"If this were not enoughˇK" In these words of God we seem to hear something of a divine sigh over so much human heartlessness. What God did for David was indeed not enough. David's sin, which seemed to make God's gifts pointless, was met with the further gifts of forgiveness and life. But the divine graciousness did not stop with a mere word of forgiveness; God sent His Son to forgive us in person and to become our very life.

But Jesus was crucified. This was the ultimate sin, for at Calvary God's unconditional love was spurned. But in the divinely ironic graciousness of God's dealing with us it was this ultimate sin that became the occasion for God's great and final act of forgiveness by which we were freed from all merely human striving and set entirely in the world of God's grace.

Though we shall always be threatened by the danger of doing evil in the sight of the Lord, we pray that Paul's words may become a reality in our lives.