Do You Want To Be Pardoned?

“Wash yourselves, make yourselves clean; Put away the evil of your doings from before My eyes. Cease to do evil, Learn to do good; Seek justice, Rebuke the oppressor; Defend the fatherless, Plead for the widow. “Come now, and let us reason together,” Says the Lord, “Though your sins are like scarlet,

They shall be as white as snow; Though they are red like crimson, They shall be as wool. If you are willing and obedient, You shall eat the good of the land; But if you refuse and rebel, You shall be devoured by the sword”; For the mouth of the Lord has spoken.

Isaiah 1:16-20

In our legal system and specifically regarding our system of incarceration of criminals we have a means of exempting a guilty person from punishment for the crimes they have committed. We call this a “pardon”. In the United States that ability is given to the Governor of the state where the guilty party was convicted of the crime, and in the governors, hands lay the ability to allow the execution of the punishment as called out by the court system or to set the offender free, exempt from the punishment of the crime. For federal crimes, only the president can issue a pardon for the convicted person. Although God has given power to the governments of this world to extract judgment, we will see in our scripture for today that God holds the final say regarding execution of judgment, and whether we are pardoned from our sins…and the interesting point to all of this is that He gives us the opportunity to be part of that decision. So, let us go back and look closely at the verses we have just read, to see how God lays out His terms for us to be pardoned, and how we can be part of the pardoning process.

In verse 16 we are told this:

Wash yourselves, make yourselves clean; Put away the evil of your doings from before My eyes. Cease to do evil

In the verses leading up to this verse the prophet Isaiah had addressed the people of Judah and compared them to the inhabitants of Sodom and Gomorrah. Calling out their sins of “hypocritical worship”, where they were doing all the things that tradition held but was not doing it from the heart. So, in verse 16 the phrase wash yourself was not an indication that the person could wash themselves clean of the sin that lives within them, but an invitation for the sinner to come to the only One who could wash them clean. And in this verse, we see the first pardon from God in this message. God asks the sinner to accept His terms by putting away their evil ways and not allowing those ways to surface again.

The end of verse 16 has God making an important distinction between falling upon sinful situations, and outright doing sinful things. God says to cease to do evil, a point being made that we stop going out of our way to do sinful things.

Upon the death of Pope John Paul II, Rogers Cadenhead, a self-described “domain hoarder,” registered www.BenedictXVI.com before the new pope’s name was announced. Cadenhead had the name before Rome knew it was needed.

The right domain name can be lucrative. Another name, PopeBenedictXVI.com, secured $16,000 on eBay. Cadenhead, however, didn’t want money. A Catholic himself, he was happy for the church to own the name. “I’m going to try and avoid angering 1.1 billion Catholics and my grandmother,” he quipped.

He did want something in return, though:

1. one of those hats

2. a free stay at the Vatican hotel

3. complete absolution, no questions asked, for the third week of March 1987

Makes you wonder what happened that week, doesn’t it? It may even remind you of a week of your own life. (Imagine a criminal walking into a police station and saying, I will tell you about someone else’s crime if you allow me to commit a crime)

Although Isaiah spoke this some three thousand years ago it still has a place in the life of the believer today. So, let us look at our worship of God. Are we doing so out of obligation or out of a sense of not wanting to not look like a believer; just playing the part, or are we bringing forth our first fruits from the heart, giving your all to God?

There was a New York Times article titled: For a Fee, Chinese Firm Will Beg Pardon for Anyone.

“As a society, China lacks the spirit of apologizing,” says Zhou Xiaozheng, a sociology professor at people’s University in China. That difficulty has given rise to the Tianjin Apology and Gift Center, a company that delivers apologies and attempts to facilitate reconciliation. The company’s motto is “We Say Sorry for You.”