Daily Manna · Day 94 · April 4
Forgotten on Purpose
“And their sins and iniquities will I remember no more.”
There are two people who read this verse, and it does opposite things to each of them.
The first cannot forget. Not the large sins, usually; the stupid ones. Something said at sixteen, the way somebody who trusted her was treated, replaying at full resolution while the house sleeps. She has confessed it more times than she can count, and each confession lasts about a week.
The second has found the verse useful. It comes to mind fairly quickly now, and it takes the edge off in about four seconds, and he has noticed that it works, and he has stopped examining the thing at all.
The verse is quoted from Jeremiah as the terms of a new covenant, and the writer of Hebrews draws one conclusion from it immediately: now where remission of these is, there is no more offering for sin. That is aimed at the first reader. There is nothing left to bring. Repeated confession of a forgiven thing is not humility; it is an attempt to pay something that has already been settled, and the settling is what makes further payment impossible rather than merely unnecessary.
But nine verses later the same writer says something the second reader should not skip: for if we sin wilfully after that we have received the knowledge of the truth, there remaineth no more sacrifice for sins. The same phrase, no more sacrifice, turned around and used as a warning. There is nothing left to bring either way. For one reader that is the end of the debt. For the other it is the end of the escape route.
Which is the truth, and it is a single sentence doing two jobs. God's forgetting is deliberate, complete, and covenanted; and it is a relationship rather than a mechanism, and the difference between the two readers is not in the verse. It is in what they wanted from it.
Daily Manna runs on a two-year cycle. The year two reading for day 94 is Wood Every Morning (Leviticus 6:13).