Several years ago I was preparing for a message on the love of God. Cowboy Church was just a couple of weeks before Valentine’s Day and it only seemed appropriate to make “God’s Love” my center focus.
If you have been reading my morning devotional thoughts for any length of time, you know that Colossians is one of my favorite books and Colossians 2 is my favorite chapter. It’s here that the Apostle Paul writes about what Jesus did on the cross for us and how his death set us free from our sin and made us acceptable to God.
“Blotting out the handwriting of ordinances that was against us, which was contrary to us, and took it out of the way, nailing it to his cross;” Colossians 2:14 KJV
“Blotting out the handwriting of the ordinances against us” holds my attention every time I read it.
Writing a document in Jesus’ day required extreme patience. No erasers or delete buttons – every word had to be carefully written because if there was a mistake, the document had to be wadded up and thrown away. Some corrections would be acceptable, but the parchment would have to be saturated with ink so that the word or the mistake was completely blotted out and no longer legible.
This is the picture Paul is painting for us here. There was a document with a long list of sins we have committed, God’s laws we have broken and Jesus “blotted” out the list and then He took and nailed it to His cross. His blood, His shed blood, was more than enough to blot out the evidence of our sin. Amen!!
I have to tell you the image that comes to mind are those little writing tablets we had as kids. We would write on the slate and then lift the vinyl and the words would disappear. The evidence of our sin disappeared when Jesus nailed it to His cross.
Jesus completely defeated His enemy and ours and led him away captive and powerless for all the spiritual world to see! We are free to live for Christ, through God’s amazing love.
“You were spiritually dead because of your sins and because you were not free from the power of your sinful self. But God gave you new life together with Christ. He forgave all our sins. 14 Because we broke God’s laws, we owed a debt—a debt that listed all the rules we failed to follow. But God forgave us of that debt. He took it away and nailed it to the cross. 15 He defeated the rulers and powers of the spiritual world. With the cross he won the victory over them and led them away, as defeated and powerless prisoners for the whole world to see.” Colossians 2:13-15 ERV
God the Father chooses to hit the delete button; crash the hard drive; wipe the slate clean; He blots out our sin.
The Father’s love is so great! He gives us all the opportunity to start fresh with a clean slate.