Daily Manna · Day 274 · October 1
Freely Loved
“I will heal their backsliding, I will love them freely: for mine anger is turned away from him.”
A slab in a country churchyard at Olney, with a long epitaph cut into it that the dead man wrote himself.
John Newton had been a slave trader. His own epitaph calls him once an infidel and libertine, a servant of slaves in Africa, and then: preserved, restored, pardoned, and appointed to preach the faith he had long laboured to destroy. The part usually left out of the telling is that his turning was not one clean moment. He went back to sea afterwards and went on trafficking in human beings for years. The backsliding did not happen before the faith. It ran alongside it, which is the version most people recognise and almost nobody says.
Hosea's chapter opens with a summons: O Israel, return unto the LORD thy God; for thou hast fallen by thine iniquity. This verse is what is waiting on the other side of that. And God does not offer to overlook the backsliding, which is what most of us would settle for. He offers to heal it, which is a deeper repair and a slower one, and it implies the wandering did real damage rather than none. Then freely, with no invoice attached, and the reason given is not their improvement: for mine anger is turned away from him. The turning has already happened on his side before anything at all has happened on theirs.
Old and nearly blind, Newton is remembered for saying his memory was almost gone but that he remembered two things: that he was a great sinner, and that Christ was a great Saviour. Those are the only two facts this verse asks anyone to hold, and it puts them in that order.
Daily Manna runs on a two-year cycle. The year two reading for day 274 is The Accuser Cast Down (Revelation 12:11).