“For thou writest bitter things against me, and makest me to possess the iniquities of my youth.” (Job 13:26 AV)
Job uttered these words in the midst of trying to figure out why the LORD would allow or cause all his misfortune. He is looking at his current life and cannot pinpoint any sin that would warrant such a tragedy. So, he does what we all do. He goes back to old sins. He figures they were so bad that God much continually judge him for them. Job believes the LORD’s grace was not sufficient for the sins of his youth. He has done all the law would require. He offered sacrifice and repented of those sins. But in the back of his mind, they were so bad that the things that befall him in the present are meant as a reminder of things he had done in the past. The same happens with us all. When things are bad, we revert to mistakes of the past. Regret swells and we become despondent to the point we erroneously think God will never forgive them on this side of glory. Every major event is seen through a lens of unforgiveness, forgetting that God has cast our sins as far as the east is from the west. Crisis has a way of doing that. The devil likes to bring up our past. It is his way of keeping us in a state of defeat.
In this day and age, escaping our past is impossible. With the electronic data age upon us, everything we have ever done, good or bad, has a trial. Even if the event is one that is supposed to drop off after certain number of years, it doesn’t take much to discover it. Several years ago, we discovered a distant relative lived in the same city to which we moved to. The new state is three states removed from where the bulk of this family has settled. We found it be happenstance. When moving to a new city, a cookbook from a ladies’ society located in the new city was buried in a box of inherited belongings. That box hadn’t been touched since it was left to us more than a decade earlier. We read the inscription inside and found that the relative that left it to the relative that left it to us lived in this city and was a member of this ladies’ society. It was uncanny how a cookbook dating over a hundred years ago would end up in our storage room and discovered at the exact moment we were moving there. We did some research and found things out things that were not so flattering. We wanted to see where this relative lived so we could drive by the house. In the process, we discovered a newspaper article that revealed this relative had an affair wherein both marriages were dissolved. There was a judgment and fine against both individuals. They ended up married. The newspaper article was publicly available. Photocopied from the early twentieth century, this relative’s sins followed beyond the grave.
This is what the adversary does. He finds pleasure in reminding us of how sinful we are and were. Yes, the Holy Spirit convicts. But He only convicts over unconfessed and unforsaken sin. The LORD does not bring up the sins of the past. Job was under deep distress. Who wouldn’t blame him? Faced with great tragedy and failing health, he wanted to know why. He couldn’t find any reasonable explanation. The one he was left with above is that God was bringing back the sins of his past. The only open door for him was the one Satan provided. If he wasn’t in sin in the present, it must be something he did many years ago. Something for which he didn’t receive sufficient chastisement. Something that was so egregious that the LORD felt it necessary to punish him afresh. We have to be careful and understand where that comes from. It is not of the LORD. It is either from within, or from the Devil himself. If we have forsaken our sin, received correction for it already, and strive to live above it, then we need to let it go. Please, for the sake of your sanity, let it go.
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