Bible Verse of the Day Saturday May 13th ,2023

Ephesians 4:32 Be kind and compassionate to one another, forgiving each other, just as in Christ God forgave you.

A common misconception has been circling and orbiting the Christian world for many generations. That is, if we are genuinely going to forgive someone, we must also be ready to forget. This act of forgetting would entail removing from our memories all the agonizing and distressing events that brought with it the necessity of forgiveness in the first place. We would have to pretend that none of the incidents that caused the hard feelings ever happened. Attempting to forget something like that is like painting our old rusty truck without sanding it down and removing all the tarnish. It would cover over the rust briefly, but eventually, the rust and corrosion would start to show through.  

 

Many people out there refer to the writings of the prophet Jeremiah and the model of God’s forgiveness as far as forgive and forget (Jerimiah 31:34). This has led many to the false belief that forgiving and forgetting go hand in hand. Some people have the idea that God forgets sins once he forgives us. In one respect, God does forget our sins because he will never use them as evidence against us. But, on the other hand, the creator of all in Heaven and all on Earth does not forget things in the manner we forget. We can delete memory from our computer drives; as we get older, our recollections will not be as good as they once were; however, all the histories of eternity are continually and perpetually before his observation. 

 

In studying God’s Holy Word, we will read about the sins of Peter, Paul, Abraham, David, Moses, and many other great people of God. God has not forgotten their sins, but they will not be evidence against them. Because of their sins and our sins, there has been a debt incurred, the wages of sin (Romans 6:23). It is this debt incurred by our sin that God forgets. Our Lord and Savior, Christ Jesus, does not demand or require that we wipe from our memory all the sins of the people around us. That would be humanly impossible, and He also would not be pleased if we just pretended we forgot. God wants us to forgive those who sin against us (Matthew 6:14-15); similarly, he forgives our sins against him (Matthew 18:23-35). 

 

God does not forget the sins we commit against Him, but He forgets the debt owed because of that sin. So, this is how we are supposed to forgive those that sin against us, we may not forget the sin, but we are supposed to forget and forgive the debt that the sin incurred. The debt our sins have incurred was all paid for on the hill of Calvary. The blood sacrifice cleared any debt that we owed because of our sins. Christ Jesus gave His life to pay that debt. If we follow the two greatest commandments (Matthew 22:36-40), we will want to give our lives back to God, not in one great flash of glory, but in small increments, living for Him and surrendering to Him more, day by day.