Last week, I listened to an audiobook of The Next Story: Life and Faith after the Digital Explosion. Author Tim Challies’ notes that many things we do online are recorded: our search requests, transactions, social network connections, and more. Each will be in its own database, but with the expansive overlapping of our social networks with other websites, that’s changing. Increasingly, what we do online is not only recorded, but tied to our social profiles so that even casual friends can know a good bit about us.

This raises a natural question. Would any of us be embarrassed by the revelation of our online actions: our comments, searches, browsing, how much we do or when? I’ll say upfront that I would be, and I try to lead a fairly transparent online life.

Challies makes the obvious contrast between these databases and the Christian life. Our Heavenly Father has given followers of Christ Jesus the righteousness of Christ, and in doing so, he has removed our transgressions from us as far as the east is from the west (Psalm 103:13)

“I, I am he who blots out your transgressions for my own sake, and I will not remember your sins.” Isaiah 43:25 ESV

The God who knows everything from the beginning to the end makes a conscious decision to reject the memory of our cancelled sins. What profound mercy. Psalm 103 says he remembers our frailty and has compassion on us like a father loves his children. He refuses to recount for us a long list of sins, because that list has been ruined. But he scored those sins in Christ’s own body and nailed them with him to the cross, like the horrible painting of Lucas Cranach the Elder shows.

What mercy.