Israel, put your hope in the Lord, for with the Lord is unfailing love and with him is full redemption.
Psalm 130:7 (NIV)
Redemption Without a Ceiling
The younger of the two men who run a music store snapped a tuning peg on a customer’s mandolin back in August, and the other one has never let it go. A mandolin comes in for strings, he hollers for the kid to come have a look at it, the kid tells him where he can put that, and the two of them keep working. The whole thing costs about four seconds a week now. Both of them would miss it if it stopped.
Somebody sang this psalm from a low place. If you, Lord, kept a record of sins, Lord, who could stand? He leaves the question where it landed and goes to what he’s sure of instead: with you there is forgiveness, so that we can, with reverence, serve you.
He turns from his own low place and addresses a country. Israel, put your hope in the Lord, for with the Lord is unfailing love and with him is full redemption. The reason he gives is a description of what God has with him rather than a measure of what Israel had managed. Unfailing love and full redemption are named as God’s own, and the naming comes before any question of who has earned them. That is the ground a whole nation was told to stand on, and the ground hasn’t changed for the people reading it now. He himself will redeem Israel from all their sins.
All their sins is the size of it. A country is a great many separate people who each did their own particular thing, in their own year, mostly in private, and full reaches every one of those. It takes in the oldest item on the list and the thing done last week, and it gets called full before the record is ever opened.
In the store the peg comes up about once a week, and by now the kid tells it better than the older man does.
A Prayer to Remember
You have more of this than we’ve got need for, God. Take the oldest thing on our record, the one we’ve stopped bringing up because we already decided how you’d answer it, and say full over that one. We’d like to believe you when you do.
In Jesus’ name, we pray. Amen.
