Your Iniquities Have Separated You

Isaiah wrote, “Behold, the Lord’s hand is not shortened, that it cannot save; neither his ear heavy, that it cannot hear: But your iniquities have separated between you and your God, and your sins have hid his face from you, that he will not hear” (Isaiah 59:1-2). The Lord always has power to help and save us; He can always hear and comfort us. But if we feel that we cannot reach Him, it may be that our sins have separated us from Him. Thus the first step to receiving aid from the Lord may be to repent. This was His plea to the Nephites who survived the great destruction at His death: “Will ye not now return unto me, and repent of your sins, and be converted, that I may heal you?” To receive His healing power we must come humbly repenting before Him. He promised, “If ye will come unto me ye shall have eternal life. Behold, mine arm of mercy is extended towards you, and whosoever will come, him will I receive; and blessed are those who come unto me” (3 Nephi 9:13-14). We cannot keep our sins forever and come to Him—His role is to help us get rid of them as He changes us to be more and more like our Father in Heaven. At the end of the chapter Isaiah continued, “And the Redeemer shall come to Zion, and unto them that turn from transgression in Jacob, saith the Lord” (Isaiah 59:20). As we turn from our transgressions the Savior comes to us and redeems us. But we must be willing to give our sins up to Him.  

                In The Great Divorce by C.S. Lewis, an allegory in which those who have died attempt to travel from hell to heaven, we see this principle in a dramatic scene. One spirit arrives with a little red lizard at the place that is bringing him closer to heaven. When he is about to turn around because the lizard won’t keep quiet, an angel offers, “Would you like me to make him quiet?” When the spirit agrees, the angel replies, “Then I will kill him.” The spirit hesitates and as they go back and forth the spirit continues to urge the traveler to let him kill the lizard: “There is no time. May I kill it?” The spirit tries to argue for a “gradual process” but the angel continues to insist that he kill it immediately, and the traveler complains, “Get back! You’re burning me. How can I tell you to kill it? You’d kill me if you did.” The angel denies this and the spirit replies, “Why, you’re hurting me now.” To this the angel says profoundly, “I never said it wouldn’t hurt you, I said it wouldn’t kill you.” They continue to go back and forth with the angel insisting that he can’t kill the lizard unless the man agrees to it, and the lizard trying to convince the man not to do it. Finally the angel is given permission and “the Burning One closed his crimson grip on the reptile: twisted it, while it bit and writhed, and then flung it, broken backed, on the turf. ‘Ow! That’s done for me,’ gasped the Ghost, reeling backwards.” After that the man became brighter and stronger and was able to continue his travels towards heaven on a stallion that rose up out of the dead lizard. Like this man, we all have sins (our own lizards) that keep us back from the Lord. To move forward closer to the Lord we must be willing to give them up—like the angel, He offers to kill them with our permission. Helaman reminded his sons, “The Lord surely should come to redeem his people, but that he should not come to redeem them in their sins, but to redeem them from their sins” (Helaman 5:10). The Lord has power to redeem us, but in so doing we must let Him take our sins from us, a process that will not be pain free. But the reward that Isaiah promised makes it all worth it. As we turn from our transgressions the Lord promised, “As for me, this is my covenant with them, saith the Lord; My spirit that is upon thee, and my words which I have put in thy mouth, shall not depart out of thy mouth, nor out of the mouth of thy seed, nor out of the mouth of thy seed’s seed, saith the Lord, from henceforth and for ever” (Isaiah 59:21). For that we should be willing to give up all our lizards that separate us from Him.