The Divine Right to Be Forgotten

In 2014, the European Court of Justice handed down a landmark ruling that changed the internet forever. A Spanish man named Mario Costeja González had petitioned to have Google remove links to a 1998 newspaper notice about his property being auctioned to settle old debts. The court agreed, establishing what became known as the "right to be forgotten" — the legal principle that a person's past failures should not follow them indefinitely through search results. Under the EU's data protection law, individuals could now request that outdated, irrelevant records of their worst moments be delisted, so that anyone searching their name would no longer find them defined by their lowest point.

Long before any court ruled on digital privacy, God had already established the ultimate right to be forgotten. Through the prophet Jeremiah, the Lord declared, "I will forgive their wickedness and will remember their sins no more." Not that the Almighty suffers memory loss — but that He chooses, deliberately and completely, to delist our failures from the search results of His justice.

When we forgive someone, we are doing something breathtakingly divine. We are choosing to stop querying the database of their offenses. We are delisting the hurt from the search results we run every time we see their face.

The world may keep its records. But the God who knows every byte of data ever created has chosen to forget. And He invites us to do the same.