hurts, let’s try to think with the mind of Christ.

We’ve used on this program a number of times a collection of letters the great Christian writer C. S. Lewis wrote to a woman living in America. She was a grudge-keeper par excellence; she had a mountain of resentments that piled up higher than the Statue of Liberty. We don’t get to read her letters to Lewis — probably a good thing — but it’s clear that she was mad just about all of the time. Notice, though, how he responds to one of her diatribes about a certain So-and-So:

“Their penitence may no doubt be very imperfect and their motives very mixed,” he writes. “But so are all our repentances and all our motives. Accept theirs as you hope God will accept yours.” Then he adds this reminder, found in Matthew 6:15: “Remember that He has promised to forgive you as, and only as, you forgive them.”

That’s a heart-stopping thought, isn’t it? And the Bible says this. Apparently, unless we learn to adopt this “dust” philosophy that heaven has toward us — “God consciously forgets our sins and consciously remembers our frailty” — and apply it to those who wrong us, we ourselves might move out from the shadow of God’s gracious amnesia.

A bit later in this same letter to the unforgiving American lady, Lewis adds this second thought:

“Try not to think — much less speak — of their sins. One’s own are a much more profitable theme!” That’s true, isn’t it? “And if, on consideration, one can find no faults on one’s own side, then cry for mercy: for this must be a most dangerous delusion.”

Well, friend, God doesn’t have delusions . . . but you and I certainly do, don’t we? It’s wonderful news that God, who knows so much more than we do, is still the one who takes our trespasses and deposits them in the farthest corner of the universe, out of His own sight. It’s God, who never forgets, who deliberately does forget.

For us the challenge is to do the same . . . to deliberately, and with intentionality, forget. To put out of our mind that grievance, that old hurt. And then say to our mind, perhaps many times a day, “I’m done with that! Mind, move away from there!” We need to make forgetting a spiritual principle, just as Jesus did when the nails were going into His hands and feet. How could He possibly forget, when every blow was exquisite agony? And then that whole Friday afternoon, every breath He took, every moment He endured, was pain beyond description. How could He forget then? But friend, that’s exactly what He did. “Father, let’s forgive them,” He said. “Even as this is happening, let’s choose to forget.”

You know, two years after C. S. Lewis wrote that letter to the American woman, he had occasion to write her again. He was tired and frail now; his own death was just five months away. But again, June 25, 1963, he is compelled to remind this woman of the power of forgetting, of forgiving.

“I hope, now that you know you are forgiven,” he writes, “you will spend most of your remaining strength in forgiving.”

And it takes strength, doesn’t it, friend? It’s hard to purposely forget the very things your soul cries out to catalogue and chronicle, to grip so tightly with the muscles of your mind. But notice how we can do it:

“Lay all the old resentments down,” Lewis writes, in the handwriting of a weary but faithful veteran, “lay all the old resentments down at the wounded feet of Christ.”