Come out of her, my people, so that you will not share in her sins, so that you will not receive any of her plagues. Revelation 18:4
The plagues are quite horrendous and serve as a reminder of what God has saved us from (Revelation 16). Living in a fallen world and mixing with sinners every day it becomes easy to take sin for granted. We lose sight of the immense holiness of God and think of sin in terms of murder, theft, or immorality. We tend to measure sin by how much it affects other people when we ought to measure sin by how much it affects God. No sin committed against us is as great as the sin we have committed against a holy God.
Luther believed if the greatest commandment was to love God with all our heart, mind, soul and strength, and to love our neighbour as ourselves, then, the greatest sin was to fail to love God with all our heart, mind, soul, and strength and to fail to love our neighbour as ourselves. Our greatest sin is our failure to love.
We are also reminded how mighty our God is to save. God doesn’t forgive 80 or 90 percent of our sins and leave us to atone for the rest by abstaining from certain activities, making sacrifices, or condemning ourselves. Christ’s blood is powerful enough not to almost save us, or barely save us but rather completely save us, none of our well-meaning activities could ever do that.
Paul writes, “There is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus” (Romans 8:1). We are assured of complete forgiveness because of Christ.
