Freely Loved

In the churchyard at Olney, a country town in England, there is a stone with a long epitaph cut into it, the words written for a grave. The man buried there wrote those words himself.

John Newton had been a slave trader. His epitaph calls him "once an infidel and libertine, a servant of slaves in Africa." In plain words, he had been an unbeliever who lived however he liked. Then it says he was "preserved, restored, pardoned, and appointed to preach the faith he had long laboured to destroy." The part of his story that usually gets left out is that his turning to God was not one clean moment. After he came to faith, he went back to sea and kept on trading human beings for years. His backsliding did not all come before his faith; it ran alongside it. Most of us recognise that version of the story in ourselves, even though almost nobody says it out loud.

Hosea's chapter opens with a call: "O Israel, return unto the LORD thy God; for thou hast fallen by thine iniquity." Our verse is what waits on the other side of that call. God does not offer only to overlook the backsliding, which is what most of us would settle for. He says, "I will heal their backsliding." Healing is a deeper repair and a slower one, and it admits that the wandering did real damage. Then He says, "I will love them freely," with no bill attached. The reason He gives has nothing to do with them getting better: "for mine anger is turned away from him." The turning has already happened on God's side.

When Newton was old and nearly blind, he is remembered for saying that his memory was almost gone, but that he remembered two things: he was a great sinner, and Christ was a great Saviour. Those are the two facts this verse asks you to hold, in that order, and the second one is bigger than the first.

Daily Manna runs on a two-year cycle. The year two reading for day 274 is The Accuser Cast Down (Revelation 12:11).

All 365 readings in Daily Manna