God Can’t Punish What He Chooses Not to Remember
Christians often suffer under the delusion that God is punishing them for something they did wrong. They are missing one of the biggest points of Christianity, namely that Christ was punished in their place for what they did wrong. They owe God no debt payment for their sins.
Once you are saved, God chooses not to even remember your sins. We will deal with some of the peculiar nuances of this below, as it is not my style to shy away from theological difficulties. (How could an omniscient God, who dwells outside of time, ever forget anything?) But first, let’s establish from the Word that God does not remember your sins.
Isaiah 43:25:
I, even I, am he that blotteth out thy transgressions for mine own sake, and will not remember thy sins.
Jeremiah 31:34:
And they shall teach no more every man his neighbour, and every man his brother, saying, Know the LORD: for they shall all know me, from the least of them unto the greatest of them, saith the LORD: for I will forgive their iniquity, and I will remember their sin no more.
Hebrews 8:12:
For I will be merciful to their unrighteousness, and their sins and their iniquities will I remember no more.
Hebrews 10:17:
And their sins and iniquities will I remember no more.
So the simple truth is that God cannot punish what He chooses not to remember. He is not punishing you for something you did wrong! Some sins cause their own natural punishment, but that is not God punishing you. (See God, Satan or You? for a lot more on this theme.)
This seems obvious enough, but some difficult theological questions now emerge.
For starters, we will all stand before the judgement seat of Christ, and our imperfect works (wood, hay and stubble) will be burned up. But for those works to be burned up, obviously God has to be able to remember them!
1 Corinthians 3:12-15:
Now if any man build upon this foundation gold, silver, precious stones, wood, hay, stubble;
Every man's work shall be made manifest: for the day shall declare it, because it shall be revealed by fire; and the fire shall try every man's work of what sort it is.
If any man's work abide which he hath built thereupon, he shall receive a reward.
If any man's work shall be burned, he shall suffer loss: but he himself shall be saved; yet so as by fire.
The idea that God “forgives and forgets” as most people would think of it cannot be true. You are already forgiven for all your sins, but God could not have forgotten them in a way that would make it impossible to burn your “wood, hay and stubble” later. And let me say, He’s doing you a big favor by “burning those works up” so that no one will know about them for all eternity. Would you want everyone to know that when you sang a special song at church when you were in your twenties, your main motivation was not to glorify God but to impress that cute girl in the third row that you were hoping to ask out?
Jesus admonished several churches about their shortcomings in the book of Revelation, so He obviously hadn’t forgotten about them. God disciplines those He loves (Hebrews 12:5-11), so He must remember our sins in order to discipline us for them.
How do we reconcile this with the verses above that come out and say that God will not remember our sins?
Let’s consider the following verse:
Isaiah 43:26:
Put me in remembrance: let us plead together: declare thou, that thou mayest be justified.
Is God saying that He has no memory of something because He’s forgotten it in the human sense, and we have to remind Him of what He forgot? I don’t know any preacher who would preach this verse as saying, “Remind Me of what I’ve forgotten; I need you to jog My memory!” God simply wants us to declare His words back to Himself. It honors Him when you do that.
In fact, the context in which God “remembers” things proves that He never forgot them. For example:
Leviticus 26:42:
Then will I remember my covenant with Jacob, and also my covenant with Isaac, and also my covenant with Abraham will I remember; and I will remember the land.
Notice that no one had to remind God of His covenants in the sense that He forgot about them. What He is saying is that He will bring them to mind so that they’re in the forefront of His thinking.
Ever go back to where you grew up (assuming you moved away) and had things jog your memory? “Oh, I’d forgotten until now, that was the bridge where Geraldine Sawyer got mad at Jimmy Hicks for yanking on her pigtail on the school bus and she grabbed his homework and threw it out the window and it blew down into the river.” This would prove that the incident was still in your memory somewhere, but it hadn’t been something you’d thought about for years. You didn’t forget the incident in the sense that it was no longer in your memory and you could never recall it again. It just hadn’t been in your thinking and it wasn’t influencing your life. Jimmy still remembered that it happened, but he didn’t let it shape his current thoughts twelve years later when he thought Geraldine was hot and he asked her to marry him.
We have to draw similar conclusions from verses like the following:
Genesis 9:15-16:
And I will remember my covenant, which is between me and you and every living creature of all flesh; and the waters shall no more become a flood to destroy all flesh.
And the bow shall be in the cloud; and I will look upon it, that I may remember the everlasting covenant between God and every living creature of all flesh that is upon the earth.
Ezekiel 16:60:
Nevertheless I will remember my covenant with thee in the days of thy youth, and I will establish unto thee an everlasting covenant.
Luke 1:72:
To perform the mercy promised to our fathers, and to remember his holy covenant;
Given that God has made multiple covenants ratified by blood, there is no way that God could literally forget them. Clearly, remember in these cases really means bring to the front of one’s mind as opposed to remembering something completely forgotten.
So we conclude that having God not remember your sins does not mean that they are erased from His memory bank completely so that He could not recall them if He wanted to. Giving that He lives outside of time, there could be no such thing as an omniscient God literally losing all memory of your sins – and then later “remembering” your “wood, hay and stubble.” It just means that He has made a conscious decision not to bring them to mind.
And that means He’s can’t be punishing you for something that He chooses not to remember!