Forgiveness: Yours For The Asking

“I have sinned,” [Judas] said, “for I have betrayed innocent blood”… So Judas threw the money into the temple and left. Then he went away and hanged himself.
Matthew 27:4-5

After a particularly embarrassing moment, the thought might cross your mind: “I wish I could just die.”

It’s a thought you really don’t mean. But for Judas, knowing that he had betrayed the Lord so filled him with remorse that he sought escape through death. Rather than seek forgiveness and a new start, Judas decided to give up and end his own life.

The special circumstances of Judas’s life and death provide lessons you can profit from. Alexander Maclaren shares his thoughts on the nature of sin and forgiveness.

WALK WITH ALEXANDER MACLAREN
“I do not suppose that Judas was lost because he betrayed Jesus Christ, but because, having betrayed Jesus Christ, he never asked to be forgiven.

“I pray you to learn this lesson: You cannot think too blackly of your own sins, but you may think too exclusively of them; and if you do, they will drive you to madness or despair.

“My dear friend, there is no remorse which is deep enough for the smallest transgression; but there is no transgression which is so great but that forgiveness for it may come. And we may have it for the asking, if we will go to that dear Christ who died for us.

“If Judas died without hope and pardon, it was not because his crime was too great for forgiveness, but because the forgiveness had never been asked.”

WALK CLOSER TO GOD
Judas could not forgive himself. But God could. “[God] does not treat us as our sins deserve or repay us according to our iniquities … As far as the east is from the west, so far has he removed our transgressions from us” (Psalm 103:10,12). Forgiveness is yours for the asking when you take God at his word.