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What the Bible says about Forgetting Sin
(From Forerunner Commentary)

Leviticus 16:22

This verse stipulates that the azazel must “bear on itself all their iniquities to an uninhabited land” (emphasis ours throughout). The Hebrew word for “uninhabited land” (Strong's #1509; used only here) literally means “a land cut off.” It derives from Strong's #1504, defined as “to cut down or off; (figuratively) to destroy, divide, exclude, or decide.”

Jeremiah, the presumptive author of Lamentations, employs this root to describe the state of death: “The waters flowed over my head; I said, 'I am cut off!'” (Lamentations 3:54). Isaiah 53:8, part of a Messianic prophecy, uses it similarly: “He was taken from prison and from judgment, and who will declare His generation? For He was cut off from the land of the living; for the transgressions of My people He was stricken.”

Jesus Christ was cut off from the land of the living; He was taken to “a land cut off.” Similarly, Psalm 88, a Messianic psalm, also describes the Messiah as being “cut off” and put into a “land of forgetfulness”:

Adrift among the dead, like the slain who lie in the grave, whom You remember no more, and who are cut off from Your hand. . . . Shall Your wonders be known in the dark? And Your righteousness in the land of forgetfulness? (Psalm 88:5, 12)

These terms are figurative language for the grave, where no thought or memory occurs, nor knowledge or device (Psalm 6:5; Ecclesiastes 9:5, 10). In taking our sins to the “land cut off” and to the “land of forgetfulness,” they are not merely paid for but ultimately forgotten.

In common usage, “forget” and its forms indicate activities of the mind. However, in Hebrew thought, “forgetting” goes beyond the mental realm and into that of action, that is, forgetting contains an act that demonstrates that the forgotten thing is no longer a factor. The Hebrew words for forgetshâkah (#7911) and nâshâh (#5382)—mean “to ignore,” “to neglect,” “to forsake,” or “to willfully act in disregard to a person or thing.”

When God forgets our sins, He makes a conscious choice to ignore them—to forsake their occurrence, as it were; to disregard them—so that His actions are not swayed by what we have done. We may still feel other effects from our sins, but as far as God is concerned, He no longer looks at us through the lens of those transgressions. They have been borne away.

Jesus Christ fulfills all aspects of this unique sin offering: His shed blood paid for sin, and He bore those sins to the land of forgetfulness—to the grave—completely removing them from view. Thus, Hebrews 9:28 says that when He appears a second time, it will be “apart from sin.” In Isaiah 43:25, God says, “I, even I, am He who blots out your transgressions for My own sake; and I will not remember your sins.” Isaiah 53:6 states that “the LORD has laid on Him [the Messiah, not Satan] the iniquity of us all.” It is already finished—we are not still waiting for those transgressions to be sent away in the future.

Similarly, under the New Covenant, He promises, “For I will forgive their iniquity, and their sin I will remember no more” (Jeremiah 31:34). Jesus bore sin out of sight, being cut off.

David C. Grabbe
Who Fulfills the Azazel Goat—Satan or Christ? (Part Two)

Romans 6:3

Most of us have watched an old horror movie or a science fiction thriller. In our youth, my brother and I occasionally sneaked down to the living room at midnight to watch the Dracula or Frankenstein movies. Invariably, a ghoulish mad scientist would send his feeble-minded assistant to the cemetery to get him a cadaver or perhaps a skeleton. Too many of us have a similar ghoulish desire to unearth, take back, and to some extent resurrect the old sinful self that God put to death in a watery grave. The apostle Paul reminds us that we should have buried our old selves - and our old sins - symbolically through baptism (Romans 6:3; Colossians 2:12).

God desires to forget transgressions as though they had not happened in the first place. When we sincerely repent of our sins, our heavenly Father not only forgives them but also totally forgets them. We read in Psalm 103:11-12, "For as the heavens are high above the earth, so great is His mercy toward those who fear Him; as far as the east is from the west, so far has He removed our transgressions from us." The memory of those sins drops absolutely out of sight and out of mind - unless we keep bringing them up or continue committing them.

Years ago, while perusing some student evaluations of my teaching, I noticed I had received both positive and negative comments. Oddly, I have largely forgotten the positive comments, but the negative ones I have continued to etch into my mind. Human nature perversely clings to the negative and discounts the positive. Perhaps this is analogous to plastic surgeon Maxwell Maltz' finding that when he repaired a facial scar, the patient still obsessed over the notion that he looked ugly. Similarly, he noted that phantom limbs on amputees often take months, perhaps years, to disappear.

It is bad enough when we dwell on our amputated bad habits and character flaws, but we greatly compound this disgusting habit when we dwell on others' past sins and transgressions. Matthew 6 teaches that we have a responsibility to bury the transgressions of others by forgiving and forgetting old grudges, slights, and offenses. In fact, we can inhibit our spiritual growth until we let go of any real or imagined transgressions against us (Matthew 6:14-15).

When we grit our teeth, muttering, "I'll forgive, but I'll never forget," we practice some of the most deplorable grave-robbing. Jesus admonishes us to let go of those grievances as a precondition of forgiveness and freedom from resentment against us. He also instructs us that, if we have allowed ourselves to become a source of resentment to others, we must make reconciliation a top priority (Matthew 5:23-24).

Unfortunately, human nature does not consider reconciliation a top-priority item. We find it far easier to nurse an old resentment, re-examining it from every angle, and harping on it continually. Proverbs 17:9 reveals the fruit of such behavior: "He who covers a transgression seeks love, but he who repeats a matter separates the best of friends." Marriages have been needlessly destroyed by the digging up and rehashing of old faults.

Satan appeals to our grave-robbing instincts. Whenever resentments occur between brethren, whenever fights occur in marriage or in the family, one unearths a past transgression of another, dangling it before him or her like some badly decomposed corpse. Though Christ's sacrifice covered or buried the other's transgressions, we, like feeble-minded lackeys in a horror movie, have the urge to dig them up.

Sometimes we parents dig up the past mistakes of our children. In addition to correcting the current transgression, we bring up an entire litany of past faults that have little or nothing to do with the current problem. What if God did that to us every time we made a mistake?

Are we dirt collectors? If we should collect dirt on people, storing juicy tidbits in our mental filing cabinets, such samples often do not remain inert like actual soil, but can become fertile ground for venomous revenge years later. Grave-robbing motives - digging up an old offense, long-forgotten and long-repented - can lead to massive character assassination.

The classic horror movies - like The Thing, The Blob, Attack of the Killer Bees, and The Attack of the Killer Tomatoes - have unsettling, open-ended endings, which have a sinister spiritual parallel. After the good guys destroy the major menace, a tiny handful of the virulent creatures escape and are left to propagate, starting the horror all over again. Whether we have a memory of our brother's transgression or of our own past sin, we need to make sure that we bury and destroy the behavior, the thought impulses that caused the behavior, and the stimulus that led to the thought-impulses. We should resist noting where we disposed of them.

The organisms left to propagate a major horror are sub-microscopic. In I Corinthians 5:6 and Galatians 5:9, Paul reminds us that a little leaven leavens the whole lump. James suggests that a tiny thought process can lead to agonizing death (James 1:15). As we repent of our sins, let us bury them and the memory of offenses against us, and then resist with all our might the ghoulish urge to exhume them. It can only result in more horror.

David F. Maas
Spiritual Grave Robbers


 




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