"And their sins and iniquities will I remember no more."
Hebrews 10:17
God is perfect and he knows everything, so I always thought that the whole not remembering thing sounded kind of strange. But today I was reading an interesting book by one of my old religion teachers and her idea was that eternity swallows up all of our mistakes. Add that to a Conference talk that I was listening to earlier that talked about how small our suffering will seem beyond the grave, and a comment from Stake Conference about forgiving ourselves and moving on, and I think maybe today it makes more sense.
Our sins and mistakes and lost opportunities can seem almost infinite from our limited mortal perspective. It seems too late to mend things that we have broken, to overcome the pain of loss. Our sins seem large and glaring, marring us in obvious ways that our minds bump into whenever we think about the shape of our lives. Like Alma the Younger. we "remember all [our] sins and iniquities, for which [we are] tormented with the pains of hell" (Alma 36:13).
Jacob has a solution for such memories however. He encourages us to repent and prepare our souls so "that [we] may not remember [our] awful guilt in perfectness" (2 Nephi 9:46). After Alma calls upon God for mercy, he too reports a similar effect: "I could remember my pains no more; yea, I was harrowed up by the memory of my sins no more" (Alma 36:19). God doesn't necessarily zap them out of being, because sometimes in our lives we need a soft reminder not to repeat past mistakes, but our memories are softened and distanced to the point where we can place them in the background where they can't torment us anymore.
I think it is the same with God. After repentance, our sins and iniquities might still be trivial facts, but if God doesn't actively remember them, then they may as well not exist. Under the weight of eternity, our mistakes will start seeming, even to us, like the skinned knees of childhood... painful and traumatic at the time, but barely shadows now. And they become that way because we've changed. We're different people than we used to be. We don't have to remember because we've moved on and are now thinking about much more important things. As Christ promises "ye shall be sorrowful, but your sorrow shall be turned into joy" (John 16:20). God doesn't remember it because it is useless information... those things don't apply to the new people that we have become.
Today, let's take advantage of the great memory-erasing, or at least memory-trivializing, power of the atonement. Let's call upon God for mercy and repent. Let's become the people we want to be... the ones who don't need to remember our sins and iniquities because we've grown past that. As we do, God's promises will be fulfilled, and "though [our] sins be as scarlet, they shall be as white as snow" (Isaiah 1:18).
Hebrews 10:17
God is perfect and he knows everything, so I always thought that the whole not remembering thing sounded kind of strange. But today I was reading an interesting book by one of my old religion teachers and her idea was that eternity swallows up all of our mistakes. Add that to a Conference talk that I was listening to earlier that talked about how small our suffering will seem beyond the grave, and a comment from Stake Conference about forgiving ourselves and moving on, and I think maybe today it makes more sense.
Our sins and mistakes and lost opportunities can seem almost infinite from our limited mortal perspective. It seems too late to mend things that we have broken, to overcome the pain of loss. Our sins seem large and glaring, marring us in obvious ways that our minds bump into whenever we think about the shape of our lives. Like Alma the Younger. we "remember all [our] sins and iniquities, for which [we are] tormented with the pains of hell" (Alma 36:13).
Jacob has a solution for such memories however. He encourages us to repent and prepare our souls so "that [we] may not remember [our] awful guilt in perfectness" (2 Nephi 9:46). After Alma calls upon God for mercy, he too reports a similar effect: "I could remember my pains no more; yea, I was harrowed up by the memory of my sins no more" (Alma 36:19). God doesn't necessarily zap them out of being, because sometimes in our lives we need a soft reminder not to repeat past mistakes, but our memories are softened and distanced to the point where we can place them in the background where they can't torment us anymore.
I think it is the same with God. After repentance, our sins and iniquities might still be trivial facts, but if God doesn't actively remember them, then they may as well not exist. Under the weight of eternity, our mistakes will start seeming, even to us, like the skinned knees of childhood... painful and traumatic at the time, but barely shadows now. And they become that way because we've changed. We're different people than we used to be. We don't have to remember because we've moved on and are now thinking about much more important things. As Christ promises "ye shall be sorrowful, but your sorrow shall be turned into joy" (John 16:20). God doesn't remember it because it is useless information... those things don't apply to the new people that we have become.
Today, let's take advantage of the great memory-erasing, or at least memory-trivializing, power of the atonement. Let's call upon God for mercy and repent. Let's become the people we want to be... the ones who don't need to remember our sins and iniquities because we've grown past that. As we do, God's promises will be fulfilled, and "though [our] sins be as scarlet, they shall be as white as snow" (Isaiah 1:18).
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