The passage above is given to Moses and contains the most amazing thing this prophet could hear. As you read this passage one must consider the holiness of God and how that fits it. If one were to do a surface reading of this text, it may seem that there is a contradiction in who God is.
The Word of God is filled with great tensions. Biblical tensions are two truths that appear to be contradictory, but are both taught as true in the Word. We must remember that when we find biblical tensions one truth doesn't trump another truth. Another example of biblical tensions is the incarnation; how can a Holy, eternal, creator, God take on a human body, entering time and history? The Trinity is another example, how can God be three persons and yet one? But we believe it, we accept these truths as God reveling himself.
There is mystery with God, He has not revealed everything about himself, but he has revealed exactly what he desires for us to know. He has revealed all that is needed for a relationship with Him and salvation. Throughout history, God planned and promised to reveal His glory to His people. But how could the Lord "forgive wickedness" and yet "not leave the guilty unpunished"? We don't see the answers to this mystery in ancient nor modern Israel. We see that God had promised a person. In the Old Testament there was an atoning sacrifice, a propitiation to diminish the righteous wrath of God. Hope required a substation of suffering and death on the part of the innocent for the deserved punishment of the guilty. This hope also requited some kind of type of relationships between the offended and the offender.
Before Christ was born, we see that people were wondering when would the Messiah would come. It had been over 400 years since they had heard from God. To put 400 years in prospective, we have been an nation only 231 years. The Lord had give the promise to Moses that he would raise up a prophet (Deut. 18:15-19). But when Jesus came, he took everyone by surprise, because he fulfilled not just the kingly prophecies of the Messiah, but he also fulfilled the prophecies about the suffering Messiah, who would be rejected and suffer in the place of his people. Jesus solves the riddle that the above passage raises. He shows us how God can forgive our wickedness while at the same time punish the guilty.
This is the beauty of the Gospel, God knew that the only perfect, innocent substitute is himself. God is faithful to us especially when we are not faithful to Him. God is faithful through the fact that he provided himself to be a perfect, spotless, innocent of sin, substitutionary, sacrifice for our sin and wickedness. So God became a man taking on flesh and blood named Jesus, lived a perfect live, and died a perfect substitution for your sin and mine. The Cross works out this mystery of How God can both "forgive wickedness" and yet "not leave the guilty unpunished?" All that is left for us to do is repent and believe in this substitute that has been give for us, otherwise we will find ourselves in the past last of verse seven, "But He will not leave the guilt unpunished."
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