“Their sins and iniquities I will remember no more” (Jeremiah 31:34 and Hebrews 10:17).
In the former days of computer technology, back when we preachers were finding what a help it could be to our writing, Pastor Frank Pollard retreated to the mountains to work on sermons and a book. At one point, as he told later, in the midst of a chapter he was laboring over, he accidentally stroked a certain key and the entire piece disappeared. Nothing he did retrieved it. We all know that experience and identify with the frustration he felt.
So, later, he asked a computer-savvy friend to explain this. “Where did my writing go?”
“It didn’t go anywhere,” said the friend. “It just disappeared.”
Frank insisted, “It had to have gone somewhere.”
“Nope,” said the computer friend. “It did not go anywhere; it went nowhere.”
Now, being the preacher constantly in search of illustrations and metaphors to make the Christian life understandable and the gospel applicable, Frank decided that this is how it is when “the blood of Jesus Christ, God’s Son, cleanses us from all sins.” Where are those sins now? They’re just gone.
I can think of three scriptures that pretty much voice the same reality.