Content taken from Living Beyond Offense by Yana Jenay Conner, ©2025. Used by permission of Harvest House Publishers.

Forgive and forget was not just a mantra I picked up from the culture. It was also a creed I learned in church. Growing up Black and Christian, I had grown accustomed to the end of a sermon, regardless of its text, ascending to a victorious retelling of Jesus’s blood shed at Calvary. Queuing the organist to join them, the preacher would start to whoop, singing, “Ohhhh! But when I turn my eyes to Calvary! I see a man named Jesus hanging on a tree for you and me!” People would begin to stand to their feet. To encourage more to do the same, the preacher would take it up an octave and say, “But that’s not how the story ends! Three days later, He rose from the dead with all power in His nail-scarred hands!” I can hear and even feel the congregation’s praise-filled response now as I think back to all those Sunday mornings and afternoons spent in church. What a gift to hear the gospel proclaimed week after week.

Every now and then, the preacher might add to their jubilant recounting of Christ’s death on the cross: “God has thrown all of our sins into the sea of forgetfulness.” Though I’d heard this refrain said several times by various preachers in different denominations, I had no idea where these words were in my Bible. But I was certain, given the consensus among preachers, that this was a direct quote from Scripture. And almost every time I heard it, I would mentally leave the room. Though I found the idea of God throwing my sins into the sea of forgetfulness immensely beautiful, it distracted my worship and sent my intellectual wheels turning. It drew up some questions for me:

• How can an all-knowing God forget? Sure, He can do anything. But isn’t the essence of being all-knowing to know all things? How is this theologically possible?

• If forgetting is what it means to forgive, what happens if I can’t forget? While I was completely on board with the selective amnesia plan, how does someone erase the pains of abuse, abandonment, infidelity, and betrayal from their core memory?

Why Forgetting Is a Dead End

Forgetting can be a dead end for anyone truly trying to forgive. Here are three reasons why:

1. Forgetting is not always possible.

Some memories will never fade. They are so embedded into our storyline that even when we aren’t thinking about the offense or trauma we’ve experienced, we’re still living in response to it. Even if our offender is long gone or not in close enough proximity to physically or emotionally hurt us again, we can be anxious, emotionally detached, and just so dang angry all the time. While the offense is no longer front of mind, our body has stored the anniversaries of when the pain of someone else’s self-centered choices entered our life and sends trigger warnings when it perceives a familiar threat. Forgetting is not always possible.

2. Forgetting the past is not always in touch with the reality of the present.

If the person who has offended you doesn’t turn over a new leaf, you will struggle to forget the past. Their repeated offenses make forgiving-as-forgetting a non-option. Were you to try to forget and turn the page, you wouldn’t find a new chapter. Instead, you would find the same story and sinful behaviors. Also, if we ignore the present in our attempts to forget the past, we will open ourselves up to more harm. But, Christ’s call to forgive is not a call to open yourself up to further harm. It is a call to be in touch with reality and humbly confront it.

3. Forgetting can be shalom-avoidant.

The shalom-avoidant person stuffs, hides, and sweeps grievances under the rug in the name of peacekeeping. Because they hate conflict, they can cling to the forgive-and-forget mantra to escape having a hard yet necessary conversation. They would prefer to keep the peace than to speak up. But, as we saw in chapter 2, biblical peace— shalom—is not the absence of conflict. It’s the presence of harmony. Those who choose forgetting as their path to forgiveness will only gain a faux sense of harmony and will have to keep stuffing, hiding, and sweeping to maintain it. This is even true when your offender is long gone or far away. If you concentrate all your effort on suppressing your feelings and forgetting your trauma, you will reach a dead end and not be able to restore shalom within yourself. The road to shalom and forgiveness starts with honestly acknowledging your offender’s sin and the pain it caused—not forgetting it.

Trade Forgetting for Faithfully Casting

If forgiving doesn’t mean forgetting, then what do we do with the preacher’s words: “God has thrown all of our sins into the sea of forgetfulness.” As followers of Jesus Christ, aren’t we expected to follow His model for forgiveness? Well, yes, but the preacher’s words are a misquote. Micah 7:19 reads, “[God] will cast all our sins into the depths of the sea,” not “God will cast all our sins into the sea of forgetfulness.” No translation is written this way. However, I do understand how the preachers in my home church reached this interpretation. In Jeremiah 67 31:34, God tells Israel that despite their egregious record of abominations against Him, He will “forgive their iniquity” and “remember their sin no more.” But, once again, how can an all-knowing God forget? I love the sentiment, but I’m not sure a forgetful God is what we want. What else is He bound to forget? My prayer requests? His promises? The offenses that were committed against me? No, thank you. I want and need a God whose memory is fully intact.

Thankfully, this is the God we have. When the Bible speaks of God forgetting or remembering, it doesn’t imply there is ever a time when His knowing has fallen short of all-knowing. Instead, the Bible is using anthropomorphic language, ascribing finite human characteristics to an infinite God, to help us get a sense of what God and His activity in the world are like. In the same way a school teacher uses age-appropriate analogies and language to help a child’s developing brain grasp an idea that’s a wee bit beyond their reach, God uses human language and experiences to help us understand infinite truths about Him. When God says He will forget, He is assuring us His forgiveness of sin will hold. Though He cannot forget, He will relate to us as if He did. Just as you can trust a forgetful person to not recall the details of the past, you can trust God to not bring up old stuff. He will not dangle offenses over your head or throw the past in your face. “As far as the east is from the west,” so far will He “remove our transgressions from us” (Psalm 103:12). He faithfully casts your offenses along with His wrath into the depths of the sea. He doesn’t forget; He casts.

As believers, this is the model of forgiveness we are called to follow. We need to trade forgetting for the work of faithfully casting. And it will be work. However, for our most intimate relationships to survive offense, we must do this work. Like God, we will need to cast our offender’s sin against us into the depths of the sea and relate to them as if we have no memory of the wrong they have done. Every time their offense creeps back into the memories of our bodies and minds, we will need to resist the urge to throw our fishing rod back into the depths of the sea to draw them back up. Instead, with each recurring reminder of their offense, we will, with God’s help, live out our committed decision to forgive and faithfully recast their forgiven sin into the depths of the sea. Emphasis on forgiven sin.

If someone commits a new offense of a similar kind or continues to behave in a manner that deems them emotionally and physically unsafe, confronting them about their sin isn’t bringing up old stuff. It’s addressing a pattern. Though you are still called to do the work of forgiveness for their new offense or offenses (that 77 times is real!), you do have the freedom to confront them about their sin, hold them accountable to change, and restructure the relationship if they don’t. But if the person has demonstrated remorse and repented of their past offenses, when they inevitably commit a new one because they are human, we relate to them concerning this new offense as if we have no memory of the old. We are careful to not bring past forgiven sin into the present. We make the merciful and committed decision to not bring up old stuff.

This work of faithfully casting reminds me a lot of our committed decision to follow Jesus. In Luke 9:23, Jesus says to all who wish to follow Him, “If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross daily and follow me.” Jesus’s use of the word daily implies that though every disciple will make the onetime life altering decision to deny themselves and take up their cross to follow Him, they will have to recommit to that decision daily. Every morning and in every moment of adversity, they will have to decide whether they will continue to carry their cross or set it aside. The same is true with forgiveness. When we forgive, we make the onetime merciful decision to release our offender of their debt and not retaliate against them. However, when we wake in the morning and our minds or bodies are flooded once again with the memories of the pain caused, we faithfully cast our urge to seek retribution or retaliation back into the depths of the sea and recommit to our decision to forgive. With God’s help, we daily pick up our cross and follow Jesus down the road of forgiveness.