He Took It Away - The One Year Unlocking the Bible Devotional
He Took It Away
He canceled the record of the charges against us and took it away by nailing it to the cross. Colossians 2:14
Think of your sins as rocks that you carry in a large backpack over your shoulders. In Old Testament times, every time you felt the weight of a rock in the bag, you would go to the priest, who offered a sacrifice for that particular sin. Every time you committed another sin, you had to go back for another sacrifice.
The Old Testament priests were taking rocks out of the bag, but Jesus takes the bag off of your back! He deals with all our sin by separating it from us through his one act of self-sacrifice. He has dealt with the whole sin issue fully, finally, and completely by taking our sins—past, present, and future—and nailing them to the cross. That is why, when he died, he cried out, “It is finished!” (John 19:30).
The reason there’s no condemnation for me in Christ is not that there are no rocks in my bag, but that the bag itself has been lifted from my back. Jesus took it from me. He carried it to the cross and dealt with it for me. But many people in church still live as if they were in the Old Testament era. When they sin, they feel as if they come under condemnation and that they need a new sacrifice.
The Bible makes it clear that if we claim to be without sin, we are deceiving ourselves (see 1 John 1:8). Our bags are never empty. We may not be aware of some of the rocks, but they are there. The Christian believer is never wholly free from sin in this life. No matter how deeply we reach into the bag, we can never empty it completely. There is always another rock.
Christ has set us free by removing the burden from us. This does not mean that we should become complacent about the rocks. God calls us to deal with the sin in our lives. But our salvation does not depend on emptying our own bags. It depends on Christ’s removing the bags from our backs, and there’s all the difference in the world between these two things!
For further reading, see Colossians 2
