Micah 7:18 “Who is a God like you, who pardons sins and forgives the transgression of the remnant of his inheritance?”

The prophet Micah wrote at a time when the nation of Israel was on the decline. They were no longer the world power they once had been. Foreign powers invaded their land. The northern tribes were sitting on the edge of extinction.

But the real catastrophe was the way this people had turned away from God. They were duped by every feel-good religion that came along. Or they just gave up every pretense of religion and faith as they pursued their materialistic dreams. After all he had done for them, after all the miraculous ways he had delivered these people in the past, it was a wonder the Lord hadn’t just given up on them. In fact, that was what prompted Micah’s question.

Micah’s choice of words highlights why God’s grace and patience ought to amaze his people. “Sins” here is literally “bending” or “twisting.” It is the word from which the concept of “perversion” comes. People take God’s good creation, and then they bend and twist it until it becomes a grotesque mutation of itself that is no longer useful or good.

When I was a kid I once used one of my dad’s wood chisels to dig and pry a nail out of a piece of wood. The blade on the chisel was meant for contact with wood, not steal. The damage I did to the tip of the chisel as I pounded it into the nail and pried on the nail head practically ruined it. That’s not what the tool was meant for. My dad was not happy with me.

God gives his people good gifts, useful tools like human sexuality, or material wealth, or pain-relieving chemicals. Then we bend and twist these things for our own purposes. We use them to serve and satisfy our own desires in ways the Lord never intended. And in the process we often turn his good gifts into grotesque mutations that don’t merely fail to do what God made them to do. They even become dangerous to us. And it doesn’t make our Lord happy.

Unfortunately, we often fail to care. Behind the other term Micah uses, “transgressions,” is a word that suggests rebellion or revolt. So often sin is not a matter of ignorance, or carelessness, or weakness. It is a matter of defiance. When it was time for our friends to go home after a visit, we began helping their children pick up the toys. But one of them didn’t want to pick up the toys. He took one container of blocks, looked me in the eye, and then dumped them all over the floor again.

Sometimes we don’t want to stop doing what we were doing. So we look God in the eye, and we do what we want anyway. That’s the way Micah’s people treated him. We put on our own rebellions against his ways.

This is what God pardons. Again, the Hebrew is more colorful than our English translation. He lifts it off our shoulders. He picks it up and carries it for us. No longer do we have to bear the guilt, the responsibility, and the consequences. The Lord makes it his own to carry. I can’t help but think of Jesus words when he invites us, “Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest.” Or Peter’s description of Jesus’ sacrifice on the cross. “He himself bore our sins in his body on the tree.”

Who does that sort of thing? What teacher sits in the principal’s office in place of the unruly student in his classroom? What parent sits in the corner or goes to bed without his supper for the child who was lipping off to him? What mugging victim sits in jail for the creep who mugged him?

Our Lord does, that’s who! Like Micah, we stand here in amazement looking at God’s forgiving nature, and we ask, “Who is a God like you?”