Can God Forget?

This is an excerpt from Spurgeon's sermon "Free Pardon" found updated in Lost and Found (see SHOPPING).

I will not remember your sins. —Isaiah 43:25
Notice that wonderful expression, “I will not remember your sins.” Can God forget? Forgetting with God cannot be an impairment like it is with us. We forget because our memory fails, but God forgets in the blessed sense that he remembers the merit of his Son rather than our sins. God forgets sin in the sense that he remembers it is forgiven. I think it was Augustine (who had once been a great sinner) who after he was converted was met in the street by one with whom he had often fallen into sin. When she spoke to him and said, “Augustine, it is I,” he said, “Ah, but it is not I, I am dead, and made alive again.” When God’s justice meets a man who believes in Jesus, that man is no longer the I that sinned, because that I is dead in Christ.
“We know that our old self was crucified with him.” The believer was buried with Christ and he that is dead is free from the law that condemned him. How can the law arrest a dead man? So, we who are dead in Christ and risen again in him are new creatures, and do not come under the divine sentence. God now knows us not as sinners, but as new creatures in Christ Jesus. He knows and recognizes in us the new life, because “he has caused us to be born again to a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead.” That is one of the instructive features of baptism. In baptism the believer pictures the doctrine of salvation by death and burial. That was Noah’s salvation. He went into the ark as one dead to the world. He was buried in the ark and then he floated out from the old world into the new. The apostle Peter mentioned Noah and the ark and said, “Baptism, which corresponds to this, now saves you, not as a removal of dirt from the body but as an appeal to God for a good conscience, through the resurrection of Jesus Christ.” That is, baptism is a picture of salvation, because it illustrates our death with Christ, our burial with Christ, and our resurrection with Christ.

Where there is true faith and the soul has fellowship with Christ, we are dead and buried with him in baptism, “in order that, just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, we too might walk in newness of life.” Death has come upon us, “because we have concluded this,” says the apostle Paul, “that one has died for all, therefore all have died; and he died for all, that those who live might no longer live for themselves but for him who for their sake died and was raised.” Beloved, in that case, if we are dead, then I am not surprised that God says he does not remember our sins, because we are new creatures and we have passed from death to life. We have come into a new life and God looks on us from a new point of view. He sees us from a new perspective; not as offspring of the first Adam condemned and dead, but of the second Adam, the Lord from heaven, the living and life giving Spirit. He is justified in saying to people who are new creatures, “I will not remember your sins.”

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Thank you for posting this Such an encouragement

Digs Gardens said...

The best news is that God will forgive us and then put that sin behind Him where it will never be brought up again.