by Joel Raygor
Hebrews 8:12: "For I will forgive their wickedness and will remember their sins no more."
Jake was a redbone coonhound and a good one. He had a tenor bawl on the track and switched over to a beautiful steady chop on the tree. When Jake told you he had a coon up a tree, he had a coon up a tree. He was a fun hound to follow and one of the best I ever had. Jake was a good hound, but he wasn't perfect.
When hound men talk about their coon dog not running trash, they are saying their dog won't run a fox, coyote, or a deer but will only run coon. Well, Jake wasn't trashy, but every once in a while he would sound slightly different and when I'd get to the tree he would have a farm cat treed. In disgust, I'd leash him up, walk him away from the tree and turn him loose again. Soon he'd strike a new coon track and I'd forget about the cat incident. At the end of the night I'd take him home, fix him a hot dog stew with extra meat and put him to bed.
Like Jake, I'm also far from perfect, but every time I sin my God forgives and forgets those sins. The scriptures tell us He remembers them no more. Because God is all-knowing, "forgetting" does not mean a literal loss of memory. Instead, He deliberately chooses not to hold our sins against us or use them to condemn us. When He forgives, He treats us as if we never sinned. We read in 1 John 1:9 "If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness."
It is hard for me to choose to forgive and forget, and to actually do it. But in the scriptures we are reminded again and again that God will "remember your sins no more".
Isaiah 43:25: "I, even I, am he who blots out your transgressions, for my own sake, and remembers your sins no more."
Jeremiah 31:34: "For I will forgive their wickedness and will remember their sins no more."
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