The Bible is full of cases where God proved He was the God of second chances. He created us, knows our every wound and scar, and all that leads us to make mistakes. It is by forgiveness and grace that He gave us a way to accept responsibility for our errors, to repent, and make amends:
If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just and will forgive us our sins and purify us from all unrighteousness.
The Bible does not need us. But we do need it. I firmly and steadfastly believe that. It is an instruction book, the place we can look back through history and see how problems similar to ours were dealt with and the final results. Was the Word shared with us an attempt to help us through our trials and tribulations? A means to help us avoid making the same errors that have been made over and again?
I believe so, just as I believe it was shared to reassure us that hope doesn’t die with an error. There is a path back to serenity and peace. That too is revealed to us through biblical events.
When we mess up and need a second chance it’s worth remembering that we all do mess up and need second chances.
It is also worth remembering that God did not set tasks to perfect people. Look to Moses, Job, to King David. All those men and many more had a past. All made mistakes and yet they were not abandoned nor forgotten. They were shown the error of their ways, and the path back to God. And they all went on to perform essential missions–essential to their people and in their time that had profound impact on themselves and many others.
Jesus instructed us to be perfect. That was not a “be perfect or you’re out” order. It was a motivational remark meant to inspire you to try to be perfect. He knew you were human. That you would err and falter. But He also knew that if you aspired to perfection, you would err, falter and fail less often. Inspired, you would progress further on your life’s journey, your life’s purpose, with you spending less time off the rails and more time on the right track.
Our country’s founders knew this, and understood the importance of values, morals and ethics in people and in a self-reliant society. They understood the importance of faith in God, and several of them wrote about it so that we too would understand and benefit from their legacies.
This legacy of knowledge is evidenced in many ways, but one of my favorite (being an author and a descendent) is something I learned as a child in school. The first book printed in this country was the Bible. That printing was paid for by Congress. The purpose? To distribute copies to all schools to assure that every student had access to the Bible to read it.
That depicts the significance they placed on it. While we each determine what significance we place on it, we can benefit from shared wisdom.
Morals, values and ethics are essential to the functioning of a republic. For a republic to survive, the people had to take in those traits and adopt them as their own. They provide a benchmark of decorum for civil society.
These many years later, we understand that, and the importance of soul survival.
Unfortunately, we have also seen many displays of what happens when these critical traits and faith itself are suppressed or ignored. It isn’t pretty, or healthy, or in my opinion, in our collective best interests.
Fortunately for me, and those who share that belief, we can go to our instruction book, the Bible, and find what we need:
The integrity of the upright guides them, but the unfaithful are destroyed by their duplicity.
That one verse tells us to remain hopeful, faithful, and encouraged because if we adopt and maintain integrity, we will be guided, and those who are unfaithful will be destroyed by their own duplicity.
Ours is the God of Second Chances.
It is up to us to take them.
Blessings,
Vicki Hinze
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