“David mastered repentance,” writes Gerald Flurry in The Key of David. You can imagine, then, how deeply Israel’s great king appreciatedGod’s forgiveness.
In Psalm 103, David wrote, “Bless the Lord, O my soul, and forget not all his benefits” (verse 2). The first benefit that he wants to “forget not,” and that we too should never forget, is: “Who forgiveth all thine iniquities …” (verse 3).
Forgiveness and the removal of sin are the central theme of this beautiful psalm.
In fact, David strategically organized this psalm to highlight this fact.
This psalm is composed as a chiasm—a literary device where the first half and last half mirror one another. Gerald Flurry explains this in The Psalms of David and the Psalter of Tara: “The first phrase of verse 1 and the last phrase of verse 22 are identical. Moving inward, the rest of verse 1 through verse 5 are similar to verses 20-22. Verse 6 is comparable to verse 19, verse 7 parallels verse 18 (describing God giving His commands to Moses; then, ‘remember his commandments to do them’), verses 8 and 17 are both about God’s mercy, and so on.”
Some chiasms have a central verse that is not mirrored, making it the center-point. Verse 12 is the fulcrum of Psalm 103: “As far as the east is from the west, so far hath he removed our transgressions from us.”
Mr. Flurry comments, “The masterful poet David uses this point of emphasis to describe God’s forgiveness and how much He wants to distance us from sin. What a comfort!” (ibid).
Let’s study what it means for God to remove our transgressions from us.
Distanced From Sin
Psalm 103:12 has a powerful image of motion and distance.
Imagine being perched somewhere on Earth where nothing obstructed your view in any direction. The horizon would be a circle. From one side to the other are opposite directions: north from south, east from west.
Notice: David did not write “as far as north is from south.” On a globe, if you traveled north or south, you would eventually reach a point where you start going the other direction. This is not the case with east and west: No matter how far you travel eastward, you will always keep going east, even if you completely circle the globe. The same is true of traveling west.
Also, David put east first—not “west from east.” In Hebrew, east is synonymous with sunrise, and west has a similar spelling to the word for evening. Traveling east to west is the direction of sunrise to sunset, which follows the progression of the day.
To fully appreciate the distance comparison in verse 12, consider the height comparison of verse 11: “For as the heaven is high above the earth, so great is his mercy toward them that fear him.” Something interesting about the horizon is, the higher you are from the ground, the farther away each horizon is from the other. Spiritually, the closer we are to God, the more distance there is between each “horizon”—i.e. that on the west and that on the east.
The first phrase of verse 12, “As far as,” is interesting. It uses the same Hebrew word (in a slightly different grammatical form) as the word removed later in the verse. It could more literally read: As distanced as east is from west, so has He distanced our sins from us. This word for “far” and “removed” contains meanings of bothdistance (to be far away from) and action, in the sense of being thrust away or repelled from.
Now consider the spiritual implications of these metaphors.
Verse 11 describes heaven above earth—the vertical expanse of God’s mercy over us (which we will read more about on the other side of the chiasm: in verses 13-14). Put simply: “Heaven” is where God’s mercy is; “earth” is where those who fear Him are.
Verse 12 says as far as east is from west, our “transgressions” are from “us.” East is listed before west, and “transgressions” before “us.” Our transgressions are in the east—earlier, or in the past. We are in the west, where sunset occurs. And as God’s days begin at sunset, you can link “west” to the start of a new day.
This imagery helps us appreciate the distance God is trying to create between us and sin—not just in being forgiven but in ridding our lives of it!
Healed
Forgiveness is the obvious theme of this verse, as it is of the whole psalm.
Verse 3 says, “Who forgiveth all thine iniquities; who healeth all thy diseases.” Physical healing is a practical way we learn the extent of God’s forgiveness and the distance He wants to place between us and the effects of sin. It teaches us how God removes sin.
When we go to God for healing, we are seeking forgiveness. We might be in a hurry for Him to remove the effects of physical sin—the symptoms, the discomfort, the penalties of pain we experience—and that is what healing will do. But God is not just “fixing” what is broken or treating the effects. Since Jesus Christ paid the penalty for those physical sins, God can actually restore things as they were before the law was broken (although at times when God heals, scars remain to serve as a reminder). It is about removing the sin—the cause.
When Jesus resurrected Lazarus after four days in the grave (John 11), Lazarus was not still dealing with the original illness that killed him or even the four days of decomposing. Though he was raised mortal, biologically it was like the original illness and four days in the grave had never happened.
Healing is God removing “our transgressions from us.”
“God wants to bring you out of sin, just as He delivered the Israelites from the bondage of Egypt,” Mr. Flurry writes in How to Be an Overcomer. “He wants to purge sin from your life completely, to remove it as far as east is from west (Psalm 103:12). God wants to empower you to live sin-free—a totally different, God-centered way, walking in newness of life (Romans 6:4).”
The book of Isaiah contains several companion verses to Psalm 103:12. Isaiah 38:14 is part of King Hezekiah’s prayer for healing: “… O Lord, I am oppressed; undertake for me.” Undertake means to pledge, barter or trade. Hezekiah asked God to trade situations. That is essentially what the Messiah would do: He would take our sins on Himself and pay that penalty for us. It appears Hezekiah even knew about this—after all, he knew Isaiah, who recorded prophecies about the Messiah’s sacrifice making possible our healing (Isaiah 53:4-5). Since that hadn’t yet happened, pledge is the appropriate word: The God of the Old Testament pledged to take the penalty of Hezekiah’s sins on Himself.
By contrast, man’s idea of a “cure” to a disease is to treat the effect—to try to remove the penalty. By this logic, we can continue in the way that brings penalties, thinking our “cure” will blot out the penalty. God wants to stop the cause of the penalties. He wants to blot out the transgressions themselves! Of course, we need forgivenessof our transgressions for that to happen. We need God to remove the penalties too; otherwise we would die forever (Romans 6:23).
Forgotten
Notice this key phrase about how God healed Hezekiah: “thou hast cast all my sins behind thy back” (Isaiah 38:17). Here is another potent image about God forgiving and removing sin: It is behind God’s back. This is also figurative language for it being in the past.
David asked God: “Hide thy face from my sins, and blot out all mine iniquities” (Psalm 51:9).
The Prophet Isaiah recorded these comforting words of God: “I, even I, am he that blotteth out thy transgressions for mine own sake, and will not remember thy sins” (Isaiah 43:25). How beautiful that God puts our sins out of His memory!
“Remember not the sins of my youth, nor my transgressions,” David prayed (Psalm 25:7).
Jeremiah quoted God in this prophecy of the wonderful World Tomorrow: “… for I will forgive their iniquity, and I will remember their sin no more” (Jeremiah 31:34).
This verse is quoted in Hebrew 10:17. God never wants to think about a forgiven sin again. He wants it “purged” to where even we have “no more conscience of sins” (verse 2)—it is gone from our thinking. We do want to learn from and hold fast the lessons of our mistakes—like David, who kept a major sin “ever before” him (Psalm 51:3). But that is to avoid making it again, not to remain burdened by its guilt and its effects.
Also realize that if we delay repentance, some sins have eternal consequences; for example, receiving a lesser reward. While God completely blots out the sin, the lesson remains.
A comforting image is also used in Isaiah 44:22: “I have blotted out, as a thick cloud, thy transgressions, and, as a cloud, thy sins ….” The New Living Translation renders this verse, “I have swept away your sins like a cloud. I have scattered your offenses like the morning mist ….”
Cleansed
Isaiah offers another beautiful image that elaborates on what David described in Psalm 103:12. Isaiah 1:18 reads, “… though your sins be as scarlet, they shall be as white as snow; though they be red like crimson, they shall be as wool.”
David also prayed to be washed of his sins and made “whiter than snow” (Psalm 51:7). God can change the color of our sins, so to speak—from scarlet or crimson to the whiteness of snow and wool.
Scarlet is the color of blood. Ironically, it’s that scarlet-colored blood that makes us white like wool. Physically, blood is no cleansing or whitening agent; spiritually, the blood of Jesus Christ is exactly so.
The Apostle John wrote that “the blood of Jesus Christ his Son cleanseth us from all sin” (1 John 1:7). In his vision recorded in Revelation 7:14, he saw a great multitude that had “washed their robes, and made them white in the blood of the Lamb.”
He wrote that God wants “to forgive us” and “to cleanse us from all unrighteousness” (1 John 1:9). Thus, Christ is our “advocate with the Father” (1 John 2:1). Commenting on this verse, Mr. Flurry writes, “What a wonderful Father we have, who will sit down and talk with our Husband about how to remove our sins” (The Last Hour; emphasis added throughout). Of course they want to forgive, as Christ’s sacrifice made legally possible (Hebrews 10:12), but the end goal is to remove the sin.
“We can’t afford to mope around because of our sins,” Mr. Flurry writes. “Christ wants us to repent and put those transgressions behind us” (ibid).
The removal of sin is not just forgiveness, blotting out the penalty. It is also repentance, or turning from sin.
Complete
David’s east-west analogy refers to the distance God will put between us and sin. It symbolizes sin’s complete removal and destruction. That is what the seven days of Unleavened Bread symbolize. “[S]ince seven is the number God uses to denote completeness and perfection, the seven days of the feast remind us that God wants His people to work at putting sin completely out of their lives” (Herbert W. Armstrong Bible Correspondence Course, Lesson 30).
Speaking of Christ’s sacrifice, Hebrews 10:14 reads: “For by one offering he hath perfected for ever them that are sanctified.” This is how God is perfecting us.
David wrote, “Iniquities prevail against me: as for our transgressions, thou shalt purge them away” (Psalm 65:3). He knew that although sin could conquer him, God could purge those sins. We need God to “subdue our iniquities” (Micah 7:19). That means to trample under foot. The rest of this verse says God will “cast all their sins into the depths of the sea.”
This recalls the complete destruction God brought to the Egyptian army at the time of Israel’s exodus. On that seventh day of Unleavened Bread, Israel sang of God’s deliverance at the Red Sea. God buried “Pharaoh’s chariots and his host … his chosen captains …. The depths have covered them: they sank into the bottom as a stone. … [T]he earth swallowed them” (Exodus 15:4-5, 12). This is what God will do with sin!
How encouraging! We all need to yield to God as He works this miraculous process in our lives.
Forgive and Forget
Just having our sins forgiven—their penalty being paid by Christ’s shed blood—doesn’t mean we’re finished. The Feast of Unleavened Bread symbolizes the “complete putting away of sin, or in other words, the keeping of the commandments,” Herbert W. Armstrong wrote (Pagan Holidays—or God’s Holy Days—Which?).
This is all leading to a time soon when God forgives and removes sin completely. “In those days, and in that time, saith the Lord, the iniquity of Israel shall be sought for, and there shall be none; and the sins of Judah, and they shall not be found: for I will pardon them whom I reserve” (Jeremiah 50:20).
As beautiful as pardoning sin is, how much more is the vision of the time when anyone who looks for sin cannot find it! God will not just forgive but also put away the remembrance of sin (Jeremiah 31:34). God is a forgive-and-forget God. He paid a magnificent price to have those penalties removed—then He works with us to remove those sins completely.
God is not only eager to forgive, He wants to remove our sins—to blot them out, to trample them under foot, to bury them, to drown them in the depths, and to remove them as far away as possible—as far as east is from west.