Sunday 15 May 2011

Good news of memory loss

From Challies' The Next Story, following on from yesterday's quote:
While the search engines may never forget, while those who capture data about us may never forget, we serve a God who does forget and who places great emphasis on the virtue of forgetting. He accepts all those who turn to him and confess their sins. Psalm 103:12 promises, "As far as the east is from the west, so far does he remove our transgressions from us." In Hebrews 8:12, God makes this promise: "I will be merciful toward their iniquities, and I will remember their sins no more." And in these things he commands us to imitate him - to forgive all offences and to never again bring those sins to mind.

How can we forgive if we can never forget? How can we move beyond a sinful past if we know that the evidence of it lives on somewhere, waiting to be mined, waiting to be discovered? Can we leave a past transgression between ourselves and God, knowing that the evidence of us remains in a database and may someday be drawn out?

Even today, when Facebook will remember every old boyfriend, every bad photograph and unkind word, every foolish sin of our younger days, we must be willing and eager to forgive as we've been forgiven, to forget as God has forgotten our transgressions against him.

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