Daily Manna · Day 252 · September 9
Sins Remembered No More
“For I will be merciful to their unrighteousness, and their sins and their iniquities will I remember no more.”
About six hundred years before Christ, in the years when his people were losing their city and their land to Babylon, Jeremiah wrote down the terms of a covenant God had not yet made. Centuries later, Hebrews quotes Jeremiah's whole promise, and this is the last line of it.
Two people can read this line very differently. One woman has confessed the same sin for years, and tonight she will confess it again, just in case. Part of her is sure there is still an open file on it somewhere. To her, the verse says that God's forgetting is a choice, not a slip of memory. The God who forgets nothing has bound Himself by covenant never to bring it up again. There is no open file. The Judge has closed the case and said so in writing.
The other reader skims the verse and moves on. He took forgiveness for granted years ago, and it has never once troubled him. To him, the verse says something less comfortable: look at what it cost God to say it. Hebrews goes on, chapter after chapter, about the priesthood, the blood and a better sacrifice, and then it quotes this line a second time: "their sins and iniquities will I remember no more." So the promise that God will remember sins no more is the most costly sentence in the letter.
Jeremiah first spoke it to a people whose world was coming apart, and that is worth holding onto. This promise was made for people in that kind of trouble, and it still is.
Daily Manna runs on a two-year cycle. The year two reading for day 252 is All Things Well (Mark 7:37).