Does He Remember?

I was thanking the Father for His mercy. I began listing the sins He had forgiven. “Remember the time I. . .”  I was about to thank Him for another act of mercy.  Then I stopped.  Something was wrong. The word “remember” seemed displaced, off-key. It did not fit.  Does He remember?

Then I remembered His words, “I am He who blots out your transgressions, and I will not remember your sins.” Wow!  That is a remarkable promise. God does not just forgive, he forgets.  He destroys the evidence. He clears the hard drive. He does not remember my mistakes.

Someone once said, "second-best is the worst enemy of the best." People have always tended to cling to the old even when something far better is offered. Most of us have been in churches with conservatives who insisted that the old way of doing something was necessarily the right way. There is security in clinging to the familiar, even when the familiar leads eventually to our undoing.

The Mosaic covenant was a unilateral agreement that structured every aspect of Israel's social, religious, physical and civil existence from the time of Moses until Paul's day. The sum total of commandments that regulated the Jew's life were numbered at 613. This did not include rabbinic interpretations of the law (the Tannaim of the Mishnah), which were also considered binding.

A second covenant was needful because the first one was faulty. The old covenant was built the Law and human obedience; there was no way it could be fully obeyed by sinful people. We will be misconceiving if we think that the new covenant is achieved by human effort as the old covenant was.

God promised and has supplied a new covenant "That's right. The time is coming when I will make a brand-new covenant with Israel and Judah. It will not be a repeat of the covenant I made with their ancestors. They broke that covenant even though I did my part as their Master. This is the brand-new covenant that I will make with Israel when the time comes. I will put my law within them--write it on their hearts!-and be their God. In addition, they will be my people. They will no longer go around setting up schools to teach each other about GOD. They will know me first-hand, the dull and the bright, the smart and the slow. I will wipe the slate clean for each of them. I'll forget they ever sinned!"

The new covenant is better in that, the Lamb of God offers up Himself in the heavenly sanctuary. The Old Covenant was faulty in that it was written on dead stones while the new covenant is written on living hearts. Through the new covenant all can be saved.

Why do we trouble ourselves to read the stories of the Old Testament and the covenant therein? 1 Corinthians 10:11 has an answer to that: “These are all warning markers--DANGER!-in our history books, written down so that we don't repeat their mistakes. Our positions in the story are parallel--they at the beginning, we at the end--and we are just as capable of messing it up as they were.” Now these things became our examples, to the intent that we should not lust after evil things as they also lusted.

How blessed we are to live in the years following Calvary. Our new life in Christ enables us to live for God and overcome the desires of the flesh through the power of the Holy Spirit. The new covenant is God’s gift, but it comes with great responsibility. We are commanded to take the gospel to every corner of this world and to point other to the redemption offered through Jesus Christ.