Most people don’t actually understand what the Bible means when it says: “As far as the east is from the west…” – Psalm 103:12
We read it like it’s just another way of saying “really far.” A poetic exaggeration. A comforting phrase. But it’s not. It’s precise. And if people truly understood it, they would stop living like their past is still catching up to them.
Think about direction for a moment. If you start traveling north, eventually you hit the North Pole… and then something interesting happens, you start going south. The same is true in reverse. Go far enough south, and you eventually begin heading north.
North and south are not infinite in the way we imagine. They are directions with endpoints. They meet. They reverse. Now ask yourself a different question: If you start traveling east… when do you start going west? You don’t.
There is no point on this earth where east becomes west. You can keep going east forever and never arrive at west. It doesn’t loop back the same way. It doesn’t reverse. It just… continues.
That’s the language God chose. Not north and south. Not a measurable distance. Not something that eventually circles back. He chose a direction that never reconnects.
So when Scripture says: “As far as the east is from the west, so far has He removed our transgressions from us,” it’s not saying your sin is far away. It’s saying there is no path back to it. No intersection point. No moment where it comes back into alignment with you again.
And yet, most people live like it does. They revisit their past constantly. They replay it. They re-feel it.
They carry it into new relationships, new decisions, new identities. They assume that because they remember it, God must still see it the same way. So they walk through life trying to outrun something that, in God’s eyes, isn’t even behind them anymore.
We live like forgiveness is a circle. Like if we go far enough, long enough, eventually we loop back to where we started. But God defined it differently. Not as a cycle, but as a separation in direction.
You’re not being chased by your past. You’re turning around and walking toward something God already sent the other way.
And maybe the real struggle isn’t whether God removed it, maybe it’s that we keep looking for something He already chose not to see again. There’s a difference between remembering something happened, and believing it still defines you. One is human. The other is a misunderstanding of grace.
God didn’t create distance between you and your past. He created a direction that would never allow the two to meet again. And most of us are still standing there… looking west… trying to find what He already sent east.
If this hit something in you, you’re not alone.
Most people aren’t held back by what happened to them…
they’re held back by what they believe it means about them.
That’s exactly what I unpack in Beyond Blame: Love, Loss, and the Limits People Live Within, why we carry things long after they’ve been removed, why we define ourselves by moments that were never meant to define us, and how to finally move forward without dragging the past into everything else.
If you’re ready to stop revisiting what God already separated from you…
Beyond Blame is available now on Amazon.
Troy P Zehnder 