I sure could use a sinkhole right about now. Do you know what that is? Occasionally we’ll read of one opening up on a city street and swallow a whole car. I think the last one I heard of doing that was in Pittsburgh. My brother did some work on a house years ago. The problem: the original builders constructed it over a sinkhole and didn’t know it. After a couple years the foundation started to give way.
But sinkholes are handy, too. My old buddy in Tennessee has one on his farm. It looked like a thirty-foot wide weed-filled depression in the ground, but he could throw a clothes washer in there and a year later it would be gone. Amazing! Were the groundhogs in the appliance repair business?
I’ve noticed the accumulation of large metal stuff around our place; old TV dishes and rusty frames to who knows what. It would be nice to just take them out back and toss them in my own personal sinkhole. No eyesore of a dump – no trip to a landfill. Nice!
Even nicer is that God has a “sinkhole” for our biggest problem: sin. He said, “I, even I, am He who blots out your transgressions for My own sake; and I will not remember your sins” and, “I have blotted out, like a thick cloud, your transgressions, and like a cloud, your sins. Return to Me, for I have redeemed you” (Isaiah 43:25; 44:22 NKJV). How does He do that for us today? Through Jesus’ sacrifice (Romans 5:6-11). How do we enact that? Through repentance and baptism (Acts 3:19-20; 22:16).
Unfortunately, as mentioned above, sinkholes can be catastrophic. In Exodus 16 a man named Korah led a rebellion against Moses. God caused the ground to split apart under them and swallow them up; they “went down alive into the pit”! Hell, itself, is not only described as a place of unquenchable fire and eternal pain and torment, but also darkness where there will be weeping a gnashing of teeth (Matthew 8:12; 22:13; 25:30).
So, we come to find out we all have a sinkhole in our future. It can be a place where God tosses my sins to be remembered no more; or it will be a place of utter and eternal agony. God would rather throw your sins away and not you (2 Peter 3:9). Will you “return” to him and let Him do that for you?
Jeff