“For he who lacks these things is shortsighted, even to blindness, and has forgotten that he was cleansed from his old sins.”
and has forgotten
“Forgotten” means forgetfulness. Literally, “forgotten” means to take forgetfulness or receive forgiveness. Someone or something else gives this person amnesia. Others influence him to become dull spiritually. This person cannot recall proper spiritual information and thus loses sight of the significance of the information. He loses sight of the spiritual significance.
We get the English words “lethal,” “lethargy,” and the mythical river Lethe (which was supposed to cause forgetfulness of the past to those who drank of it) from the root of the Greek word for “forgotten.”
There is a progression here. First, we grow blind to spiritual things and then forget that God forgave us our sins. People in marriage can forget what caused them to love each other initially. The hurts that come between can distort their first love.
When we became Christians, a grand love affair began. We loved God because of His grace and forgiveness. We recognized that everything depended on His provision for us. At the point where we tasted grace, the wonder of our love for the Lord Jesus was great. Something happened to distort that love. We took on spiritual forgetfulness. We can come to the place where we forget all that He did for us. We are like those who never came to Christ.
PRINCIPLE:
Forgetfulness causes a vacuum in our souls toward God.
APPLICATION:
A marriage might be fully in love at one point and then become dull in that love. Something blunted original love. Losing love led to bitterness and antagonism; something else filled the gap. Sin distorts memories. Negative attitudes toward one another create a vacuum in their thinking. That vacuum sucks in negative attitudes, and that distorts the love of the past—the pleasant memories of the past fade away. Something has happened to warp that love.
Some Christians have been believers for so long that they forgot they were non-Christians. They forgot that they had a life BC, before Christ. This is spiritual complacency and lethargy. A person like this goes to sleep as a Christian for the rest of their Christian life. He does not want to be disturbed. “Don’t wake me up. Please don’t bother me. I don’t want to get involved. Do not expect anything of me.”
Receiving forgetfulness is a process. We begin to stop studying the Word then things go downhill from there. We cannot discern the necessary truth experience to have a rich fellowship with the Lord (2 Ti 2:15).
