Have you ever put a message in a bottle and then thrown it into the ocean?

More importantly, has anyone ever come across it years later?

Believe it or not, there are actually people who keep track of this sort of thing.

According to the Message in a Bottle Hunter website, the world’s oldest seagoing message in a bottle is almost 132 years old. It was dropped into the Indian Ocean by a German research vessel studying ocean currents in 1886, and was found on a beach in Western Australia in 2018. (Wikipedia records an even older message, a Japanese one found after 151 years afloat.)

Bottled messages have travelled many thousands of miles. The farthest recorded distance travelled is probably the one that floated from New Zealand to Spain, almost an antipodean journey.

Perhaps the most romantic message in a bottle story concerns Swedish sailor Ake Viking. In 1956, he stuffed the message “To Someone Beautiful and Far Away” into a bottle and cast it into the sea. It was later retrieved by a young woman named Paolina in Sicily. Their subsequent correspondence culminated in marriage in 1958, with the wedding ceremony attracting 4,000 people.

We marvel at events like these: the idea that something thought lost and forgotten can show up decades later.

But there are some things we don’t want to come across again.

Who wants to be reminded of a sordid episode in our past—something that we did that now makes us cringe with regret and horror?

Fortunately, once our sins have been forgiven by God, they won’t wash up on a beach somewhere to accuse us.

Thanks to Christ’s atoning work on the Cross, our sins won’t come back to haunt us.

“Once again you will have compassion on us. You will trample our sins under your feet and throw them into the depths of the ocean!” (Micah 7:19)

“As far as the east is from the west, so far does he remove our transgressions from us. “ (Psalm 103:12)

Certainly, we may have to deal with some repercussions of our sins. There may be consequences we have to work through with God’s help and grace. But once we’ve repented and laid our sins at the foot of the Cross, the offences themselves will no longer be charged to our account.

This is put so well in Matt Papa’s hymn “His Mercy Is More”:

“What love could remember, no wrongs we have done
Omniscient, all-knowing, He counts not their sum
Thrown into a sea without bottom or shore
Our sins they are many, His mercy is more.”

We must trust that once God has forgiven our sins, He has cast them behind His back and remembers them no more. We shouldn’t keep revisiting them and wondering if He has truly forgiven us for them.

Remember, God has posted a sign on the shore: “No Fishing Allowed!”

© 2023 Lori J. Cartmell. All rights reserved.