Matt Tully

I want to return back to that Etch A Sketch metaphor that you used a few minutes ago. I think it’s powerful because we know that with an Etch A Sketch, once you shake that thing and turn it upside down, it’s gone. There’s no undo button, unlike maybe a computer today where anything you do can be brought back with a quick shortcut. I wonder if people might be thinking, Does that metaphor work with God? This fits in with another one of the things you draw out in the book about God and how he relates to our sin. Isaiah 43:25 is a famous passage. God says, “I, I am he who blots out your transgressions for my own sake, and I will not remember your sins.” There’s a question in my mind and maybe in other Christian’s minds: How does that work with God? How could God not have an undo button? Could he truly forget something, in the sense that we can erase and completely remove like we can with an Etch A Sketch? How do we understand this verse? What is he trying to say there? Does God truly forget our sins?

Sam Storms

Great question, and I am happy to answer it. I also just want to squeeze in on the front end of my answer that the book addresses twelve different ways in which God has dealt with our sin. He removes it as far as the east is from the west, he casts it in the depths of the sea, he tramples it underfoot, he turns his face away from it—all of these incredibly beautiful metaphors and analogies and illustrations, that’s what constitutes the bulk of the book. The one that you brought up is probably one of my favorites. It’s important to remember a distinction between forgetting and choosing not to remember. You and I cannot choose to forget. If we try to forget something, guess what? It’s going to be right in the forefront of our thinking. It races back into our minds. So, no, God cannot forget anything. God is omniscient. He knows everything exhaustively in minute detail. That’s what it means to say God is all-knowing. But when God says I will not remember, I think what he’s saying is, I will never bring up your sin to you and use it against you. I will never throw it back in your face. Think about how different this is for us. If somebody violates me or betrays my confidence, my tendency is to say, I will never let you forget this. I’m going to bring it up at every opportunity. I’m going to use it against you. I’m going to hold it over your head. When God says, I will not remember their sins anymore, he’s saying, I will never do that. I won’t bring it up. It’s not that I’ve pushed delete in my infinite mind and somehow I can’t remember your years of unbelief or rejection of Christ or your sexual immorality before you were born again. I simply will never bring that up. I will never use it against you. I will never throw it back in your face. It will never become a factor in how you and I relate one to another. That’s the glory of God’s promise not to remember. So, the idea that God forgets—no, but in a sense, yes, because he says, I won’t remember it. So, as far as we’re concerned, that’s basically what we mean by saying that God forgets it.

Matt Tully

It’s almost a more beautiful statement when you realize it and understand it that way. There’s a decision that God is making, not to hold our sin against us. That’s how much he loves us, that he would choose never to bring it up again.

Sam Storms

I think one of the great glorious things about life in the new heaven and the new earth after Christ returns is that we will remember our sins, but not in a way that will diminish our joy. We will remember them for the sake of delighting in the reality of forgiveness. We’ll think, My goodness! Look at what God has done for me! Let me worship him all the more passionately and sincerely. I strongly suspect that we will see, in eternity future, how God orchestrated our lives for our good in spite of our sin, how he made use of our transgressions to bring honor to his own name. But not for the purpose of bringing sadness to our souls, but incredible delight and joy and exhilaration in knowing that those failures, those sins, will never threaten our relationship with the Lord forever and ever.

Matt Tully

This is a bit of an aside, but this is an interesting example of a passage where we need to read Scripture in the light of all of Scripture. We know from the rest of Scripture that God is omniscient—he does know all things—and so we need to read this passage, where it says that he won’t remember our sin, in light of the broader knowledge that we have of who he is.

Sam Storms

Yes. And the good thing about this same metaphor that I address in the book is that there are a lot of things that God says, I will remember. He says he will remember his people, his covenant, his promises—

Matt Tully

That doesn’t just mean that he’s going to remember it like we would. It means more than that. It means he’s going to act upon it.

Sam Storms

Exactly. He has made a promise to us that is sealed with the blood of Christ that he will never break, and that is I will never again make reference to, mention, hold over your head, say to others, or in any way exploit your failures as a way of justifying my disdain for you or my rejection of you. Praise God for that.

Matt Tully

Another idea that we encounter repeatedly in the Bible throughout both the Old and New Testaments is the idea of being cleansed from our sins—that metaphor of cleaning or washing. I wonder if you could flesh that out for us, especially as it relates to one of the most common ways that we respond to our own sin or feel about our sin, and that is a sense of defilement or dirtiness or shame because of our sin. Unpack that idea of cleansing in the Bible.

Sam Storms

Let’s be clear about one thing: we’re supposed to feel conviction. That’s what the conscience is in the human soul. It’s that capacity of the image of God in humans that registers either a discomfort and a pain for having failed, or a sense of joy for having succeeded. There’s a sense in which I want to feel the defiling effect of my sin, but not so that it cripples my life or leads me to doubt whether God really cares for me or has actually done enough to secure the salvation of my soul. The problem though with this whole idea is that Christians live in a constant state of defilement—of feeling dirty, of feeling disqualified, of feeling that I’ve just simply gone too far in my rebellion and my unbelief and my failures. This whole image of cleansing—David in Psalm 51 says, Cleanse me from my sin and purify me with hyssop. Hyssop is this funny looking little stalk. It looks like broccoli. They would dip the head of the hyssop in the blood that was shed and sprinkle it.

Matt Tully

That’s going back to Passover.

Sam Storms

Right. The imagery that I have—and I talk about this in the book—is I’ve got this white shirt and I’ve left it in my closet, and there’s this huge brown spot on the left side right above the pocket. I took it to the cleaners multiple times. I pointed the spot out to them and said, Use whatever you can to get that stain out of there, and they never could. It would come back with a little note on it that said, Sorry, we couldn’t remove it. I would take it back and say, Try this, and they would try it without success. Finally I realized that sometimes is the way Christians feel about their sin. It’s like I’ve got this deep, dark, stain on my soul, and nothing can remove it. Nothing! I can’t do enough good works to make it go away. I can’t trick myself into thinking it’s not there, and the only way that that deep, dark stain on our souls can be removed is through the blood of Christ, which is an interesting irony, is it not? Blood stains, and yet it’s the blood that cleanses us from all stain. To be able to wake up in the morning and not feel dirty in the presence of God is a glorious reality, and it only comes when we reflect and meditate on the things that God has done with our sin, one of which is he’s blotted it out. He’s cleansed it. It’s just such a beautiful image that Scripture uses.