Hebrews 8: When God Forgets

“I will put my laws in their minds

and write them on their hearts.
I will be their God,
and they will be my people.
¹¹ No longer will they teach their neighbor,
or say to one another, ‘Know the Lord,’
because they will all know me,
from the least of them to the greatest.
¹² For I will forgive their wickedness
and will remember their sins no more.”

-Hebrews 8:10-12

If God is perfect, he can’t forget, can he? But we read in Hebrews 8:12 that God says he “will remember their sins no more.” What does this mean?

A key insight is found in the literary concept of parallelism. In Hebrew poetry, two lines often complement one another in thought. Since this is a quote of an Old Testament poetic passage, we discover the “big idea” in the previous line. The focus is not on forgiving; the focus is on forgiveness.

Hebrews notes, “I will forgive their wickedness.” When God forgives, he forgets in the sense that he no longer holds sin against us. When we are forgiven, God sees us as a new creation with a fresh start.

If God sees us as forgiven, can we? Let us walk today with the encouragement that God is with us, can forgive any wrong, and seeks to make us new.

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Dillon Burroughs is the author and coauthor of numerous books and is handwriting a copy of all 31,173 verses of the Bible at HolyWritProject.com. Find out more about Dillon at Facebook.com/readdB or readdB.com.