“…and will not remember thy sins.”—Isa. 43:25.
“I will remember their sin no more.”—Jer. 31:34.
“Their sins and their iniquities will I remember no more.”—Heb. 8:12.
One of the clearest teachings in all the Bible is that our God, the God of the Bible, is omniscient. By that we simply mean that He sees everything, hears everything and knows everything.
Let me illustrate.
Friends, our God is never surprised, never shocked. You have heard people say, “That’s news to me!” Nothing is news to God. He is well aware of everything that is happening on this earth.
Our God is omniscient when it comes to wars. He was not shocked by the Civil War, World War I, World War II, Korea or Vietnam. That One who said there shall be “wars and rumours of wars,” heard the clanking of the sword, the pop of the musket, the roar of the cannons in eternity past. All the blood spilled on the battlefields of the world did not come as a surprise to Him who saw Nathanael under the fig tree.
Again I say, He is not surprised by the rise of wicked despots across this world. He has the hairs in Osama bin Laden’s head all numbered. Hitler was not a rude awakening to our Heavenly Father. Stalin, Mao Tse-tung and all the other tyrants down through history were nothing more than puppets in the hand of that One who “knoweth our frame.”
Again, He is never perplexed by catastrophic events that shake Planet Earth. He knew the course of the Korean jetliner destroyed by the murderous Russians. He saw beforehand the sinking of the “unsinkable” Titanic. The Chicago Fire and the earthquake that shook San Francisco were not astonishments to Him.
I’m simply saying to you that our God is from everlasting to everlasting, all-knowing. The Bible verifies this in verse after verse. Hebrews 4:13 says, “All things are naked and opened unto the eyes of him with whom we have to do.” My friends, have you forgotten that there are two invisible eyes that run to and fro throughout the whole earth, beholding both the evil and the good?
Again the Bible says in Proverbs 5:21, “For the ways of man are before the eyes of the Lord.” Get that phrase—“the ways of man.” No trip to the grocery store, no visit to the restaurant, no appointment with the dentist escapes His eyes. He knows what goes on behind the closed doors of our homes. He sees the filth, the perverted debauchery that taints the streets of San Francisco. He is sensitive to every decision made in the White House. Nothing that appears in our newspapers is news to Him.
We read in Jeremiah 23:24: “Can any hide himself in secret places that I shall not see him? saith the Lord. Do not I fill heaven and earth? saith the Lord.” The Bible is saying there is not a place so dark, not a spot so remote that a man can hide from the all-knowing God Almighty.
The psalmist sums it up for us in a beautiful way in Psalm 139: “Whither shall I go from thy spirit? or whither shall I flee from thy presence? If I ascend up into heaven, thou art there: if I make my bed in hell, behold, thou art there. If I take the wings of the morning, and dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea; “Even there shall thy hand lead me, and thy right hand shall hold me.”—Vss. 7–10.
One person in the Bible that perhaps expressed omniscience better than anyone was Hagar. As she ran from the wrath of Sarah, alone in the wilderness, she met the Lord by a well. After He named her expected son and sent her back to Sarah, she said, “Thou God seest me” (Gen. 16:13).
And I believe every one of us, if we know our Bibles and full well realize the power of God, would have to admit, “Thou God seest me.” He sees our heart; He sees our thoughts; He sees our motives; He reads our very sentiments and goals; He knows us from the top of our head to the bottom of our feet. Every hair is numbered; every thought is written down. God Almighty knows. He is omniscient! And may the Spirit of God write this upon our hearts today.
But wait! In spite of His omniscience, in spite of the fact that He is always there, I say to you that there are at least four instances where God says, “I will remember their sin no more”! God is actually saying it is possible for Him to “forget.”
Now it’s mighty hard for me to associate forgetfulness with omniscience. Can One who is all-knowing, can One who is always there, can One who always sees and hears, actually forget? It’s easy for me to associate forgetfulness with finite men like you and me. It’s an infirmity of the old flesh. All of us have problems with forgetfulness. We forget names. We forget promises we make.
Oh, yes! Not too long ago a friend promised me a set of books, a set I had wanted for a long time. The books would have been a great aid to my teaching ministry. But my friend forgot. We forget promises!
We forget those we love. We forget that birthday card. We forget that anniversary present. We even forget Mom’s kiss when we leave the home. Our boy goes off to college, and he forgets the letter to Mom and Dad.
And sad, sad the bitter wail—we even forget Almighty God! Psalm 9:17 says, “The wicked shall be turned into hell, and all the nations that forget God.” Ecclesiastes 12:1 says, “Remember now thy Creator in the days of thy youth.”
Why does God have to remind us to remember Him? Because in this frail flesh, we are prone to forget. Psalm 103:2 says, “Bless the Lord, O my soul, and forget not all his benefits.” God has to remind us to remember Him. Forgetful souls we are!
In I Corinthians 11:24, the Bible says, “This do in remembrance of me”—speaking of the Lord’s Supper. Why did God institute the Lord’s Supper? One big reason is so He could give us something that would keep us from forgetting Him. Man is so prone to forget.
We forget faces; we forget promises; we forget names; we even forget God in Heaven. Yes, my friend, it’s easy to see that man is forgetful. But how do we associate forgetfulness, nonremembrance, with omniscience? God says He knows everything. God says He sees everything. God says He hears everything. The Bible verifies that He is omniscient. Yet four times it says, “I will remember their sin no more.” How do we explain it?
I think it is easy and both beautiful and precious to the Christian. The omniscient God’s forgetfulness is deliberate. Did you get that? Theologically it is judicial. It is part of His grace and mercy.
My friend, the day God saved you, He gave you a home in Heaven and indwelt you by His Holy Spirit; and He also forgot your sins. He positionally justified you just as though you had never sinned. Oh, what a blessed thought! If we’re saved, God has not only forgiven our sins and washed them in His own blood, but He has literally, in His mind, forgotten those sins. That moves me, stirs me up, when I think it was my dirty sin that marred His creation, that put thorns on the rose bush and venom in the fangs of the serpent. And, yes, it was my putrefying sin that drove Jesus Christ up Calvary’s mountain. It was my shame that brought the prick of the nails in His hands and feet, the thorns in His brow, the spear in His side. I’m overwhelmed to think that God loves me enough not only to forgive my sins, but never to hold them against me again! Oh, what grace!
I thank God not only for His forgiveness, but for His divine forgetfulness.
Nineteen long years I was in sin, and one of my greatest blessings was to study what happened to my sin when I got saved.
First, God put my sins behind His back, and He said to Himself, That is not far enough.
Second, He cast those sins in the depths of the sea, and He said, That is still not far enough.
Then He took those sins, removed them as far as the East is from the West, and said, That is still not far enough. They might be found. I will have to do something else.
Then He blotted them out, erased them from His memory. He doesn’t even remember them!
I like what Charles Haddon Spurgeon said about his sins: When I received Christ, neither time with its lapses, nor suffering with its fretting, nor doubt with its venom, nor death with its terrors, can ever resurrect my sins. They are clean gone, clean gone, clean gone from the memory of God.
If that doesn’t bless you, friend, nothing will!
If the Devil comes to Jesus Christ tomorrow and says, “Hey, what about Bob Kelley?” Jesus will say, “What about him? What about all his sins?”
Jesus will look down from His intercessory throne and say, “Oh, I don’t recall those.”
I remember when I first got saved and had come home from college where I had been playing football. I secured a really good job. I wanted to go to Tennessee Temple. I’d been called to preach, and one of my good friends had gotten me a job at Combustion Engineering. I sat at those blueprint desks hour after hour; and, like Niagara, for eight hours a day, the Devil would take my sins of the past and roll them over the falls of my mind. Sin after sin, filth after filth played havoc with my mind. I believe that every sin I had ever committed left fly tracks across my heart during those days.
Finally, one day I could take no more, so I went in the men’s rest room where I could be alone, got down on my knees and cried, “Oh, God, if this is Christianity, I can’t stand it. I can’t live with my past sins.” All of a sudden, God reminded me of Jeremiah 31:34 and Isaiah 43:25. He seemingly said, “Son, I don’t remember your sins; when are you going to stop remembering them?”
Thank God, on that eventful day, I left my sins in His hands. If He could forget them, in my weakness I would reckon upon His power to help me forget them.
Now let’s talk about the forgetfulness of God. What does it take for God to forget your sins? What does it require for Him to remove them and blot them out? What is the process of God’s forgetfulness?
I think there are three things that we need to see. If you need comfort, you’ll get some. If you need conviction, you’ll get some. I believe this message has something in it for every person.
I. He Works a Miracle Upon Himself
When God forgets our sins, He works a miracle upon Himself. Our God is a Miracle Worker. He can stand on the edge of eternity and with fiery fingertips make worlds. He can stand on the brink of the Red Sea and say, “Come on, waters, roll back!” and there will be a dry path through the sea. He can stand at Daniel’s den of lions and give the beasts lockjaw. He can make the sun stand still in its strength. He can open blind eyes, unclog deaf ears, arrest multiple sclerosis. This Miracle Worker can mend the heart.
I want you to see this. When God saved you and me, He had to work a miracle on Himself. Let me explain.
In the strictest sense of the word, when we use the word omniscience, that word does not allow for forgetfulness. In the strictest sense of the word, when one is referred to as omniscient (and God is the only One who is), that means he must know everything instantaneously. Everything past, everything present, everything future must be in his mind at every moment. To God, the life of Abraham, who lived two thousand years earlier than Peter, is just as familiar as Peter’s. Omniscience sees all things at one time.
Think about it. In order for God to forget your sins, He had to work a miracle in His own omniscience. He had to erase His mind.
Let this speak to your hearts today. God never forgets His universe. He has millions of solar systems to care for. His stars are numberless. He calls them all by name. He tends to the sun and keeps the planets in their orbits. He doesn’t forget His universe, yet He takes time to forget our ugly sins. He blots them out of His mind.
God never forgets His children. I think of the universal Flood. The Bible says that “God remembered Noah.” See Jonah in the whale’s belly. God didn’t forget him. God remembered Jonah. See Elijah by the brook Cherith. How sad he must have been! But the Bible says God didn’t forget him. He sent the ravens twice a day to feed him. And the One who clothes the lily, that One who takes note of every sparrow that falls, hasn’t forgotten, and won’t forget, you.
You may feel lonely. You may feel like you’ve gone the last mile of the way. You may feel like the world has passed you by. No, no! God hasn’t forgotten you. He never forgets His children.
Oh, isn’t it wonderful that the One who cannot forget anything about His children or universe made it so He could forget our sins!
God never forgets kind deeds that are done. He never forgets the cold water given in His name. He never forgets tender words, generous prayers, unselfish gifts. He never forgets those tired hours of visitation. He never forgets any good thing we ever do. But the One who cannot forget worked a miracle on His mind so that He would forget our sins the moment He forgave them. God’s forgiveness and God’s forgetfulness go hand in hand.
There are some things we have to work at to remember. We go to a funeral, and we take an old rose and press it in our Bible and keep it for years. Why? Because that will make us remember. We take pictures of that sweet baby who went to be with Jesus. We want to remember that sweet face.
But God’s memory is not like that, folks. He doesn’t have to have anything to cause Him to remember. He remembers every part and particle, every minute detail of life. Yet that One who remembers with ease worked a miracle on His own memory and said, “I will remember their sin no more.”
The Mind that cannot forget, the omniscient One who always remembers, made it so He would never remember our sins! Hallelujah!
He worked a miracle on Himself.
II. He Freed Himself to Work Miracles Through Us
I want you to see the position of the sinner, that one who is lost from Jesus Christ, alienated from God. He is an enemy of Jesus Christ. A middle wall of partition literally separates him from God Almighty. A great gulf is fixed between him and God. Now for God to bless and use us, He has to remove the gulf. He has to destroy the enmity. He literally has to obliterate the barrier between Himself and us. This requires not only His forgiveness but His forgetfulness.
If God hadn’t forgotten our sins, if He remembered those sins against us, there would be some things He couldn’t do for us.
If He remembered our sins,
A. He Could Not Have Received Us Into His Family
The Bible says in John 1:12 that “as many as received him, to them gave he power to become the sons of God.” Can you imagine having an earthly father who could remember even the most minute sin you ever committed? He wouldn’t have enjoyed having you in his family if he could remember your sins twenty-four hours a day. God forgets our sins so that both Father and son can enjoy the sonship relationship.
If God had remembered our sins,
B. He Could Not Have Let the Holy Spirit Come to Live in Us
The Bible says in Romans 8:16,17, “The Spirit itself beareth witness with our spirit, that we are the children of God: “And if children, then heirs; heirs of God, and joint-heirs with Christ; if so be that we suffer with him, that we may be also glorified together.”
Our bodies are the tabernacle, or temple, of the Holy Spirit. Do you think that God the Holy Spirit (and the Holy Spirit is God) would enjoy living in your body remembering all the filth of your past? No. He had to make it so that there would be no sin to remember—past, present or future.
If God remembered our sins,
C. He Could Not Be Our Intercessor; He’d Have to Be Our Accuser
Oh, yes, Jesus sits at the Father’s right hand, not to bring railing accusations against us for our sin, but to intercede for us before God. He is there to pray for us, not to accuse us.
If God remembered our sins,
D. He Could Not Use Us in His Service
Can you imagine how many sins Paul the apostle committed? Could God have used him had He remembered his sins?
Can you imagine how many sins John Newton committed, vile sinner that he was; or how many sins Moses committed? And, yes, can you imagine how many sins Bob Kelley committed? There would be no usefulness in any of us if God remembered and held our sins against us. You couldn’t teach that Sunday school class or drive that bus or preach the Word of God or sing. You couldn’t do anything for the Saviour if you knew God was still holding your sins against you. You would live in constant grief and guilt. Aren't you glad He removed them?
Two women in Chicago were having a feud. One said, “Well, I’ll fix her.” So she built a great, high fence between her house and her neighbor’s house. The sad thing about it was, when she built her fence, she shut out the sun. The grass started to die, the flowers began to wilt, and her yard became an ugly mess.
Before we were saved, there was a high fence between us and God. But the day we got saved, He removed the fence; and the sun began to shine, and now we can serve Him. My greatest privilege is that I can stand behind this sacred desk without the guilt of my sin and preach the Gospel of Jesus Christ. If I thought for one minute that God was remembering my sins against me, I couldn’t preach but would instead die with guilt.
I don’t know anything more precious. Do you? He had to work a miracle upon Himself. He had to work a miracle upon the saint.
III. He Works a Miracle Upon the Records In Heaven
For God to forget our sins, He has to work a miracle upon the records of Heaven. I want every person reading this who is not saved to know right now that, in Heaven, there is a record of your sins; and those sins are against you. I don’t have to go very far in Scripture to prove that. The Bible says in Romans 14:12, “So then every one of us shall give account of himself to God.” How can men give an account if there are no records that make them accountable?
Again, in Daniel 7:10, Daniel looked up, and the Bible says, “The books were opened.” He is talking about the divine accounts that are held against the sinner. Note the books are plural. These are books of deeds.
Again, in Revelation 20:12 (and this seals it), John said, “And I saw the dead, small and great, stand before God; and the books were opened.” What books? The books of works, the books of sins, the books of deeds done.
When I first got saved, I helped to organize a men’s quartet; and this is one of the songs we used to sing:
There was a time on earth
When in the book of Heav’n
An old account was standing
For sins yet unforgiv’n.
My name was at the top,
And many things below;
I went unto the Keeper
And settled long ago.
If you are without Jesus Christ, you have an account that must be settled. And the only One who has perfectly settled that account in the history of mankind is Jesus Christ when He went to the cross. He paid the debt for every sin on your record. And the only thing necessary to erase that record is to come to Him and cry, “Oh, God, be merciful to me, a sinner”; and the whole account will be settled.
Sinner, I encourage you not to forget the books; because the minute you ask Jesus Christ to save you, God is going to work a miracle on the books. Isaiah 44:22 says, “I have blotted out, as a thick cloud, thy transgressions.” The minute you get saved, He is going to erase the books, and He is going to erase His mind. And it will be just as though you have never sinned. All your sins—past, present and future—will have been literally obliterated by the blood of Jesus Christ, and you will be justified forever.
A meat market was about to go out of business. The proprietor had sold too much meat on credit. So he put a sign in the window which said, “Everyone who owes me anything will have his name and the amount he owes me on the front of the window next Saturday.” Naturally, a lot of money came in that week.
My sinner friend, in Heaven your name is posted, and what you owe God is beside it—every filthy, dirty sin is listed there. Somebody has to pay your sin debt. You will either pay for it yourself by going to Hell, or you will trust in Jesus’ payment on the cross to pay it for you.
When I first started preaching, my mother came to hear me. All I knew to do in my sermon was to give my testimony. As a young preacher, many times I’d tell about my past sins. I don’t do that anymore. If He’s forgotten them, I want to too. But I remember I would mention some of my old sins. I was reared in a rough area; so, naturally, being a young man of the streets, I had my sins.
After I had preached, my mama came up to me and said, “Son, I don’t remember all those things you did.” It’s like a mother not to remember her son’s sins. And it’s like God not to remember ours. In His grace, He takes care of that. When He forgives your sins, He forgets them. He wipes the slate clean. He forgets you ever sinned or ever will sin. He takes off your old robe of self-righteousness and puts on you a new one—His own righteousness. Romans 4:8 says, “Blessed is the man to whom the Lord will not impute sin.”
Sinner, come to Christ! Then when God sees you, He will see the righteousness of Jesus Christ.
Praise God, when God forgives, He forgets! That’s grace!