He Hath Not Dealt With Us After Our Sins Is an Accounting Term

There is a particular way a man sits at a table when he is waiting for something to be brought up.

I know it because I did it for about a year and a half after I came out of the hospital. I would go to my mother's house on a Sunday, and I would eat, and I would talk, and the whole time some part of me was standing slightly apart from the room waiting for the sentence to start.

Nobody was going to say it. I want to be clear about that. My mother never once raised it. My sister, who is the one who found me, has never brought it up in her life, not one time.

And I sat there braced anyway, for months, because a man who has done what I did does not believe a room like that. He assumes the bill is coming and that the meal is a courtesy extended before it.

The strange thing is what that does to a table. You cannot really eat at a table you are waiting to be arrested at. You can put food in your mouth, but you are not there.

There is a psalm about this, and its central sentence is not emotional at all. It is arithmetic.

The verse is about proportion

Here it is.

He hath not dealt with us after our sins; nor rewarded us according to our iniquities. (Psalm 103:10, King James Version)

After means in accordance with. According to means in proportion to. Both halves of the verse are saying the same thing twice, which is how a Hebrew poem emphasizes something: the treatment does not match the offense.

That is not a sentence about God feeling generous. It is a sentence about a ratio that has been broken on purpose.

Which is exactly the thing a braced person cannot compute. A man sitting at a table waiting for the reckoning is running a proportion in his head, and the psalm says God is not running one.

You are not being dealt with in proportion to what you did, and Scripture states it twice in one line. Psalm 103:10 says He hath not dealt with us after our sins nor rewarded us according to our iniquities, and it is the same Spirit, Romans 8:16 bearing witness with our spirit, who reports that into a chest that has been braced for years.

How far the psalm says it has been moved

Two verses later David tries to describe the distance and picks a measurement that cannot be completed.

As far as the east is from the west, so far hath he removed our transgressions from us. (Psalm 103:12)

Notice which axis he chose. He did not say north from south. North and south have poles; the distance between them is finite and a person could in principle measure it.

East and west have no poles. Travel east and you never arrive at east. The distance is not large, it is unmeasurable, and David chose that axis with a poet's precision.

So when a person keeps going back to find the thing, the psalm is saying something specific about the search: there is nowhere for it to be found, because the direction it went in has no end.

You are looking for something that was moved along an axis with no end to it. Psalm 103:12 says as far as the east is from the west. It is the Spirit of God, John 16:13 the Spirit of truth, who makes a distance like that land as fact rather than as a nice line.

God says He does it for His own sake

Here is the sentence that finally broke the bracing for me, and it is not the one anybody expects.

I, even I, am he that blotteth out thy transgressions for mine own sake, and will not remember thy sins. (Isaiah 43:25)

For mine own sake. Read that again. He does not say for your sake, which is the version a person expects and quietly distrusts, because a man who knows what he did assumes he is not worth it.

He grounds it in Himself. Which means the whole thing does not depend on an assessment of the person being forgiven, and that is the only ground that could hold a man who has correctly assessed himself as not worth much.

And Hebrews quotes the new covenant with the same formula:

And their sins and iniquities will I remember no more. (Hebrews 10:17)

Will I remember no more. That is not amnesia in an omniscient God. It is a legal undertaking, a decision not to bring something forward, which is exactly what a braced man is waiting to have happen.

You have a case that will not be brought forward, and God grounds that in Himself rather than in you. Isaiah 43:25 says for mine own sake. It is His Spirit, Hebrews 10:15 saying whereof the Holy Ghost also is a witness to us, who is named as the witness to that undertaking.

What that does to a table

Here is the practical end of it, and it is the reason the physical action on this page is a meal.

A person who is braced eats differently. They are polite, they are present in the way a guest is present, and they are not actually in the room. There is a part of them standing near the door.

And the thing that undoes that is not a conversation, in my experience. It is repetition. Sitting at the table, again, and nothing happening. And again, and nothing happening.

Romans states the legal fact underneath it in five words:

There is therefore now no condemnation to them which are in Christ Jesus. (Romans 8:1)

Now. Present tense. Not eventually and not on review. And no condemnation, which does not mean the offense was small. It means the sentence is not being served.

You are sitting at a table where nothing is going to be raised. Romans 8:1 says there is therefore now no condemnation to them which are in Christ Jesus, and it is the Holy Spirit, named in the next verse as the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus, who is the one who made a man free from the law of sin and death.