Hopefully you were able to find some joy this past Sunday for Easter. I know this virus has given us a lot of family time. We’ve laughed and yelled and shared memories of things us parents didn’t know about.

Apparently my kids think they were being sneaky when they stayed up all night reading. And when they had an entire drawer full of candy wrappers (that I cleaned out), they somehow still thought we didn’t know they would sneak candy into their rooms.

But one thing that came out really did surprise me. My son explained how he firmly believed that sleeping was time travel.

Go ahead, read that sentence again. Sleep = TIME TRAVEL.

And his reasoning was solid. Time seems to pass in the blink of an eye when you sleep. You wake with no recollection of what has happened in the past several hours. Your environment is often altered, but your body is not.

He was young. The whole concept of time and sleep as recovery was outside of his understanding. But he did his best to reason and think through the situation. He came up with something to relate his experience to and made decisions based on the idea that he knew exactly what happened when he slept.

Our sin separates us from God. No animal sacrifice is enough to atone for our sins because we are not perfect, the animals are not perfect, and most importantly we just keep sinning.

But God is outside of time. He knows that I will keep sinning. He knew my kids would sneak candy into their bedrooms and sneak flashlights into bed to read all night. He knew that we would all follow that internet rabbit hole too far at one time or another.

Not because he can travel through time, but because he is at all times. Always.

So he provided us with the perfect sacrifice, one that would transcend time as he does, and pay the debt for our sins forever. But like children, it is so far outside of our understanding that we try to relate it to our lives and make sense of something that will never make sense to us.

When we hear about the crucifixion of Christ, we sometimes feel happy, sometimes sad, guilty, or uncomfortable, and often we feel extreme gratitude. But what we fail to understand is that Jesus did not just die and rise again. He died slowly, feeling the effects of every sin in our timeline and beyond. The separation from his father would’ve been a painful experience.

When I was a child, I thought “He already died for our sins, I may as well keep sinning.” I thought, “What’s the point in changing my behavior if I’m already forgiven?” My cousin even told me a story once when I was little (using a curse word) and said, “It’s okay, I’ll ask forgiveness later, but it’s already forgiven.”

But that forgiveness was not an idle, “I forgive you.”

It was a slow, painful experience that is worsened by every sin we commit. Not was worsened; is. Because God is without time.

Like tiny pebbles in a sandstorm flying through the air at him, our sins, were thrust upon Jesus at the cross 2,000 years ago. He didn’t just take on our sins, he suffered for every single one. Because God is at all times, every sin that I choose not to commit, is one less pebble being thrown at my savior.

Why change our behavior if we’re already forgiven? Because every sin hurts God. Still.

Despite that, he forgives us anyway.