The Christian Appeal (March 2000)
Issue Theme: Centering on the Cross

A God Who Forgets
by Tom Williams

I pity those poor Jews in the Old Testament. Year after year they endlessly repeated the same animal sacrifices as an annual reminder of their cumulative burden of guilt. I hate to be reminded of my wrongdoing. When I offend someone, I wish there were some way to gain access to his memory bank and erase the knowledge of my unseemly behavior. And     I wish I could forget it.  The awareness of guilt is a source of debilitating anguish.

But we cannot simply forget guilt and start over as if nothing is wrong. Something is wrong, and we cannot cover it up without disastrous results. Guilt is like an acid eating away the lives of countless millions, not only outside the church but within it as well.

Modern psychology understands that guilt is a root cause of malfunction, depression, and aberrant behavior, but psychology has no effective way of removing it. The dominant approach has been to pass the buck to society, environment, or nature. “You should not feel guilty for your feelings of hate and resentment; they are your parents’ fault.” “You should not feel guilty for losing your temper; it’s a natural way of releasing tension and hostility.”

Implicit in all purely psychological approaches to guilt is the premise that guilt is not real, that there is no absolute standard for you to measure yourself by. You are not suffering from real guilt but from mere guilt feelings brought on when you fail to conform to the conventions and expectations of an inhibited society.

Since guilt feelings arise when we fail to meet standards, this theory proposes that we get rid of all standards. Compare yourself to nothing or no one, but set your own path and do exactly and only what you want, ignoring the artificial boundaries imposed by society and religion.

But not only does this approach fail to remove guilt, it aggravates it. According to such logic we would tell the glutton to throw away his bathroom scale and eat to his heart’s content. As long as he just doesn’t weigh himself, he will feel no ill effects. Such an approach could be fatal.

We feel guilty because we are guilty. Guilt is real because sin is real. Sin is real because there is an absolute standard for our lives that resides in God himself. He made us to be like him, and we are not. That is sin. If we ignore  this standard and behave according to our own impulses and appetites we make the sin principle dominant in our lives, incurring an intolerable burden of guilt.

Sin cannot survive in the same universe with God. He could not be called good or perfect if he allowed it to co-exist with him forever. This puts us in a grim predicament because each of us is a little sin-generator. It would have been a fatal predicament if God had not loved us so much that he was willing to separate us from the sin that grips us. And this was no easy operation. To remove that hideous and ravaging tumor of sin while saving the feeble patient cost God more than we can comprehend. The price of sin is death. This is no arbitrary, legalistic price, but one that stems inevitably from the nature of God. Sin must be obliterated to make room for the goodness of God to fill the universe. There is not room for both. That which adheres to the sin principle will be annihilated by the very presence of God.

Jesus paid the price for sin when he was put to death by the forces of Satan. He took the sins that you and I have committed as if they were his own and accepted the penalty for them. As a result of his sacrifice we are as free of guilt as if we had never sinned. Now our condition is what the  Bible calls “justified.”

Major Ian Thomas says the word “justified” means “it is just-as-if-I’d never-sinned.” And he is right. A forgiven sinner looks perfect to God because the Father attributes the sinner’s sins to Christ and attributes the Son’s perfection to the forgiven sinner. If you want God to look at you that way, all you need to do is admit your guilt, place your sins before God, and surrender your life in obedience to him. Then, on the basis of Jesus’ sacrifice, God forgets that you are a sinner and sees you as guiltless as Jesus himself.

Can God really forget? When he looks at us as forgiven, is the knowledge of our sin literally banished from his memory and beyond recall? I suppose it is possible that God merely forgets “in effect.” That is, the knowledge of your sin is locked away deep in his mind where it will never be brought forward because it no longer has any meaning.

Perhaps it is difficult for us to imagine that God actually forgets because we tend to see forgetfulness as a negative attribute associated with waning mental powers or undisciplined habits. But sin itself is negative, and it is not unreasonable to surmise that the knowledge of it has no place in the mind of a positive God.

If God intends to obliterate sin from the universe so his own perfection can dominate totally, why shouldn’t he do the same thing with the awareness of sin in his own mind? We have no compelling reason to assume that Hebrews 10:17 means anything less than exactly what it says—God forgets. And being God, his forgetfulness is perfect. When God forgets, you can be sure the sin is gone.

When the sin is gone, the guilt is gone. Now there is no longer any need to dwell on past misdeeds and offenses. When the Jews laid out their guilt before God with their perpetual annual sacrifices, they were showing faith that God would be true to his promise to remove their sin and relieve their guilt at some point in the future.

But now that Jesus has become the ultimate sacrifice, there is no more need for such dredging up of past sins. Instead of showing faith by remembering, we now show faith by forgetting.

If we continue to feel guilt after receiving forgiveness, we show lack of faith in the efficacy of Jesus’ sacrifice. By that sacrifice your guilt has been removed once and for all. God has forgotten it, and so must you.