'As thou hast forgiven ... even until now.'
His past is the guarantee of His future. This is true of every one of
His attributes. There is no limitation to the divine forgiveness; you
cannot exhaust it.
Sometimes there may be long tracts of almost utter godlessness, or
times of apathy. Sometimes there may be bursts of great and
unsanctified evil after many professions of fidelity, as in David's
case. Sometimes there may be but a daily experience in which there is
little apparent progress, little consciousness of growing mastery over
sin, little of deepening holiness and spiritual power. Be it so! To all
such, and to every other form of Christian unfaithfulness, this blessed
thought applies.
We are apt to think as if our many pardons in the past made future
pardons less likely, whereas the truth is that we have received
forgiveness so often in the past that we may be quite sure that it will
never fail us in the future. God has established a precedent in His
dealings with us. He binds Himself by His past.
As in His creative energy, the forces that flung the whole universe
forth were not exhausted by the act, but subsist continually to sustain
it, as 'He fainteth not, neither is weary,' so in the works of His
providence, and more especially of His grace, there is nothing in the
exercise of any of His attributes to exhaust _that_ attribute, nothing
in the constant appeal which we make to His forgiving grace to weary
out that grace. And thus we may learn, even from the unfading glories
of the heavens and the undimmed splendours of His creative works, the
lesson that, in the holier region of His love, and His pardoning mercy,
there is no exhaustion, and that all the past instances of His
pardoning grace only make the broader, firmer ground of certainty as to
His continuous present and future forgiveness for all our iniquity. He
who has proposed to us the 'seventy times seven' as the number of our
forgivenesses will not let His own fall short of that tale. Our
iniquities may be 'more than the hairs of our heads,' but as the
psalmist who found his to be so comforted himself with thinking, God's
'thoughts which are to usward' were 'more than can be numbered.' There
would be a pardoning thought for every sin, and after all sins had been
forgiven, there would be 'multitudes of redemptions' still available
for penitent souls.
There is but one thing that limits the divine pardon, and that is
continuous rejection of it.
Whoever seeks to be pardoned _is_ pardoned.