Caught!! What a frightening word! The funny thing is that it
wouldn’t be a scary term if we never did anything wrong. Yet we all have a sin
nature and a guilt complex.
For instance, personally I hate having a police car driving
behind me. I can be driving the speed limit, with my seatbelt on, both hands on
the wheel and not even listening to music, but I feel like I am going to get
pulled over. It’s just a scary feeling at times.
Maybe it’s because of the dozens of times I was speeding and
got away with it. One night I was driving home from youth group really excited
about what God was doing in our teen’s lives. I was listening to praise and
worship music and not really paying attention to the speed. Driving down
Sandrun Parkway there is a little dip in the road that runs through water. As I
slowed down to cross the water, I thought it would be fun to gun it on the way
up out of it. I accelerated to 45 miles per hour on a 25mphs road. I didn’t
think anything of it until I saw the park ranger’s truck just up a head. “Oh
it’s only a park ranger, they don’t give tickets,” was my excuse for breaking
the law.
I was wrong!! Yes, wrong to excuse my speed, but also wrong
about park rangers. She quickly pulled me over and extended to me a ticket for
speeding. I was penalized $75 for my speeding, yet she extended to me some
mercy. Mercy is not getting what I do deserve. Though she wrote me a ticket,
she ran it through the Parks instead of through the city, so it wouldn’t put
points on my record. I was wrong and she would have been justified in issuing
me the full penalty for my crime. Yet she did not!
To be honest, I didn’t think my speeding was a crime before
I was caught. I got used to doing my own thing. I guess I rationalized my sin
by saying “if I don’t get penalized for doing it, then it must not be wrong.”
Others may say it this way “if it makes me happy and doesn’t hurt anyone then
it can’t be wrong.” That is often our approach to sin. We don’t think sin is as
severe as it really is. Just because God doesn’t lay the “Smack Down” on us
every time we sin, doesn’t mean He condones our actions. God would be justified
to strike us dead at the very moment we sin, but He doesn’t.
There is a great story in John chapter 8 about a woman
caught in the sin of adultery. Now we know very little about this woman, her
life circumstances and her normal behavior. We see her in this vary narrow
window. But what we know about her is she was committing adultery. Whether this
was her first offense or not, we don’t know, but we know she was guilty.
Very likely she was a normal person just like you and me.
Life can be overwhelming and her marriage may have become very difficult. She
may have felt over looked, uncared for, or just angry at her husband. Along
comes a nice guy who treats her with kindness. He listens to her and
compliments her. She longs for the times she passes him in the market place
because she knows he will affirm her. It feels so right to be around him and
then, one thing leads to another, she sleeps with him. She probably didn’t wake
up one morning and say “I want to commit adultery today!” No, I’d imagine it
was a slow process, one moment at a time that led to this sin. I’m sure she was
conflicted with a sense of it being wrong, but also making her happy.
Many today assuming God wants them to be happy and so
continue to do sins they think make them happy, when in reality they are
robbing themselves from true happiness. The truth is God is far more concerned
about your holiness then your happiness. What we need to learn is that the
pursuit of a holy life is removing the things from our lives that actually make
us unhappy. It is removing the cheap imitations of the real blessings God has
in store for us.
Back to the story: the Pharisees found her in her sin. This
fact always begs a couple of questions for me. How did they know she was
committing adultery? Did they send a PI to tail her and report back to them? If
they new she was headed down this road, as religious leaders, shouldn’t they
have cared more about her soul then her sin and tried to lovingly reach out to
her before this point? What about the man involved in this? Where was he? Was
he just using her so they could trick Jesus? And so on…
We don’t know all those answers, but we see what happens
next. They throw her at Jesus’ feet and say “the Law of Moses commands us to
put an adulterous woman like her to death by stoning! What do you say we should
do?” Now the Roman law of the land was strict that only Rome could give the
death penalty. These religious leaders where trying to get Jesus to either
agree with Rome and therefore make the Jews mad, or to agree with Moses and
they could report him to Rome.
Jesus does the unexpected thing when he challenges the crowd
“he who has no sin should throw the first stone!” And then he stoops down and
writes in the dirt. There is not an argument with Jesus. I can imagine some
hesitation on the crowd’s part, and the religious leaders part. Everyone knew
they had sin at some time or another. They knew that if they were guilty of one
part of the Law they were guilty of all.
What did Jesus write in the dirt? It could have been the 10
Commandments that everyone was guilty of. We are not given the specific
details. However His words were convicting enough. They all dropped their
stones and walked away.
Jesus’ charge to the crowd showed that only the perfectly
sinless could judge sin. Only God Himself is the just Judge. His own statement
said that He was the only one who could throw that first stone. He had every
right to throw the stone at her. Yet He didn’t!
She was indeed caught in sin! The Law did say she deserved
to die for her sin! Jesus was the just Judge who could enact judgment. But
instead, He had mercy! He did not give her what she did deserve. He chose, rather,
to forgive her and charge her to “go and sin no more!” He did not condone her
sinfulness. He did not give her permission to keep on sinning. He showed mercy
and called her to life.
How did she feel at that moment? Death seemed to be imminent
and now she sees life! How grateful she must have been! How much love she must
have felt for the One who saved her! Think of the zeal she must have had to
live in the new freedom and life she was given!
The truth we all face is that we have been caught in our sin.
We stand in judgment already. We are desperately wicked and headed for an
eternity without God on our own. Yet Jesus came to meet us where we are at. To
offer us life when we are facing death. To remove from us the penalty that we
deserve and give us life. Jesus calls us
to “Come and follow me,” and when we trust Him he forgives us and calls us to
“go and sin no more.”
Life with Jesus starts now and lasts forever! Every day is
an opportunity for us to live in the mercy He has given us. Not only that, we
can extend that mercy to others! Instead of judging others, we can show them
mercy and love them to Jesus! Look for ways this week to extend mercy and
reflect Jesus to a lost and dying world!
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