God Forgives

Micah 7:18-20
18Who is a God like you, pardoning iniquity and passing over transgression for the remnant of his inheritance? He does not retain his anger forever, because he delights in steadfast love.
19He will again have compassion on us; he will tread our iniquities underfoot. You will cast all our sins into the depths of the sea.
20You will show faithfulness to Jacob and steadfast love to Abraham, as you have sworn to our fathers from the days of old.

While the Book of Micah has been difficult to swallow at times because of his brutal honesty about our sinfulness, the last couple of chapters are filled with hope and grace. He now closes his book with pure Gospel. “Who is a God like you?” Is this perhaps a play on the prophet’s name, Micah, which means “Who is like the Lord?” At any rate, Micah raises the rhetorical question to show that there is absolutely none like God, because he forgives sins (mentioned four times), he is compassionate (four times), and he is faithful (two times).

The reader cannot deny that God’s judgements about our sinful idolatries are true. Honest confession demands that we are clear about ourselves and our ability to walk way from God and His ways. But in closing, Micah reminds us that we serve a God who chooses forgiveness. We don’t deserve it and can never earn it. And yet God reaches out to us with His love – continually. The ancient Jews recognized God’s forgiving nature and commemorated that characteristic every year on Yom Kippur (the Day of Atonement).

The last three verses of this book are joined to the book of Jonah for reading in the synagogue on the afternoon of the Day of Atonement. Once a year on the afternoon of New Year, the orthodox Jew goes to a running stream or river and symbolically empties his pockets of his sins into the water, while he recites verses 18–20. The service is called “Tashlich” after the Hebrew word meaning “thou wilt cast.” By God’s grace to us, you and I know this is not God’s way of casting our sins into the depths of the sea. He does this for us only because of the work of the Lord Jesus Christ on Calvary where he bore those sins for us. Because he was punished for them, God can pass over the transgression of any sinner.
The Minor Prophets by Charles L. Feinberg, pages 186 and 187

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