Cast away

“Cast away, each of you, the detestable things of his eyes, and do not defile yourselves”  Ezekiel 20:7

Cast away – You stand before God.  He pulls out the record book of your life and begins to read.  Every sin you have ever committed, every mis-deed, every harmful thought.  The list goes on an on.  You are ashamed, humiliated and devastated.  Not one thing has been cast away.

Is this the picture you have of God?  I hope not.  God uses this same verb (shalack) in Micah 7:19 to tell us that He has personally cast away our sins from us into the depths of the ocean.  God has abandoned any remembrance of them.  He has erased them from the book.  They will never return.  They have nothing more to do with our lives.

God asks us to take the same action toward sin.  Abandon it completely.  Cast it so far away from you that it has nothing more to do with you.  The root word is the verb for “throw”.  Sin is trash.  Throw it away!

Once in awhile I make a mistake and throw something into the garbage that I should have kept.  My neighbors might wonder what I am doing when they see me sorting through the trashcan, pulling out one mess after another, looking for the thing that doesn’t belong there.  But when it comes to sin, there is nothing worth rescuing from the garbage.  If I find myself digging through the trash of my life to “rescue” something that I think I need, I am doing just the opposite of what God did for me.  He threw all that trash away.  He promises not to hold it against me any more.  Why would I want to pull it back out of the garbage?

“Cast away” means utterly abandon.  Turn your back on it.  Leave it in the garbage.  Let it go to the dump where it can be burned up.  Act toward sin the way that God does.  Have nothing more to do with it.