“… I will not remember your sins …” (Isa. 43:25, NKJV)
We are currently examining the question – how can the all-knowing God, in his unending knowledge, wisdom and understanding, ever forget anything, as He for instance notes above in Isa. 43:25?
In Hebrew thought the words forget and remember resonate deeper than in Western thought. To remember, in Western thought, focuses mainly on the principle of recalling memories, or linking thoughts to things that have happened. To forget is to not be able to remember a particular incident or event or association in mental terms. Both processes, forgetting and remembering, are thus concerned with mental abilities or inabilities, which is measured according to information coming to the fore, or not.
But the Hebrew verb zakhar encompasses much more than just our understanding of ‘remember’. It includes everything the West links to remembering, but has a very important additional part – it includes the important actions taken to make possible that which is remembered.
To illustrate one can draw from Gen. 8:1 (CV) – “And God remembered Noah, and all the beasts, and all the cattle that were with him in the ark. And God made a wind to pass over the earth, and the waters subsided.”
At first glance it seems as if God actually forgot that poor Noah and his family and all the animals in the ark are still floating around the flood waters. But the word ‘remember’/’forget’ was not a mere random thought of God; it was rather a memory of the covenant that God made with Noah before all these cataclysmic events had dawned.
Later in Genesis we read, “And God remembered Rachel. And God hearkened to her, and opened her womb.” (Gen. 30:22, ACV). The word “remember” focusses on the covenant upon which the event is founded, not necessarily to any mental activity involved in recalling it. In Rachel’s case, to remember strictly speaking means to intervene, and focuses specifically on what God had done, not necessarily that He suddenly remembered it.
The Hebrew words that are used for forget, shakach and nashah, also carry wider implications in terms of their meaning. It means to ignore something, to neglect it, to sacrifice something or to negate a person or a covenant. See Deut. 6:12 as example – “then beware, lest you forget the Lord who brought you out of the land of Egypt, from the house of bondage”. The Israelites intentionally ignored the covenant, they did not merely forget it, as Deut. 4:23 for instance makes clear in more explicit terms: “Take heed to yourselves, lest you forget the covenant of the Lord your God which He made with you …”
When David prays in Ps. 13:2: “How long shall I take counsel in my soul, having sorrow in my heart daily? How long will my enemy be exalted over me?”, it has nothing to do with forgetting, but is rather a call to God asking why He doesn’t do anything to change the situation.
It is immensely interesting that in the Word of God the word forget is not once used along with the word sin; sin is rather used in combination with the phrase not remember. The idea of “remembering sin” reinforces the idea that God functions according to mental faculties, and this creates a negative perception, almost as if God will punish each one according to their sin; He will punish sin, not only hold it in his thoughts, as is for instance suggested in Hos. 9:9: “They are deeply corrupted, as in the days of Gibeah. He will remember their iniquity; He will punish their sins.” This is a beautiful example of parallelism in the Hebrew language:
He will remember their iniquity
He will punish their sins
It is now easy to see that remember and punish can be likened to one another. The implication of this is immensely important – God cannot just forget about sin, it has to be dealt with righteously. Ex. 34:6-7b makes it very clear: “And the Lord passed before him and proclaimed, ‘The Lord, the Lord God, merciful and gracious, longsuffering, and abounding in goodness and truth, keeping mercy for thousands, forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin, by no means clearing the guilty’”. (Also see Ezek. 33:15-16, for instance.)
The implications of this for believers is equally important. We often say of someone who has hurt us – I will forgive him, but I’ll never be able to forget it. Jesus however instates forgiveness as an absolutely necessary requirement in the life of the believer, when he presents it in Matt. 6:15: “But if you do not forgive men their trespasses, neither will your Father forgive your trespasses.” And forgiveness has to also be a perpetual act – up until “seventy times seven” (Matt. 18:22), to infinity within a numerical symbolic.
Many believers are willing to try this, but truly struggle to just forget the transgressions against them, and the fact that they remember this usually irks them, and they often feel that within the depths of their heart they are unable to truly forgive.
But if we then apply the Hebrew thought principle around remember and forget to ourselves, then forgetting is not a mental process, but is rather linked to not remembering, in other words with the conscious choice to consider the transgression against you in terms of a particular covenantal link. The proverb of the unfair servant (Matt. 18:23-25) is specifically concerned with this principle, and Jesus presents the conclusion as such: “And his master was angry, and delivered him to the torturers until he should pay all that was due to him. ‘So My heavenly Father also will do to you if each of you, from his heart, does not forgive his brother his trespasses.’” (verses 34 & 35).
If you think about it – you express much more love when you are hurt by someone and then choose to not remember it (even if you still do), time after time, rather than removing the incident from your thought process forever. The more we can love each other in this way, the easier it becomes to forget the scars of our wounds. But it can only happen if we link remembering and forgetting not merely to mental processes, but to covenantal relationships – 1 John 4:21 makes it clear: “And this commandment we have from Him: that he who loves God must love his brother also.”
Think of remember as the opposite of dismember, with its denotations of tearing something apart, of undoing something. Remembering is concerned with making things whole, of reconciling things, of redoing them. Both require intentional actions.
- Selah: Make sure you have forgiven everyone in you life who have wronged you.
- Read: 39-41; Matt. 16-17; Ps. 40.
Memorise: Ps. 40:7 (how does this verse connect to the rest of the teaching?)
