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.”
Around six hundred years before Christ, with the walls of Jerusalem about to come down, Jeremiah wrote out the terms of a covenant God had not yet made. Centuries later the writer of Hebrews quotes him word for word, and the clause he quotes last is this one.
Two people read it differently. One has confessed the same thing for years and confesses it again tonight, just in case, because some part of her is certain a file is still open somewhere. To her the verse says that the forgetting is a decision, not a lapse. The God who forgets nothing has bound himself by covenant never to raise the matter again. There is no file. The judge closed it and said so in writing.
The other reads the verse quickly and moves on, because he assumed all this years ago and has never once been troubled by it. To him the verse says something less comfortable. Look at what it cost to say it. Hebrews spends eight chapters getting here, through priesthood and blood and a better sacrifice, because remembering no more is not God being casual. It is the most expensive sentence in the letter.
Jeremiah wrote it while the siege ramps were going up. That is worth holding onto. This promise was never designed for people whose lives were going well.
Daily Manna runs on a two-year cycle. The year two reading for day 252 is All Things Well (Mark 7:37).