Sin and the Titanic

You don't nurse Your anger and don't stay angry long,

for mercy is Your specialty.  That's what you love most.  

And compassion is on its way to us.  

You'll stamp out our wrongdoing.

You'll sink our sins

to the bottom of the ocean.

Micah 7:18-19

For His unfailing love toward those who fear Him

is as great as the height of the heavens above the earth.

He has removed our sins as far from us

as the east is from the west.

The LORD is like a father to His children,

tender and compassionate to those who fear Him.

Psalm 103:11-13

I don't think I have really grasped the metaphors Micah and David are throwing out here.  They're so big, my feeble, not-spatially-oriented brain can't begin to understand what they're trying to say.  What do you mean, "as far as the east is from the west"?  "As high as the heavens"?  My little brain just can't wrap around it.

But "the bottom of the sea".  That I have a reference for.  Not from experience, mind you, but, well, sort of.  I've been to the beach.  I've lost things (sunglasses and contact lenses, usually) in the ocean.  And, barring a miracle of God, if you lose something in the ocean, you're not getting it back.  If God were to throw our sin into the water, even near the shore, in the waves, there's no way we're going to put our hands on it again.  But Micah doesn't say He throws our sins in the water near the shore.  He's so much more merciful even than that.  He "sinks our sins to the bottom of the ocean."  And the image of the "bottom of the ocean" that comes to my mind is the Titanic.  

The Titanic was the biggest thing to ever sail in the ocean.  Enormous.  Huge.  Impossible to forget.  And when it went down, it went down fast.  It went down without a trace.  For decades, no one even knew where it was.  It took multitudes of scientists, countless explorers, and millions of dollars' worth of technology just to figure out where the thing landed.   And it went down so far that no one can ever bring it up again.  Even though we know the Titanic existed, even though there are some lasting memories of the thing, we can't go back to it.  There's no swimming through it.  There's no dwelling in this thing.

Why do we have a hard time thinking of our sin as the Titanic?  Even the biggest, baddest, ugliest monstrosity we've ever done absolutely disappears when it sinks into the sea of the Father's grace.  And He's not telling us where it is at the bottom of His vast ocean.  So why do we allow Satan to dredge the sea and bring it up again?  That's not the Father's plan.  It's not His way.  When He forgives, He throws our sins into the absolute deepest part of the ocean.  It's sitting at the bottom of the ocean, under the Titanic.  Let it just sit there.