The God Who Forgets

I’ve sat across the table from inmates who express a common struggle: “I believe Jesus died for my sins, and He forgives me. I just can’t forgive myself.”

The struggle isn’t theirs alone, is it?

We carry a sense of vague or specific disappointment in ourselves over what we should have done differently, where we should have known better. We see and grieve consequences and lost opportunities. And we decide that the best way to ensure our repentance and insure our good standing is to accept God’s forgiveness but keep the mark against ourselves.

The logical fallacy is that we really imply that God’s forgiveness isn’t quite enough. I need to add a little extra something to make sure it’s good enough for me. We attempt to overrule His verdict of “It is finished.” And we partner, essentially, with a spirit of suicide that turns against our own selves and yells, “Kill her anyway,” in spite of all He has done.

Of course that’s not really what we meant to do.

We were afraid.

Afraid that the promise of forgiveness from an all-seeing, all-knowing God is just too good to hope for, in my particular case. Afraid that rejection falls like the second shoe, so we’d better go ahead and brace ourselves. Adam and Eve are our parents, after all.

And in holding what we think is a high standard of justice, we have missed His heart again.

A friend who oversees a discipleship ministry was leaving town for a few weeks. She asked if I would meet with two key leaders in her absence, to be available for prayer or questions. These two women are wise and merciful shepherds of other young believers. It would be a delight to spend time with them.

They recounted and celebrated ways God was active around them, and we prayed about some personal struggles.

In passing, they mentioned an incident where some heated words were exchanged in the ladies’ bathroom. The two parties had later talked it out. These leaders felt it was sufficiently resolved.  No need to speak to me of names or details. Excellent.

On my way out of the building, “Andrea” asked to speak to me.

“You may have heard about an incident that happened in the bathroom.” So much for anonymity.

God had graciously dropped a Scripture in my lap before I left the house that morning. Now I knew what it was for. We walked through it, and I left her with some questions she could process with God, going forward.

I still didn’t really know what happened. Didn’t know who the other party was, or who was to blame. Didn’t care. I’m not even sure if Andrea sought me out of a sense of repentance or a desire to make sure she wasn’t in trouble.

The point in telling the story is what happened afterwards.

Andrea had always been quick to share with me her latest ideas on how God might use her and those around her to help others. But the next few times I saw her, she avoided me.

I don’t know for sure, but I suspect it was incident-related. She assumed I was holding something against her that I wasn’t, a lower opinion of her at the least.

Did I think Andrea was perfect before but now had my bubble burst? No. Did I see value in Andrea before but now tossed it aside? No. Did she do something wrong? Possibly. Was I going to think of a bathroom mirror anytime I ran into her for the next five years? Not even.

But she was afraid I might, so she kept her distance.

And that is where I sensed the heart of God.

I remember the freedom of realizing that at the point in history when Jesus died, ALL of my sins were still in the future. And all of them were forgiven by the sufficiency of Christ’s sacrifice—not just the ones that I committed “before I knew better.”

He’s not keeping His distance from me over my omissions or failures from last week any more than I suddenly shunned Andrea for hers. It just wasn’t on my mind.

And it’s not on His.

That’s not meant to make little of sin. It’s to make much of salvation.

A great line of poetry by Samuel Whitlock Gandy in “His Be the Victor’s Name” was modernized by Zac Hicks,

I love the double meaning of that last line. He was qualified to pay my penalty because He knew no sins of His own. But now when He thinks of me, He knows nothing to hold against me. No matter how much His enemy or my guilty conscience might protest otherwise.

“And their sins and their lawless deeds I will remember no more.” Hebrews 10:17

“In love You have delivered my life from the pit of destruction, for You have cast all my sins behind Your back.” Isaiah 38:17

How can a holy, omniscient God forget about something that serious?

I’d explain it with one of my Dad’s best words.

If I ask my Dad, “What do I owe you for the stuff you picked up for me at Lowe’s?” he would famously say, “I disremember.”

I like that word. Especially applied to God’s stance toward us. No denial of the fact that the supplies cost something. Something he paid. But the debt on my ledger? Disremembered. Not coming to mind. That’s not amnesic forgetfulness. There’s something deliberate about disremembering.

God wanted to hit the lesson with me again from another angle recently. I missed the driveway of a friend’s house and had to make a three-point turn in the street when I realized my absent-minded error. Only I bumped into a mailbox doing so.

I happened to know the couple who lived in that house too. So I knocked on the door and said, “I don’t see any damage, but I bumped into your mailbox. If you notice any problem later, it was me.”

He squinted at the mailbox. Squinted at me. And in his gruffly kind manner, waved me off, saying, “Forget about it! Get outta here.”

Forget about it. That’s the kicker, isn’t it? Not just that God forgets about it but that He invites us to forget about it too. It will not label our identity. It will not define our relationship going forward.

When we’re pretending things are acceptable that aren’t, God is certainly intentional enough to lead us to confession about issues we need to address. But this fear of rejection and vague disappointment we carry about His opinion of us distorts the truth. Like Andrea, and like Adam, we keep a distance that God wants to bridge, not reinforce. His heart was to save you and bring you near. Nothing has changed that.

He came to seek and save what was lost. Whether you lost your cool, lost your way, or lost your mind, nothing is beyond His ability to redeem. Because He has “disremembered” our cringe-worthy moments, we have the privilege to relinquish the shame and forget them as well.

The icing on the cake is in Zechariah 13:2. God will take this merciful forgetting of our stumbles and make our reconciliation to Him a finger-poke in the enemy’s eye:

“And on that day, declares the LORD of hosts, I will erase idol worship throughout the land, so that even the names of the idols will be forgotten.”

The idols—those things that drew us away from Him, our old flames in all their forms that broke His heart and broke His covenant and broke us—they are the forgotten.

Talk about taking away the accuser’s power! The snake likes to mention a name here or there, bring up an incident, to trigger the shame cascade all over again and wear us down.

God is so committed to our full reconciliation that He heals us to the point of expunging the record. Erased. Deleted. File not found. In ultimate poetic justice, about the very ones who would keep us from God, we will one day say, “No, I don’t remember that name.”

What a God! Forgetting our shame and insisting that we leave it behind, along with everything else He has cut off from us, including the names of His enemies that entangled us. They, and the sins you committed in alignment with them, are disremembered. Forgotten.

And you never will be.

Isaiah 66:22 “As surely as my new heavens and new earth will remain, so will you always be my people, with a name that will never disappear,” says the LORD.