Daily Manna · Day 160 · June 9
Removed Completely
“As far as the east is from the west, so far hath he removed our transgressions from us.”
Psalm 103:12 says God has removed our sins "as far as the east is from the west." Yet one line of poetry may not feel like enough for what you actually did. You know the thing by heart. It comes back while you are brushing your teeth, or halfway through a hymn, and a picture about compass points does not seem to reach it.
So notice who this psalm names five verses earlier: "He made known his ways unto Moses, his acts unto the children of Israel." Moses is the psalm's example of a man God dealt with closely, and Moses had a killing in his past. He saw an Egyptian beating a Hebrew, and "he looked this way and that way, and when he saw that there was no man, he slew the Egyptian, and hid him in the sand." When he learned that somebody had seen it, he ran, and he lived in Midian for forty years. Whatever God later built with that man, He did not build it by pretending the killing never happened. Exodus records it in the plainest words there are. And this is still the man God spoke with "face to face, as a man speaketh unto his friend."
Now look at the measurement. North and south have poles: travel far enough north and you start heading south again, so the distance closes. East and west never meet anywhere on the earth. The psalm chose the direction that does not close, and it chose it on purpose. Look at the tense too: "so far hath he removed." He has already done it. He is not still working on it, and He is not waiting until you have suffered long enough over it.
So your memory has the size of the sin right. The distance was set by Someone who knew its size exactly. What comes back tomorrow, and it will come back, is only a memory. It can no longer bring a charge against you, because there is nothing waiting at the far end of it any more.
Daily Manna runs on a two-year cycle. The year two reading for day 160 is At Ziklag (1 Samuel 30:6).