Sovereign Grace Church

For I will be merciful to their unrighteousness, and their sins and their iniquities will I remember no more.

(Hebrews 8:12; 10:17)

It is most certainly true, God remembers all the actions that ever men have done, do, or shall do; He remembers the nature and quality of all actions as they are; He remembers such actions as done at such times; and He knows they are thus and thus in the nature of them; and yet, so it is, that ‘He remembers not thy transgressions;’ that is, though He remembers the things thou hast done, yet He doth not remember them as they are thine; He remembers whose they are, He Himself has passed them over, He decreed that they should become the sins of Christ; and when He passed them over to Him, they ceased to be thine any longer [beloved].

You know that text in Isaiah 53:6, “He hath laid on Him the iniquities of us all;” and you know that place in 2 Corinthians 5:21, “He was made sin for us, who knew no sin, that we might be made the righteousness of God in Him.” Now I ask this question, whose are the sins which believers commit? When Christ became their sin, are they not His? and if they are [made to be] His, are they any longer theirs that did commit them? 2 Corinthians 5:19, shows plainly that the Lord reckons them no longer theirs when He hath made them once to be Christ’s. [For] “God was in Christ reconciling the world unto Himself, not imputing their trespasses unto them;” as much as to say, I will never reckon them thine any more; I will never impute them to thee [beloved]; all that I look for, in respect of thy sins, I look for at the hands of Christ; "For He was made sin for us," saith the text.

And whereas people think it strange, forasmuch as believers themselves do remember their sins, that God should not remember them; I answer, if any believers or members of Christ remember their sins any otherwise than God remembers them, their memory fails them, and they are mistaken in their remembrance. If, when believers have sinned, they have a conceit that their sins shall be charged upon them; the truth is, they have other conceits of themselves than God hath of them. But if they will remember their sins as [God] remembers them, they must remember them, and know them, by the light of God’s Spirit, that shall lead them into all truth. The Spirit of God will remember them of them indeed, and lay before them such and such actions, and tell them that they have these pollutions in them, and will convince them of the abhorrency of them; but the same Spirit will remember them withal, that the ‘Lamb of God hath taken away all these sins of theirs,’ and that the scape-goat hath carried them away into a land of forgetfulness; thus, I say, the Holy Ghost, as He brings their sins to their remembrance, so He will suggest to them also, to whom their sins are sent [to be remembered no more, that is, the Lamb of God]. [AMEN!]