Repentance falls before God and achieves the total blessing of the Lord. God feels for one who comes to him. ‘That young person is doomed to die. I will bless.’ He causes us to be loosed; he sets him free from our debt to him, from the burden of sin. ‘You will owe me nothing. I will release you.’ That is the way God forgives. He throws our sin into the sea of his forgetfulness. Sadly this was not a case of genuine repentance, but we will be forgiven if we are genuine.
In our case it could be illness that shocks us. We are alarmed perhaps, and frightened, and we start to worry about hell. No parable is perfect and includes everything, but as we hear about Calvary we see that God alone can solve the problem of our sin, and he has done so in the person of his Son, the Lord Jesus Christ. Yes, you can be forgiven and become a child of God. More than anything else, we need to find him.
Old preachers were fond of a simple illustration which they told many times. It is about a couple, husband-and-wife, who lived in a mining village. Times were hard, but they lived in an age when people did not want to go into debt, and thought it was shameful. The wife however could be careless and ran up debt at the grocer’s shop. He would keep it a record of it in his book. She made excuses to him and said, ‘I will pay next week’, but she didn’t. Anxiety about this debt kept her awake at night, but she did not tell her husband. The next time she went to the shop, she again said foolishly, ‘I will pay next week.’ ‘Pay what?’ said the grocer. ‘You don’t owe us anything.’ ‘Yes, I do’, she insisted. ‘No,’ he said, ‘look at the book.’ She looked and saw there was a line through all of her debt. She went home and told her husband. ‘Somebody paid it’, he said. ‘No,’ she said, ‘it has been cancelled.’ ‘No, my dear. If no one has paid it, then don’t you see, the shopkeeper has paid it.’ Our debt of sin is an offence to God and must be paid. We cannot pay, but Christ has come, and – what mercy! – he has paid our debt in full, if we are among those who trust in him. He has said, ‘Punish me instead of them.’ Christ had to die in order for anyone to be saved. You must come to him and put your trust in his sacrificial death for sinners.