Identity & Literature: And Then There Were None & Your Hidden Sins

A politician’s career exploded overnight after a scandal from years ago was uncovered. It doesn’t matter who this was because by the time you read this, you will have your pick of examples. This might seem a distant cautionary tale until you look closely at your own life. You might not face public humiliation or jail, but what if someone were to discover and air your secret sins from ten, twenty, fifty years ago? What do you do with past regrets which you cannot bury no matter how many years you lay on top?

Agatha Christie’s There Were None, a haunting whodunnit, progresses through a thinning cast of strangers lured to an island together, all reckoning with murder in their past as one by one they meet the justice they’ve been running from. Each character has found ways of coping but not forgetting. They may have excused, rationalized, blame-shifted, or become hardened, but as the blade of justice draws near, they all know their deeds, and what those deeds deserve.

If their conscience will not forget, how much less will God? What they need—what we all need—is expiation, the removal or atonement of guilt. The desire for expiation is the reason why criminals can feel relieved at being caught or serving out their sentence. It’s a way to “pay back their debt” to society. But shame and ruined reputation can continue long after the courts have cleared you. This is where Jesus offers something no one else can—to wash your soul at a depth that no one else can reach (Isaiah 1:18).

This is what David is after when he confesses “Against you, you only have I sinned…Purge me with hyssop, and I shall be clean; wash me, and I shall be whiter than snow” (Psalm 51:4, 7). Without God’s forgiveness, David can be esteemed in the eyes of the world but live under a burden; with God’s expiation, he walks free, even if the rest of his life he pays the consequences with other people (which he largely did).

At any point you may also be called to answer for ten seconds of foolishness that happened over twenty years ago. But with Jesus, you don’t need to let this keep you up at night. He offers to not simply forget the offense, but to pay for it on the cross. You are clean from that sin, not simply because your accumulated good from the rest of your life outweighs the bad (who could determine such a thing?) You are clean because Jesus has personally paid for that sin and sees you as if it never happened.

If you rack up a year’s worth of credit-card debt, you may have bad credit the rest of your life. This will be inconvenient and embarrassing. But if someone pays that debt, you don’t pay it a second time. The debt is gone. That is expiation.

This soul-level need for expiation is also why we can leave justice in God’s hands. We may want to see people get what they deserve, but even when that happens, it’s often profoundly unsatisfying. We need to trust there is a deeper and more eternal judgment we cannot see.

In 2014, Bessel van der Kolk published The Body Keeps the Score about the body’s ability to remember, store, and respond to trauma people have blocked from their minds. The Bible teaches us that the soul also keeps the score. We may justify and excuse in our minds and find healing in our bodies, but our souls keep a reliable record. There is only one path of healing for this deeper trauma we accumulate in our souls over the course of life—expiation through Jesus.

You don’t have to worry about someone getting away with it. We all carry a court of justice inside us. You cannot outrun God; but you can run to Him. God graciously promises to cleanse you not only from things you’ve done that still haunt you, but also from the things you can no longer remember, but your soul still carries. Receiving that expiation is as simple as asking and trusting.

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Enjoying Identity & Literature? Read Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Threefold Destiny & The Three Desires of a Man

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