The Handwriting Was a Document, and It Was Nailed to Something

A man asked me a question about his own forgiveness that I could not answer with encouragement, and I am glad I did not try.

He said: some days I feel completely clean and some days I feel exactly as I did before I ever confessed anything, and I cannot see any pattern in it, and I want to know which of those days is telling me the truth.

That is a better question than most of what gets asked about this subject. He was not doubting the doctrine. He was noticing that his sense of it moved with something, probably sleep and probably the time of year, and he wanted to know what to stand on that was not weather.

And there is an answer, and it is not a feeling, and it is not a technique for producing a feeling. It is a document.

The word Paul chose

Writing to a church about what happened at the cross, Paul reaches for a word out of the world of debt and law rather than out of the world of religion.

Blotting out the handwriting of ordinances that was against us, which was contrary to us, and took it out of the way, nailing it to his cross. (Colossians 2:14, King James Version)

The handwriting. The word behind it means a document written in somebody's own hand, and in that world it was specifically the word for an acknowledgment of debt. A person wrote out what they owed, in their own writing, and that paper was the thing that could be produced against them.

That is the picture. Not a mood and not a general disapproval. A written record, with your own hand on it, that could be brought into a room.

And then three verbs, and every one of them is aggressive.

Blotting out. Wiped so that the writing is gone from the surface. Took it out of the way. Removed from the middle, from the place where it stood between. Nailing it to his cross. Fixed to a public object where anybody could see what had been done with it.

You have a record that was dealt with by three separate actions, and every one of them was done to the document rather than to your feelings about it, and Colossians 2 uses a legal word out of the world of debt, and it is His Spirit who makes a finished transaction into something a person can actually rest on.

Why a document is better than a feeling

I want to be careful here, because feelings are not the enemy and I am not going to teach anybody to distrust their own interior.

But a feeling is a report on a condition, and a document is a report on a transaction, and those are two different kinds of information. A person who has slept badly will feel unforgiven, and nothing at all has changed except their sleep.

You have been reading one instrument and calling it the other, and Colossians 2 puts the whole action on a piece of paper rather than on anybody's interior, and that part belongs to the Holy Spirit, who teaches a person which gauge they are looking at.

Hebrews describes the same finished quality with a physical detail that people read straight past.

But this man, after he had offered one sacrifice for sins for ever, sat down on the right hand of God. (Hebrews 10:12)

Sat down. The writer has spent chapters describing priests who stood, because their work was never finished, and here is the contrast in two words.

You are looking at a work that was finished by somebody who sat down afterward, and the sitting is in the text as evidence rather than as description (Hebrews 10:12). That work is the Spirit's, and He moves that from a fact a person knows to a fact a person can stand on at four in the morning.

Where the record went

Scripture is not vague about the disposal, and the images are worth having in a person's hands because they are specific.

He will turn again, he will have compassion upon us; he will subdue our iniquities; and thou wilt cast all their sins into the depths of the sea. (Micah 7:19)

The depths of the sea. Not the shallows, where a person could wade back out and retrieve something. The deep water, which in that world was the one place a thing could not be recovered from.

And there is one more, and it is the strongest sentence in the Old Testament on this subject.

For I will forgive their iniquity, and I will remember their sin no more. (Jeremiah 31:34)

I will remember their sin no more. That is not forgetfulness, because He is not capable of losing information. It is a judicial decision not to bring a matter up, which is a stronger thing than an inability to recall it.

You are dealing with a decision rather than an amnesia, and a decision is more reliable than a memory ever was (Jeremiah 31:34), and the Holy Spirit is the one who keeps a person from turning a settled ruling back into an open question.

Before I go on, one thing has to be said in a message like this. If what you carry has taken you somewhere darker than a bad day, where being here at all has come into question, that is not for an article to hold. Say it to somebody tonight: a doctor, a counselor, a pastor you trust, or the 988 crisis line if you are in the United States. Going is strength and always has been.