Between God’s Faithfulness and Man’s Infidelity – Michael Austin
A profound look at the history of salvation reveals a constant clash between two truths: God’s faithfulness and man’s infidelity. The first truth is a positive one while the second is negative. Right from creation, it has always been like that. Adam and Eve were unfaithful to the command of the faithful God. Years later, the story of the Israelites typified this in a most special way. God established a covenant with them at Mount Sinai. He rewarded them whenever they were faithful. But soon after, they always disobeyed Him by breaking their own part of the pact. Consequently, they were punished by being abandoned into the hands of their enemies. When they later repented of their evil, God always welcomed them back as His sons and daughters, remembering the oath He swore to their fathers.
We, the present-day descendants of Adam and Eve, are no different from the then Israelites. In fact, we human beings of today have always shown ourselves to be those who break new grounds in sinning and wickedness. In our sophisticated world, there are new trends that we bring, which are clear affronts on our Creator. Many of us support abortion, euthanasia, artificial birth methods, gender ideologies, and the likes. This is the stark reality facing us all. As a result of these, the future of the world looks bleak.
All hope is not lost, though. The world needs to do something that is at once important and indispensable: the exercise of repentance. All of us have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God (cf. Romans 3:23). No one is perfect. Conscious of this, we then see the need for repentance whenever our human frailty gets the better of us.
God’s mercy is always there for us. Unfortunately, we have many persons who talk about this mercy without emphasizing the need for repentance. Without genuine repentance, we cannot receive the mercy of God. In other words, we cannot receive pardon for our sins if we do not call them to mind. If we are not remorseful and decisive in our bid to avoid future sins, our repentance will be in vain. Pope Gregory the Great once said: “All of us are weak, but weaker is he who is unaware of his weakness”. Acknowledgement of our human fragility is, therefore, of the essence.
We have to confess our sins to God, asking Him to forgive us. But before that, we also have to forgive those who sin against us. This is clearly stated in the Lord’s Prayer: “And forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us” (Matthew 6:12). If we do not forgive others, we are indirectly asking God not to forgive us.
The message of repentance is needed all the more in our world, which suffers from two dangers: the loss of the sense of sin and self-justification. Talking of the former, many live in objective situations of sin but have gotten used to it so much so that sin is no longer seen as sin. What is abnormal is now seen as normal. This is really pathetic. On the latter, there is equally a great number of persons who see themselves as just, and others as sinners. They readily see the speck in people’s eyes while forgetting that there is a log in theirs. They are quick to judge and condemn others, forgetting that we are all debtors before God and man.
True repentance is needed now, more than ever. We are all called to be like the tax collector in Luke 18, who, conscious of his sins, said: “Lord, have mercy on me a sinner”.