How Can God Forget Our Sins?

Good morning, Immanuel. When God forgets it is on purpose. He willfully erases our sins from his thoughts.

“I, I am he who blots out your transgressions for my own sake, and I will not remember your sins” (Is. 43:25).

Photo by Owen Michael Grech on Unsplash

Isaiah 43:25 says, “I, I am he who blots out your transgressions for my own sake, and I will not remember your sins.” How does this work? For you or me, forgetfulness is a limitation of ours or a failure of the mind. But God doesn’t forget anything by accident. He can’t. His mind is flawless, his memory perfect, and nothing escapes Him. If He forgot like we forget, then He wouldn’t be a God worth worshiping. He would be mistake-prone and untrustworthy (like us).

So how can God forget our sins and still be perfectly powerful, perfectly good, and perfectly just? Because when God forgets it is on purpose. He willfully erases our sins from his thoughts. 

Here’s how the Bible describes God forgetting our sins:

• He throws them behind his back: Isaiah 38:17 - Behold, it was for my welfare that I had great bitterness; but in love you have delivered my life from the pit of destruction, for you have cast all my sins behind your back.

• He utterly removes them from us: Psalm 103:12 - as far as the east is from the west, so far does he remove our transgressions from us.

• He cleanses us from our sin (erases them): Psalm 51:1-2 - Have mercy on me, O God, according to your steadfast love; according to your abundant mercy blot out my transgressions. Wash me thoroughly from my iniquity, and cleanse me from my sin!

All of this is done through the work of Christ, the one who paid for sin and conquered sin and whose righteousness we now bear. In Him, our sins are forgotten and forgiven.