Our Daily Bread: Called to ServeSampel

The Greatest Word

You offer forgiveness, that we might learn to fear you. —Psalm 130:4

God is highly dangerous. We are sinful, and He is holy. Sin can no more exist in the presence of God than darkness can exist in the presence of light. To stand before Him in the strength of our own “goodness” would be to invite our destruction. The psalmist wrote, “Lord, if you kept a record of our sins, who, O Lord, could ever survive?” (Psalm 130:3). 

In a cemetery not far from New York City is a headstone engraved with a single word: Forgiven. The message is simple and unembellished. There is no date of birth, no date of death, no epitaph—only a name and the solitary word forgiven. But that is the greatest word that could ever be applied to any man or woman, or that could be written on any gravestone.

The songwriter said, “You offer forgiveness, that we might learn to fear you” (v. 4). That refrain echoes in both the Old and New Testaments. God is honored and worshiped because He alone can clear our record. 

If God could not forgive us, we could only flee from Him in terror. Yet the God whose holiness threatens us is the God who through Christ redeems us. This dangerous God offers forgiveness for all our sins. We only need to ask Him.

Haddon Robinson

Sin invites judgment; confession ensures forgiveness.