"‘Come now, let us reason together,’ says the LORD. ‘Though your sins are like scarlet, they shall be as white as snow; though they are red as crimson, they shall be like wool.’" (Isaiah 1:18 NIV).

Earlier in this introductory chapter to the book of Isaiah, God had systematically listed the main sins of Israel. He calls them "a sinful nation, a people loaded with guilt, a brood of evildoers, children given to corruption." Hardly a complement. Israel had persisted in sin and God was ticked! He’s so upset with these hypocrites that he says, (Isaiah 1:12-14 MSG)"Quit your worship charades. I can’t stand your trivial religious games: Monthly conferences, weekly sabbaths, special meetings – meetings, meetings, meetings – I can’t stand one more! Meetings for this, meetings for that. I hate them! I’m sick of your religion, religion, religion, while you go right on sinning." . Sounds a little like some folks today does it not?

That is the bad news. In the middle of His scathing rebuke God says in effect, "Come on now, lets discuss this. We can fix it; actually I can fix it if you’ll let me. I can take your sins, as deep as their stains might be and make them pure as the freshly fallen snow! There is no stain of sin too deep that I can’t clean it up!"

What a marvelous message of hope! No matter who you are or what you’ve done, God can and will forgive you if you come to Him in faith through Jesus Christ. Isaiah wrote these marvelous words from the mouth of the Father looking forward to the day they would be a reality; you and I have the pleasure of living in that reality as we stand in the shadow of the cross. The Old Testament sacrifices covered over sin; Jesus Christ removes the sin!

Perhaps you are a believer and you have struggled with some hidden sin – hidden to others, known to God and painfully real to you. You’ve struggled with that sin and you’ve wondered how God views it. I’ll tell you: if you are in Christ, that sin has been paid for by Christ and removed from your record by His shed blood! In God’s eyes, His redeemed children are as pure as the driven snow!

Thank God for His provision and find release for your struggle. He’s forgiven you in Christ, ask Him to help you apply that forgiveness in your emotions.

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When God is Silent

“To you I call, O Lord my Rock; do not turn a deaf ear to me. For if you remain silent, I will be like those who have gone down to the pit. 2 Hear my cry for mercy as I call to you for help, as I lift up my hands toward your Most Holy Place.” (Psalm 28:1-2 NIV).

There is no sound more deafening then the silence of God. Been there done that, and if you are honest, so have you. We cry to God and plead with Him for some favor or some deliverance and all we are met with is silence. C.S. Lewis described this horrible silence this way: “Meanwhile, where is God? This is one of the most disquieting symptoms. When you are happy, so happy that you have no sense of needing Him, so happy that you are tempted to feel His claims upon you as an interruption, if you remember yourself and turn to Him with gratitude and praise, you will be – or so it feels – welcomed with open arms. But go to Him when your need is desperate, when all other help is vain, and what do you find? A door slammed in your face, and a sound of bolting and double bolting on the inside. After that, silence. You may as well turn away. The longer you wait, the more emphatic the silence will become. There are no lights in the windows. It might be an empty house. Was it ever inhabited? It seemed so once. And that seeming was as strong as this. What can this mean? Why is He so present a commander in our time of prosperity and so very absent in time of trouble?” Lewis, C.S., A Grief Observed, (Bantam Books, New York, 1961, pp. 4-5).

Many times when we read our Bible, we do so through the proverbial rose colored glasses. What I mean is, we tend to put the major players on saintly pedestals, picture them moving and writing to us from Ivory Towers of ease. That is not so, and unless you realize this two things are bound to happen. First, you will miss great truths of comfort for your own heart. Second, Satan will convince you that spirituality is for a select super saints so you might as well now give up.

Look again at our passage. It doesn’t appear that David is crying for God’s help from a place of safety. Frankly, had this “man after God’s own heart” been in a safe place many of the Psalms would never have been written. But this is what I want you to notice: apparently even David had bouts of struggling with the silence of God!

If you are going through one of those silent times, take heart. God has not moved nor has He turned a deaf ear to His child. Lewis discovered this. Later, he writes, “You can’t see anything properly while your eyes are blurred with tears . . . And so perhaps with God. I have gradually been coming to feel that the door is no longer shut and bolted. Was it my own need that slammed it in my face? The time when there is nothing at all in your soul except a cry for help may be just the time when God can’t give it: you are like a drowning man who can’t be helped because he clutches and grabs. Perhaps you own reiterated cries deafen you to the voice you hoped to hear.” (Grief pp. 53-54). By the way, as you work through this Psalm, you will discover that this is David’s experience as well. His pleas will turn to praise when God’s silence obviously breaks.

One final thought. I don’t know when this Psalm was written, what circumstances it may have arisen from. While the Psalm itself was probably written in a brief time, you can be sure that the experience from which this Psalm is written comes from a life-time of experience. Life experience is another thing we tend to forget when we study the Bible. Let’s speculate for illustration purposes. Let’s suppose this Psalm comes out of David’s cumulative experience with Saul. Let’s suppose for a minute that verses 1 & 2 were written the day he ran and verses 6-7 were added to the Psalm the day he got to stop running. Do you realize that we would be looking at a 13 year period? Incredible! But even in the “silent” years you can be sure of this, God was working (at least behind the scenes) and God did still care about what was happening with David. Why was God silent? He was preparing the shepherd boy to be the shepherd of Israel.

If God is silent to you right now. Don’t give up. Don’t give in. Charles Spurgeon said, “When you can’t trace His hand, trust His heart.”

"The Lord said to him, ‘Who gave man his mouth? Who makes him deaf or mute? Who gives him sight or makes him blind? Is it not I, the Lord? 12 Now go; I will help you speak and will teach you what to say.’" (Exodus 4:11-12).

Exodus 4:12 is my life verse. I will not go into details here, but until I was 16 I had a serious speech impediment that resulted in my being sent to special speech therapy classes from 1-11th grade. Because of that impediment, though I was a Christian, I had real reservations about God’s love and Sovereign control over things. Like many there was a line I did not want to cross, feeling that somehow God must be protected.

Then I read this passage. Look again at verse 11. Did you catch it? God takes full responsibility for each individual creature, handicaps and all! Suddenly it dawned upon me that I wasn’t simply the genetic amalgamation of my parents; a chance by-product of the biological act, but God was working in and through the processes to produce a person exactly according to His perfect specification–impediment and all! He had a plan. Redpath is right: "There is nothing -- no circumstance, no trouble, no testing -- that can touch me until, first of all it has gone past God and past Christ, right through to me. If it has come that far, it has come with some great purpose, which I may not understand at the moment. But as I refuse to become panicky, as I lift up my eyes to Him and accept it as coming from the throne of God for some great purpose of blessing to my own heart, no sorrow will ever disturb me, no trial will ever disarm me, no circumstance will cause me to fret, for I shall rest in the joy of what my Lord is."

What is it that your are facing today? Please understand that (1) God has a purpose in it, (2) it has not taken Him by surprise nor somehow slipped under His radar, and (3) if you will trust Him you will discover that in the thorn there is a blessing.