This is the other instance that I wanted to discuss: God will choose to not remember our sins. “For I will forgive their wickedness and will remember their sins no more.” Hebrews 8:12. Here is the infinite Godhead promising to limit His active recall of our sins!
This will be of great benefit to us when we go to be with Him forever. This self-imposed limitation is completely for our benefit, and He will glorify Himself in our eyes greatly, and increase our joy in His presence.
I don’t know about you, but I am plagued at random times with the memory of some way or another that I have embarrassed myself over the years. For some reason, I seem to have a plethora of these memories from high school. Perhaps you know the kind of memory I’m talking about—one that you wish you could just strike from your memory, and from the memory of anyone that was there at the time!
For me, these memories were times of shame and embarrassment relating to wanting to make a good impression, and then instead, through poor performance or some personal setback or lack, inviting ridicule. In most cases, I’m the only one that actually knew how far I failed to meet my expectation for myself in the instance, and I’m probably the only one that remembers it at all. We are, after all, the star (or the dud) of the highlight reels of our own memories, and play mostly forgotten roles in the highlight reels of old friends, because they are, after all, focused on their own roles, too.
Anyway, I beat myself up at times just by remembering, and catch myself almost swearing in my mind at my own stupidity or foolishness or outright ineptitude. I don’t know why these memories come up randomly, instead of memories where I was praised or honored, or where I exceeded my expectations for myself, but the general tendency of my heart is to pull out the “reel of shame” from the memory banks rather than the “highlight” reel.
Whenever this happens, a shadow of sorts clouds my heart in my present moment, and I show myself how inferior, bad, or stupid I am. I mortify myself all over again when I think about who may also remember my embarrassing moment.
Well, God knows everything. How would you like spending eternity with someone who constantly points out your previous faults or reminds you over and over how you fell short? I’m sure God could point out ways that we have fallen far shorter than we give ourselves credit for!
If God were to do this, it would be like bringing a cold and unfriendly shadow into heaven, a reason for ongoing self-reproach and condemnation. Thankfully, He has made a provision to keep from rehearsing to us the facts of our sin-ridden histories. Instead, He will choose to look only at the all-consuming righteousness of the Son within each of the redeemed, and we will fellowship with Him unhindered by accusation.
What a relief!
Some of you may know what it is like to live with someone who constantly points out your faults, or have friends that like to get together and share embarrassing stories about you. The thought of that continuing in heaven would strike fear in anyone, especially if every actual truth about your life in the flesh was to follow you around paradise. If this were to be the coming reality, then heaven might look like paradise but feel a bit more like Hell!
But our God has thought of everything that will make heaven really heaven for those that love Him. “No eye has seen, no ear has heard, no mind has conceived what God has prepared for those that love Him.” 1 Corinthians 2:9. And God will not be upset with us, nor remind us of how far we fell short, nor will we have any reason to find fault in any of the other redeemed souls, seeing how we are all justified, accepted, and loved by The Blessed One!
God has, and will, selectively limit His access of certain knowledge for His glory and our good, and the Father hand-fed Jesus the knowledge He operated within while He walked in human flesh. Jesus accepted the limitation and subordination as inherent in the role of a surrendered servant, and as the Son.
“Your attitude should be the same as that of Christ Jesus: Who, being in very nature God, did not consider equality with God something to be grasped, but made himself nothing, taking the very nature of a servant, being made in human likeness.” Philippians 2:5-7. NIV 1984.
While omniscience was certainly available to Him within the Godhead, Jesus made himself nothing, and did not grasp it of His own accord. He took the very nature of a servant, who must operate under the authority of the Father. The Father obviously gave Him special foreknowledge or knowledge outside His direct line of sight and experience in specific instances—such as when He spoke to the woman at the well about her five husbands and the man she was living with—but, at other times, the Father restricted the flow of extra information to Jesus, as in the case of the woman who touched His clothes from behind and was healed, and in the case of the centurion who astonished Jesus with his faith. Let’s look more closely at these last two cases.
As recounted in Mark 5 and Luke 8, the woman who had a condition of uncontrollable bleeding for twelve years approached Jesus in a crowd and determined to touch His clothes by faith to be healed. When she touched His clothes, she was healed immediately, and Jesus felt power go out of Him. When He asked, “Who touched me?”, in that moment the Father had not revealed to Him the answer, but gave the direction to Jesus to ask the crowd. The Son honestly did not know that it was the woman. He could have asked the Father in that moment and received unlimited knowledge about the circumstances, but instead the Father directs Jesus to work from within the human limitation.
Why that way? Well, we see the woman come forward, on display for all to see, and confess in front of everyone her action, fearful and filled with dread about how Jesus would see it. At first, she had denied it, along with everyone else (Luke 8:45). So now she has the added guilt of having lied to His face about it. The way Jesus was asking, it seemed that He might be upset that someone came and took power from Him without asking, and His persistence in looking for the person shows that it was a weighty matter to the Father. This woman may have felt that Jesus was going to accuse her of stealing. Perhaps she realized that the consequences of confession might be that she would receive back her illness, or worse!
She was moved to confess, despite all consequence, and it was beautiful! She fell at His feet and confessed the whole truth, in front of Jesus and the entire crowd. She threw herself upon His mercy and totally disregarded her reputation in the eyes of the crowd, counting as the only important thing to come clean with Jesus, no matter the cost. By submitting to the Father, Jesus had searched and waited for a raw and heart-rending response from a woman whose soul was stricken by guilt, and was burdened by a fear of enduring punishment.
God released her, in peace, because of her confession. As an aside, I’ll ask if you think she would have had such a peace for the rest of her life if she had not come forward? She may have been able to leave the scene without discovery, but in her heart she would have always carried around with her the knowledge that she stole her healing from Jesus and then denied it. Some people live their lives under a burden of guilt that they can’t allow themselves to drop. Jesus, by calling it out, gave her the opportunity to be completely free, not only of her sickness, but free from guilt, as we see in Luke 8:48,
“Then he said to her, ‘Daughter, your faith has healed you. Go in peace.’” NIV 1984.
Let’s suppose, for a moment, that He was operating in full knowledge. If that is the case, then there is something of pretense in this interchange, as if He was doing a bit of acting. Jesus wheels around dramatically in response to the touch, and, knowing full well who had touched him, put the question to the crowd, “Who touched me?”
One could go on, along these lines, to make the argument that all of reality is a matter of presentation, carefully revealed in bits, because our finite minds simply can’t take it all in, and that God is a Master Director. Physical reality, in this view, is a carefully edited movie. There is so much behind the scenes and within the sets that would frustrate living if the director were to reveal too much of it to us. Our minds could easily become overwhelmed to the point that our lives would lack the linear continuity that makes living enjoyable, (and liveable).
The movie, “The Truman Show,” toys with this idea. Truman’s life is an elaborate TV show, and everyone that he sees or interacts with is acting a part. As he begins to question his reality, his comfortable routine is more and more disrupted. (The movie seems to put forth, through satire, the idea that real living begins to happen when we escape the limitations and machinations of the Director, “Chistof,” who is an arrogant, manipulative, stand-in for God).
Another movie, “The Matrix,” picks through some of the same themes. The destiny of mankind is controlled and scripted by computers, until a savior can be awakened to overthrow the evil computer and restore free will.
Could Jesus just be toying with this woman… indeed, with every person that He meets? Is He playing His part so that we will be manipulated into thinking and saying the lines that are destined to come from us?
There is another remarkable thing about the interchange with the woman in the crowd: power apparently went out of Jesus without the involvement of His specific intentional will. I’m not saying something happened outside His will, or that He was unwilling, but rather, the Father accomplished something through Jesus that did not involve a co-directed, specific intention from the Son.
The Son has proven constantly that He was here to serve the Father and was wholly subservient to the Father’s will. There was no resistance within Jesus to being used this way, and so there was, as a result, a general cooperative intention and action in the healing of the woman that seemed to bypass omniscience and the specific intention of Jesus. “But Jesus said, “Someone touched me, for I perceive that power has gone out from me.” Luke 8:46. ESV. This wording is very revealing in this instance, and shows us that Jesus was not specifically directing the healing Himself!
The Father often works His will this same way through us, and the power that goes out from us is the action of God through the Holy Spirit, and is not our own in any way. Oftentimes, when God uses me, I am unaware, (or at least not specifically expecting to be used in a certain way), and then find that the Spirit moved or is moving through me to speak truth, give a challenge, share encouragement, or call for peace. When surrendered, the general sentiment of my heart is cooperative with the Lord, and I want Him to use me as He will, and when He wills. I don’t need to know exactly how God intends to use me, nor am I dependent on seeing any results, (I am not smart enough to know what God is accomplishing in any specific moment), but there is additional joy that comes when I become aware that God has done something through or around me.
The joy that Jesus experiences in surrender to the Father is available to us, and the Spirit accomplishes through us all the more, when we submit. When the Spirit moves through us, it is not our own power or strength, but God’s. We can’t order the Spirit to move, and so we are dependent on the will of the Father, but our hearts can be co-operative and have an invitational expectation that God will work in our circumstances.
In Matthew chapter 8, Jesus speaks with a centurion, who comes to ask Him to heal his servant. If Jesus operates here in full omniscience, then His response is all mere theater. Jesus makes an offer to go to the sick servant, knowing that the centurion would decline graciously and make a beautiful declaration of faith. And then Jesus would act astonished even though He knew how the centurion was going to respond.
Jesus, however, is genuinely astonished at the centurion’s faith: the centurion’s assertion that Jesus could accomplish a healing of a specific person that only the centurion had in mind, and that Jesus could do so without being taken into the servant’s presence. The centurion probably even had more than one servant. It really is remarkable faith that trusts like this. In effect, the centurion was saying that he didn’t need to even see Jesus had the right person in mind to heal, miles from where they stood.
The Father, Son, and Holy Spirit teamed up again to heal in a miraculous way, this time demonstrating omniscience, omnipresence, and omnipotence in concerted action and through human exchange. What we see, over and over again in Jesus, is our Living GOD, acting in the NOW, with a fresh and unrehearsed action, reaction, thought, and word. What a unique way for God to reveal what He is really like, to a people that would be overwhelmed to see His undiminished glory! The infinite Godhead made Himself finitely accessible so that we can understand and love Him, not for the riches we think we can get from Him, as sycophants hope, but through understanding His character and qualities in a body of flesh.
Jesus did not have to act, in a theatrical sense, in the scene with the centurion, nor did he stage a morality play when He came to His own hometown, Nazareth, described in Matthew 13 and Mark 6, where he is amazed at their lack of faith, (Mark 6:6). It says that He did not do many miracles there.
“And he did not do many mighty works there, because of their unbelief. ” Matt. 13:58. ESV.
“And he could do no mighty work there, except that he laid his hands on a few sick people and healed them. And he marveled because of their unbelief.” Mark 6:5. ESV.
Did Jesus lose His power to heal in the presence of unbelievers, like Superman loses his powers in the presence of Kryptonite? No way. Was He unwilling to heal them? I believe He was willing. (Who, ever, could deserve a healing through perfect belief? All who have been healed have received it as a gift and not as a reward for performance). But when it says He “could not” do many miracles there, this is an indication that He was surrendered to the Father, and did not receive permission to display His miraculous powers except in a few cases. He was restricted by the Father, and accepted the limitations the Father placed on Him, trusting in the timing and discretion of the Father.
I’m sure Jesus wanted to gather the children of his hometown like a hen gathers her chicks, just like he wanted to gather the children of Jerusalem, (see Luke 13:34), but they were largely unwilling. Only a few people there presented themselves to Jesus for healing. What’s more, there are no recorded unbidden miracles in Nazareth at the time, such as the feeding of the five thousand in Bethsaida, in the next chapter. If I were Him, the temptation would be great to do some kind of miracle to show the doubters, the ones who took offense at Him in Matthew 13:57, that I AM. It must have been disappointing to be rejected by those he grew up among. Jesus didn’t try to dazzle his hometown crowd, nor counter the sting of rejection by a snatch at glory.
Jesus has a perfect record of obedience, despite the worst that man and the Devil could dish up. Don’t discount the surrender of the Son by thinking, “He knew just how to play everyone, since He already knew everything about everyone.”
We have the same opportunities that Jesus took, to seek the Father and look for His lead, and to act under the authority of the Father and the power of the Holy Spirit. The results of surrender are up to Him. Sometimes, many miracles may result while at other times we will find that we “could not” do many miracles. But we can gain an increasing confidence in the power and discretion of our Loving Father, and know that His decisions to work or not to work in a certain way are best.
In this way, we will agree with our Savior, the Son, and live and relate to the world with fresh expectation that God the Father can, and may do, anything. We find that we are like Jesus, not relying on omniscience, but able to depend upon and engage the Father in our moments. We see that the Holy Spirit moves in us to perform miracles when the Father directs, even when we’re unaware that He is doing something. And finally, we see that when we submit to the Father, it is Jesus Himself submitting again in us, abiding with us, and fellowshipping with us within the community of the Godhead. It is comforting and inspiring to grasp that Jesus did not even lean on His own understanding, nor function within His own strength, but in every way relied on the Father, and we understand that God is calling us to this very same thing.