Many Christians hold the notion that God forgives and forgets our sin. And while the idea that ‘God forgets our sin’ is sort of ambiguous in the Bible, we can use our critical thinking and deduction skills from other verses to come to the conclusion He does. Such as the following: “God is love” and “love keeps no record of wrongs”; therefore, God keeps no record of wrongs, so he forgets. Or, a main verse used for this argument is Isaiah 43:25, which reads, “I, I am he who blots out your transgressions for my own sake, and I will not remember your sins.”
Well there you have it. All done here?
Yeah, not so fast.
Let’s think some things through:
If God technically forgot our sin, then he would fail to be omniscient; but he can’t become less of himself in order to become more of himself (i.e., even more forgiving). If so, he would fail to be God, and therefore, offer a forgiveness that would be utterly irrelevant. If God could technically ‘forget sin’, then his forgiving nature of forgetfulness would be at odds with his omniscient nature, like two repelling polar magnets. Additionally, and more importantly, if God truly forgot our sin, then he would technically forget about Jesus and the glory of cross for our sin, which would oppose the greatness of His grace. That can’t be right. Thus, I think this is safe to say: God ‘forgets sin’ as much as he forgets the holes in his hands: He doesn’t.
Rather, when the Bible means “forget” it doesn’t mean that God all of sudden has a memory lapse or even chooses to forget. It means that His forgiveness is so strong that it is basically like He forgets. His forgiveness of sin is so potent that it has the same effect as if He had forgotten them. Meaning, for those in Christ, God doesn’t relate to us with any memory of our past sins or our failures. In Christ, he treats us and relates to us as if we had never sinned and as if He had forgotten our sin because He sees us fully robed in Christ’s righteousness, which has atoned for and covered all sin. In Christ, our sin doesn’t come to his mind when we come to him.
Indeed, because we are fully covered in Christ’s perfection, God fully and perfectly loves and forgives us—no grudge, no wrath, no annoyance, no frustration, no judgment is bottled up in the least amount to us because of our sin. God, who is unable to spare his wrath because he is just, poured out all punishment for sin once and for all in Jesus, so that not a drop is leftover for those who trust in Christ.
There is no condemnation for those in Christ Jesus (Rom. 8:1). He does not deal with us according to our sins, nor repay us according to our iniquities; as far as the east is from the west, so far does he remove our transgressions from us (Ps. 103:10,12). He has, for good, cast our sin into the bottom of the sea and put up a large neon sign, “no fishing allowed”*.
And so, how does this gospel apply to us? How does the notion that God’s powerful forgiveness that is described as forgetting fuel the way we forgive?
We should, then, forgive others in the same way that He has forgiven us. Indeed, it would be hard for us to forgive others of their sin in the same way that God forgives us of our sin if he could simply just forget. We can’t do that. We can forgive yes, but we can’t mentally forget the time when someone did (insert experience) to us. If we could just forget, that would be a lot easier.
However, because God doesn’t technically forget our sin, we have no excuse. His forgiveness of our sin is so strong that it is like he forgot our sin. Similarly, in order to demonstrate the same forgiveness we have received from God, we must also forgive others in such a way that when we relate to or think about or talk to them, we must not do so with a memory of their sin in our thoughts of them or a filter of judgment in our perception of them. We must treat them as God has treated us: a total forgiveness of sin so strong that it is as if they had never wronged us. Total forgiveness fuels a forgetfulness of sin, whereas partial or trite forgiveness allows memory of sin to linger, haunt, and embitter.
To forget is not to basically forgive. But to forgive is to basically forget. We forgive others like God has forgiven us when we do not hold people’s sin against them or define them by their sin—even in the slightest. Rather, we must see them as if they had not sinned in the first place, because God’s love towards us in Christ is as if we had not sinned in the first place. The gospel of our forgiveness in Christ applies to and empowers our forgiveness of others.
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*loose quotation from Corrie Ten Boom
