I remember once hearing someone say, “Did you know that I can do something that God can’t do? I can remember my sins, while God cannot!â€Â Now I fully understand what the person was attempting to communicate. He was extolling the graciousness of a God who didn’t go digging up past sins which had previously been confessed and forgiven. However, does the Bible teach that God actually forgets (is unable to recall) what those sins were or that we in fact committed them?Â
A God with one arm tied behind His back
Both the Old and New Testaments are replete with references, even promises, to God forgetting and no longer “remembering†people’s sins which He has forgiven. The Old Testament prophet Isaiah records God’s declaration, “I, even I, am He who blots out your transgressions, for my own sake, and remembers your sins no more†(Is 43:25). Likewise, the New Testament author of Hebrews affirms God’s promise in the old covenant when he quotes the book of Jeremiah, “For I [God] will forgive their wickedness and will remember their sins no more†(Heb 8:12). And we could look at numerous others. Clearly, this is a common statement throughout Scripture. But what does it mean?
One possibility, as mentioned above, is that this means God, in some way, is truly unable to recollect our past sins. But let’s think about the consequences that this view would entail. It would mean that God doesn’t know all truth. Suppose while writing this blog post, I paused for a moment and began coveting my friend’s Mac computer (there may be more truth to this than you know!). Then suppose that I recognized my sinful covetous thoughts and so confessed them to God, asking for His forgiveness and help to be content with what I have. Well, if God’s forgiveness leads to or entails His inability to recall my sins, then God wouldn’t know this true statement: “Brent coveted two minutes ago.â€Â And God wouldn’t be able to make statements like the one recorded in book of Ecclesiastes 7:20, “There is not a righteous man on earth who does what is right and never sins.â€Â On this view, as far as God knows after He forgives me, I may have never sinned before.
But this problem extends beyond being a mere theological or philosophical problem. It is a problem that reaches down into the practicality of living. If the above interpretation of God is accurate, I now have a God who really doesn’t know much about my own past (after all, I’ve been forgiven a lot in my life!).  I don’t want a God like that. That would mean He doesn’t understand the depths of my life-long personal struggles and debilitating tendencies toward selfishness. And so this God can’t strengthen me at my weakest points of pride or anger because, so long as I’ve been forgiven in those areas of my life, He’s unaware that I so often fail there. Yet, I need a God who is familiar with all of me—the good and the bad—and who still loves me. After all, isn’t that our truest experience of love—someone who knows us completely and still loves us completely? So, if God is still able to mentally recall our past sins, how are we to understand what the Bible means when it tells us that God “forgets†our sins?
When God “forgetsâ€
There are two primary ways that we can talk about what God is like. The first is to speak of His attributes or qualities. God is eternal, creative, patient, gracious, and so on. The second way is to speak in anthropomorphic terms, as if He were human. And so we use human images to paint pictures of how His attributes play in our lives. We say God is like a loving father, a shepherd, king, redeemer, fortress, rock, and the like. With this in mind, think of God’s attribute as a forgiver communicated in anthropomorphic terms as one who forgets. Here’s the idea. When a human person forgets something—suppose a loan given to a friend—he or she doesn’t follow-through with actions to collect payment. So, in human terms, memory is tied to action.Â
The Bible constantly employs this idea of God both “remembering†and “forgetting.â€Â When the biblical authors speak of God’s intentions to act on behalf of His people, they often articulate it as God “remembering†His covenant (Lev 26:44-46). Memory is always tied to actions. This is the point the Bible makes with God’s forgiveness. The psalmist David rejoices in how God has separated David from his sin “as far as the east is from the west†(Ps 103:12). Of course, the punch of this picture is that there is no place where east and west meet. So, there is no location where God is storing our sins to later go back and dig them up. The sin removal is permanent and profound. And just like a human person who has absolutely forgotten a debt, and who will therefore not be moved to action, so God will never resurrect our sins which have been confessed and blotted out by our liberally gracious God.Â
Psalm 103:8-13
8 The LORD is compassionate and gracious,
      slow to anger, abounding in love.
 9 He will not always accuse,
      nor will he harbor his anger forever;
 10 he does not treat us as our sins deserve
      or repay us according to our iniquities.
 11 For as high as the heavens are above the earth,
      so great is his love for those who fear him;
 12 as far as the east is from the west,
      so far has he removed our transgressions from us.
 13 As a father has compassion on his children,
      so the LORD has compassion on those who fear him;
7 Comments on “Does God really ‘forget’ when He forgives?”
An interesting idea to ponder. A couple of thoughts: first, you refer a few times to what “we need” from God, as if our needs determine His nature. While God ceertainly meets our needs, He isn’t altered or determined by them. He is.
I suspect that when we finally get to see God and experience His true nature, we’ll chuckle at our feeble attempts to express His attributes in words. It’s “obvious” that a person cannot forget and remember at the same time, but God’s not a person. Like many other apparent paradoxes that result from giving God human characteristics, I’d guess that this one will be resolved in a way we cannot possibly imagine from our limited perspective.
I believe He knows me intimately, all of my flaws and failures, and I believe at the same time that He turns the page on my sins and glues it shut, never to be seen again. How is that possible? For me, it’s not. Fortunately for all of humanity, God’s capabilities exceed mine!
Hey, Rich!
You’re right, God’s nature isn’t determined by our “needs†or desires. That is, our contingent needs don’t have causal effect on God’s necessary nature. But my point here was that if God promises to be our utter fulfillment, and if of our most basic needs are to be (1) fully known and, (2) fully loved, then it necessitates (I “needâ€) a God who can meet both of these criteria of knowing and loving. So, I was trying to demonstrate that God must be intimately familiar with our sin and weaknesses.
What I was suggesting in this post is not that we need to wait to have a paradox resolved in eternity, but that if we rightly understand the biblical authors’ use of anthropological language applied to God, we can grasp their meaning here and now. After all, I don’t think the biblical authors were meaning to communicate ideas which would be comply obscure to their listeners, or which they themselves didn’t know the meaning of. Rather, I think they were employing a figure of speech commonly used both in the ancient world as well as today. Think for just a moment about how you used one in your response. You wrote, “I believe…that [God] turns the page on my sins and glues it shut, never to be seen again.†You were using anthropological language to get at a truth about God. And the fact that it’s a matter of speech which must be correctly understood as such doesn’t in anyway lessen the truth of what you communicated—that God completely forgives our confessed sins.
Ultimately, I’m attempting to offer a way to understand to the biblical authors’ (as I believe they intended to be understood) use of anthropological language.
Brent,
I’ve been pondering this a lot, and I posted a response to one aspect of it in my blog: http://tinyurl.com/ckymqc
Let me know what you think.
Rich,
I appreciate your tension you’re trying to balance between having knowing of God and yet recognizing the mysteries that we can’t know. So, I’d completely agree that we can have knowledge of God which accurately corresponds to His nature, while recognizing that it’s not comprehensive knowledge. After all, this is the case even with our knowledge of finite things such as pens, computers, table, even people.
I guess the only area I’d take issue with is the idea that God can both forget and know everything at the same time and in the same sense. You wrote that while the Bible contains paradoxes it does not contain contradictions. Maybe some of this comes down to what a person means by “paradox.†I understand a paradox to be a condition where two lines of reasoning lead to mutually exclusive conclusions. So, this can lead one to conclude that either (1) the paradox really ends in a contradiction or a logically impossible state of affairs, or (2) only an apparent contradiction which is more like a puzzle and which has the possibility of being resolved or figured out.
An example of the latter would be Jesus’ statement that in order for a person to save their life he or she must lose it for his sake. But I’d suggest that an example of a true logical contradiction would be the suggestions that “God can both ‘forget’ and ‘know everything’ at the same time.†I’d amend what you stated in your post, God can do anything…which is meaningful and/or logically possible.
You know, rather than going on here too much, maybe I’ll try to write a blog post about this—good discussion!
I think God chooses to not remember our sins.
This is a very interesting concept, does God actually forget?
Although I may recal my sins, does Mankind forget?
A Clergy I had one time knew of a greivious sin I had committed & repented of. Probly 6 or 7 years later that same Clergy called me & asked me to assist the Church with a specific task. I questioned him, questioned his trust in me. Questioning if I could be trusted in that specific service to the Church. As we discussed his trust in me I came to realize that over the years he had forgotten my confession, my sins, that in fact my repentance was complete & that I had in fact been forgiven.
I still declined the Clergy’s request as I feared I could not trust myself just yet. Perhaps I had not truely forgiven myself at that time – if I were asked today to perform that same service for the Church, I would not hesitate, a resounding YES!
It was many many years later that an associate of mine that had been a victim & was seriously angered by my acts initiated contact with me. He spoke of how he had thought of me often & wondered what had come of me, where I had gone in life what I had been doing. He knew we had had a falling out though could not recall why or what had led to it. He too over time had found peace within himself & was thus able to forgive me & then as the years past was able to forget the acts I had committed that had led to our departure. He did recall them after I reminded him of 1 aspect, 1 detail, though in recalling them he seemed to do so with a bit of wisdom, the wisdom that comes with spiritual growth & learning of the harm to one’s own self by holding grudges.
All of our acts, all of our sins, form a part of who we are. Just as in life, we are the person we are because of our past even if others don’t recall our past. Some do recal parts of our past though that doesn’t really change who we have become since.
I believe with forgiveness does not necessarily come a true forgetting but rather a point where the forgiven sin no longer matters, no longer influances our decisions & no longer the influences the decisions of others.
Frequently the last person to actually forgive us of our sins, of our mistakes, is our ownselves!
How often do we second guess our decisions because of bad experience, a bad choice, years ago? Or have we gotten to a point where we trust our decisions again?
Brent,
If we are forgiven and are sins are forgotten
as we see in many verses, why is there judgement and what exactly does that mean? I am perplexed by this notion as it seems paradoxical. Do I one day answer to the sins I have committed even though I have repented and been forgiven and these sins have been forgotten?
Or are we given the time and chance to deal with our own sins and judgement as stated in 1 Corinthians 11:31 and if we don’t deal with it ourselves, then we will be judged?
This troubles me.