Last week the oldest lady in our Seniors Bible Study group confessed to a horrible crime.  Back in primary school she had dipped the hair of the lass sitting front of her into the ink-well.

Ink-well...?  Good grief, what’s an ink-well?  Okay, I guess that’s something that needs explaining to anyone who started primary school after 1960.  Why 1960?  Well, because that’s about the time ball-point pens became commercially viable.  Prior to that you could certainly have purchased a ball-point pen – they were first patented in 1880 – but it would have cost you the equivalent of more than $200 in today’s terms.  Before 1960 every student desk at school contained a porcelain ink-well into which you repeatedly dipped a special pen – that had a nib – as you wrote in your exercise books.  What’s a nib...?  Well, if you don’t know, just Google it. – and don’t get me started on the ink-monitors in each class who had the task of topping up the ink-wells.

So why did the subject of ink-wells come up in a Seniors Bible Study group?  Because we were talking about blotting paper.  Blotting paper...?  Stone the crows, what’s blotting paper?  Well, it was special absorbent paper that soaked up excessive ink from the ink-well.  I recall commencing every new school year with a large clean sheet of blotting paper.  To stop the wet ink in your exercise book from smudging you pressed a piece of blotting paper on your work, which instantly dried it.  Blotting paper was also used to soak up any accidental drips or spills.

So why were we talking about blotting paper in the first place?  Because we were studying Isaiah 43.  In that chapter the Lord (through Isaiah the prophet) tells Israel, “I have blotted out, as a thick cloud, your transgressions” (ESV).  It’s rather graphic imagery for those of us who grew up with ink-wells and blotting paper.  Just as a blotting paper soaked up spilt ink so the Lord soaks up the sins of those who belong to Him.  And Isaiah is not the only place where we find that imagery.  When the apostle Peter speaks to the crowd that gathers after the healing of the lame man in Acts 3, he tells them, “Repent therefore, and turn again, that your sins may be blotted out...!”

That’s a very telling way of talking about the mercy of the Lord our God.  We know from the Bible that God takes sin seriously.  He has to.  He is a holy and righteous God to whom sin – any sin – is offensive.  So God never ignores sin, nor just ever overlook it.  Instead he does with it what we kids did at school (pre-1960) when we had an ink spill or any excessive ink on our page – we blotted it out.

It may come as a surprise to some of us to find that the Lord has many similar radical ways of speaking about the removal of our sins when we come to the Lord in faith and repentance.

My favourite one is in Psalm 103 where David says: “As far as the east is from the west, so far does he remove our transgressions from us.”  People in David’s day may already have realised that the distance from the east to the west was an immense distance.  Today we understand that so much more clearly – it is an infinite distance; because on this globe that is planet earth, we can travel eastward or westward forever.  What comfort it is to know that my failures of yesterday were removed that far from me when I confessed them to the Lord.

Another biblical image of the radical nature of our forgiveness is found in Micah 7.  “He will again have compassion on us; he will tread our iniquities underfoot.  You will cast all our sins into the depths of the sea.”  And then just to remind us that when we are forgiven that way we also need to forgive ourselves, Billy Graham once said, “After casting all our sins into the depth of the sea the Lord put up a “No fishing!” sign.

I asked my Bible Study group how we might communicate the idea of our sins being blotted out in today’s culture where we no longer use ink-wells and blotting paper.  One of our folk suggested that it’s like all our sins appearing on the screen of God’s computer and then when we confess them the Lord God just hits the ‘delete’ button.

John Westendorp