The psalmist asks “who can understand his errors?” We often think that it is enough to be ashamed of them, when we are really called to learn, through the Spirit, what the nature of our fault actually is.
All such meditations should begin with the cross—God’s reply to our errors. When Jesus died on the cross as a substitute for His people, this death was a qualitative and covenantal death. It was not quantitative. The simplest way to illustrate this is by saying that if God’s good pleasure had been to choose ten more people as among His elect, Jesus would not have had to suffer for an hour longer in order to cover that. Christ’s death was sufficient for all men, but was efficient, in the good pleasure of God, for the elect alone. Christ suffered as the designated representative, as the head of His people.
With this truth in mind, we should turn it around. Each one of us should realize that if “I” was the only elect one, if “I” was the only one chosen, Christ would have suffered no less. If the only sins to be atoned for were my own, if the only thing that Jesus had to do was to save me, or to save you, the same thing would have happened to him. The sins that you and I have committed were, in themselves, sufficient to place Christ on the cross. If the only sins in view were the ones that you have committed, Jesus would have suffered every insult, every stripe, every blow, every hour on the cross. Nothing would have been different. Sometimes we hide out in the sheer number of people that Jesus died for, hiding ourselves in a quantitative view of the atonement. We tend to think that our sins, added to the whole, surely made no significant difference. If Jesus were crushed under the “infinite” weight of human sinfulness, what is six more ounces? But this is not the way to think of it at all.
For you children, think of it this way. In the first Narnia book, Aslan is like Jesus, and he died and came back from the dead, just like Jesus did. But he did all of it . . . just for Edmund. And in the last Narnia book, King Tirian says that it was by Aslan’s blood that all Narnia was saved.
Never forget that the statement Jesus died for you is an astounding statement.