What God Already Gave: Forgiveness

Ever wonder why we can forget what we had for breakfast or what we wore yesterday, but offenses–someone else’s or our own–seem to lodge in our memories like planks in our eyes?

When it comes to sin, one fundamental difference between God and His people is this:

We remember.

God forgets.

I like how Max Lucado put it.

“Just as it’s against your nature to eat trees and against mine to grow wings, it’s against God’s nature to remember forgiven sins.“

It’s hard to think of God as the forgetting God. Forgetfulness seems more of a vice. Something to take pills for or the evidence of sleep deprivation.

God remembers His people. He will never forget His promises.

But when we confess and ask God to forgive sin, He forgets.

It’s gone from His memory.

In fact, it’s against His nature to remember.

This isn’t an imagined, hoped-for, made-up characteristic of God. He said it Himself in Isaiah 43:25,

“I even I, am He who blots our your transgressions for My own sake; And I will not remember your sins.“

We tend to ask for His forgiveness over and over, because our guilt and memory burden us down. We want to forget, and we tend to think God hasn’t.

If we could only hear Him say to us in return,

“I gave you forgiveness the first time you asked. I don’t remember it anymore.”

We often ask God for something He already gave: Forgiveness.

Forgiveness that forgets.

When the sins God already forgave haunt you, remember.

He forgot.

“I will forgive their iniquity, and their sins I will remember no more.“ Jeremiah 31:34

By Bethany Hayes
Used by Permission

Forgiveness that forgets.

When the sins God already forgave haunt you, remember.

He forgot.

Further Reading