God’s Big Rubber Stamp

Imagine you received a document that recorded all your sins. As you read through it you were more and more ashamed. You knew it was all true. You had no excuse, your goose was cooked. Just holding this book in your hands would make you sick. Layer after layer you were guilty. It is hundreds of pages of single spaced type. You are in trouble, big trouble. The problem with life is that it is linear. It is sequential. One thing follows another. You simply cannot go back and undo what is in the past. The Disney movie Lion King has a song that talks about life as a circle. But for us as individuals it is not a circle at all. It may seem cyclical, but it is still linear. So our past is real, and we cannot change it. Time travel is a fiction.

The Bible often refers to our sinful self as our flesh. It is even called “this body of death.” This is the baggage we received from Adam and all our own sin too. The gospel is that God has a way of completely removing this thing that is dragging us down to hell. It is a miracle surgery! “In him also you were circumcised with a circumcision made without hands, by putting off the body of the flesh, by the circumcision of Christ,” (Colossians 2:11 ESV) This “circumcision of Christ” is a reference to his crucifixion. The flesh can be totally cut off by our uniting with Christ by faith. The Bible says we are crucified with Christ. The book of the record of our sins is canceled and nailed to the cross. Listen to this “And you, who were dead in your trespasses and the uncircumcision of your flesh, God made alive together with him, having forgiven us all our trespasses, by canceling the record of debt that stood against us with its legal demands. This he set aside, nailing it to the cross.” (Colossians 2:13-14 ESV)

What a fantastic promise. The record of debt is canceled and nailed to the cross. Canceled and nailed, yes! We cannot go back and “un-sin” the sin, but God can cancel it by nailing it to the cross of Christ. We can, by faith in Jesus Christ, be fully free from our record of debt. Oh, what a relief. God will cut off your body of death when you turn to Christ. All your recorded sins can be canceled by the power of the death, burial and resurrection of Christ. Imagine that book with all your sins recorded in it. Imagine God stamping it with a huge rubber stamp dipped in the blood of Christ “CANCELED!” Praise God!