Omniscient Forgiveness

as far as the east is from the west, so far has he removed our transgressions from us.  Psalm 103:12  NIV

As Far As – How are is the East from the West?  How far do you have to travel toward the East to reach the West?  The answer is obvious.  Infinitely.  Forever.  Never.  If I asked you how far it is from the North to the South, you’d be able to tell me.  The distance, ultimately, from the North Pole to the South Pole.  But East to West?  Nope.  Doesn’t work (unless you believe in a flat earth).  That’s the point of this often-cited verse.  God has removed our sins from us in such a way that they cannot be recovered.  And only God can do that.

Unfortunately, we live in a world where there is another omniscient being, one who not only doesn’t remove our sins but recalls them no matter what the distance.  That “being” is called the Internet.  The internet never forgets.  The internet never forgives.  Once you realize the power of such a being, you should be horrifyingly afraid.  We tend to ignore this awesome power to destroy until it becomes personal.  We pretend our lives are protected.  But they aren’t.  The unforgiving internet can destroy anyone, any time, by simply recalling every little detail, every mistake, every sin, and playing them back for the world to see.  God is the omniscient Being who forgives.  The internet is His polar opposite—the omniscient being who never forgives. “Part of forgiveness is the ability to forget.  And yet the internet will never forget.  Everything can always be summoned up afresh by new people.”[1]

“As the work of Jon Ronson and others on ‘public shaming’ has shown, the internet has allowed new forms of activism and bullying in the guise of social activism to become the tenor of the time.  The urge to find people who can be accused of ‘wrong-thinking’ works because it is part of their business model.”[2]

“Here lies an additional quagmire.  There is little enough recourse when old school journalism tramples across someone’s life.  But on the internet there is not even a regulatory body to appeal to if your life has been raked over in this way.  Thousands—perhaps millions—of people have been involved, and there is no mechanism to reach all of them and get them to admit that they raked over your life in an unfair manner.”[3]

God chooses to forget our sins.  Does that mean He erases them from the cosmic internet?  No, it means He decides not to count them.  They are taken off the ledger.  But the god of this world, the growing cyber AI judge and jury, never takes them off the ledger.  They are held in abeyance, ready to be used for accusation whenever necessary.  Perhaps the mark of the beast isn’t 666 after all.  Maybe it’s just 1’s and 0’s.

Topical Index: omniscience, forgiveness, kirḥōq, as far as, internet, Douglas Murray, Psalm 103:12

[1] Douglas Murray, The Madness of Crowds: Gender, Race and Identity (Bloomsbury, 2019), p. 176.

[2] Ibid., p. 108.

[3] Ibid., p. 176.