Isaiah 43:25 (NIV) “I, even I, am he who blots out your transgressions, for my own sake, and remembers your sins no more.”

One of the great mysteries of the Gospel is trying to figure out why God is so patient and forgiving when it comes to us. We know that He is good and that His love endures forever (Psalm 136:1), but why? Why go through all the trouble of coming down to earth to be rejected, utterly disrespected, beaten, abused by us and then hung on a cross? Why forgive everything that we’ve done without exacting any punishment on us at all when we receive the sacrifice that Jesus made on the cross for us? And then why go to the extreme measure of not only forgiving everything that we have done wrong, but then totally obliterating them from His memory?

The answer lies in the verse above. He does it for His own sake. Why for His own sake? It’s because He is who He is. He has told us that from ages past. His name says that. His name is Jehovah, which means “I am who I am.” There are so many characteristics of who God is but one that stands out above all is love. God personifies love. He is love. Love comes from Him. We only know love (though dimly at that) because He created us in His image. When we come to know Him as our God, then we have a much better view of love, though we never really can get a full grasp of it in its purest form because it is so wide and long and high and deep. It is beyond fully understanding because God is beyond our understanding. But one thing that we know about love is that it must be expressed in order to be love. God created us to express His love towards beings that He created and so that we can express that love back to Him willingly. So because God is love, love moves Him to blot out our transgressions and to remember them no more...once, that is, we ask for forgiveness and receive Jesus as our Lord and Savior, because He also is a God of justice.

God is so awesome that He took care of the justice part of our transgressions by offering His own life as a sacrifice so that we, the people that He created whom He loves, could be saved and so that we would be able to spend all of eternity enjoying His love and expressing our love to Him. He did it for His own sake, but His own sake turns out to be greatly for our sake. Blessed be His name!

Pastor Joey Vazquez