The Lord promises a real solution to sin and death. We have new hearts as far from sin and death as the east is from the west. He takes hearts of stone and makes them capable of life—death’s very contradiction.
As far as the east is from the west
so far does he remove our sins. (Psalm 103:12)
Just how far is the east from the west? Immeasurably far. Say you’re on America’s Pacific coast and you want to get east. Not just to go east, but get there. You’d cross mountains, deserts, plains, more mountains. Eventually, you’d hit an ocean. You’ve gone east, but are you there yet? Cross the ocean and then keep going. There will never come a time when your east-bound journey comes to an end. From west to east isn’t a matter of distance; the two are direct contradictions. If you want to go all the way east you just can’t get there from here.
If God promises to take our sins as far as the east is from the west, clearly he’s thinking of something greater than a physical journey. Yet the map of salvation history is just that, one long east-bound sojourn. When sin and death entered the world, our first parents were sent from their earthly paradise eastward, to live by the sweat of their brow (Gen 3:24). Then, after Cain killed Abel, God sent Cain east of Eden, to a land called Nod, where he could hide in anonymity from his sin (Gen 4:16). Later, God took Israel out of Egypt, out of a land of slavery, on a forty-year journey, east into the land of Canaan.
Each of these stops on the ever-eastward journey provided God’s people with temporary rest. Each journey symbolically removed them from their sin, but it didn’t solve the underlying problems. Adam’s children still eat by the sweat of their brow. Cain’s sons still spill the blood of their brothers. Even forty years in the desert didn’t end Israel’s self-enslaved idolatry. Wherever God took his people, the memory and threat of sin and death were close on their heels.
Did God fail to make good on his promise? Relocation was only ever a temporary solution. The truth is, we can’t walk away from our problems. We were banished from a broken paradise, and we carry it around in our hearts. No journey will ever be long enough. But God has promised far more, to take his people east, all the way east. God promises a separation from sin as wide as east is from west, not just another march in one direction. Our weary feet won’t get us there—God wasn’t done yet.
All of these journeys east and west, place to place, were, in the end, not enough. But they all foreshadowed a far greater exodus. Consider the Babylonian exile. One last time, God uprooted his people, sending them east. This time, they made it as far as Babylon and Persia, nine hundred miles east of Jerusalem. It’s there that God began to speak more clearly. To the prophet Ezekiel, he stops speaking of exile and promises to abide far closer to home. He’s taken Israel out from among the nations for a reason. He’s brought them out into the desert and exile, not to establish a new home as in former days, but to do something new. He tells the prophet:
“I will take out of your flesh your heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh” (Ezek 36:26). Not a mere correction, but a transformation. God promised he would make us able to love him by making our hearts like the heart of the one we love.
The Lord promises a real solution to sin and death. We have new hearts as far from sin and death as the east is from the west. He takes hearts of stone and makes them capable of life—death’s very contradiction.
But even then the prophet wasn’t done. The Lord led Ezekiel to his new temple, a restored temple, and asked him to tell the people what he could see. And he saw the glory of God coming from the east. Like the rising of the sun in a darkened sky the temple was filled with the glory of the Lord who came through the eastern gate like the morning sun on the earth’s horizon (see Ezek 43:1–5). God crossed earth and sky to enter the darkness and restore and fill it with his presence.
We can’t make it to the horizon, a destination always just out of reach. Instead, the east breaks upon us. We vigilantly await the rising sun, not only until the light of day, but “until the morning star rises in our hearts” (2 Pet 1:19). A light we could never reach or make for ourselves comes to meet us in our very hearts. This then is eternal life, not that we break in upon the dawn, but that the dawn first broke upon us (cf. 1 John 4:10, 19). We look for the light, to internalize it, to be bathed in it, recast in it, to become it. And like the light of a new day our hearts don’t fade from darkness to a middling grey. The light of a new dawn shatters the darkness, turning it into light itself.
The Lord doesn’t want to change your circumstances; he wants to change you. Jesus Christ’s purpose in your life isn’t to make you better at dragging around a heart of stone. Instead, he came to enliven your very heart, that we might have life, and have it in abundance. He came so you would be a contradiction to sin and death, and be unrecognizably Christ-like. Nothing less. Our true exodus is not measured in miles or years, because the love of God doesn’t transport, it transfigures. It is Christ breaking in like the dawn, taking us as far from sin and death as the east is from the west: immeasurably far.
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Republished with gracious permission from Dominicana (October 2025).
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