"Fear not; for thou shalt not be ashamed: neither be thou confounded; for thou shalt not be put to shame: for thou shalt forget the shame of thy youth, and shalt not remember the reproach of thy widowhood any more." (Isaiah 54: 4)
Every word of Scripture matters, and every element which the Holy Spirit witnesses to us through the Word should give us great joy and hope.
Like many Christians, I wanted to forget my youth.
I wanted to forget the mistakes which I had made, the missed opportunities, the other shameful things which I had said and done.
When it comes to widowhood, most children of God in the Body of Christ may comment: "I have never been married", or "my spouse is not dead yet", or "I am a male."
Yet widowhood speaks of a status of great loneliness and frustration, despair wrought from losing ky relationships, as well as wealth and power or position.
How many of can think of times when it seemed as though God was one million miles away, as if He did not care what was going on? Much of the time, we were simply operating out of a lie or we misunderstood something. For me, at least, the fullness and finality of the Cross had not been faithfully explained to me.
Jesus did not just die on the Cross for our sins. He married us to Himself, and with Him we receive life, and that more abundantly (John 10: 10)
Regarding the need to forget, we need to understand that God causes us to forget the shame of our youth. We do not have to struggle to forget our youth. He takes away the reproach of our "widowhood".
Regarding the trying events from our past, we find many examples where God not only does not hide them, but rather magnifies the very people who did wrong things and this glorify God's grace.
Look no further than the geneology of our Lord Jesus Christ in the Gospel according to Matthew:
"And Judas begat Phares and Zara of Thamar; and Phares begat Esrom." (Matthew 1: 3)
Tamar's account is quite illicit, one which few pastors would preach in many modern churches, for fear of alienating pious, religious individuals in their congregations. Reading Genesis chapter 38, we find the daughter-in-law of Judah, Tamar, waiting for Judah to allow his next son to lie with her and sire offspring for her dead husband. Judah's first two sons died, and he refused to give his third to her.
Frustrated with her father-in-law's refusal to give his third to her, Tamar dressed herself up as a prostitute and seduced Judah to lie with her, all the while without her father-in-law knowing that he was sleeping with his own daughter-in-law. An account of incest, deception, familial strife, and outrageous desperation winds up in the first recorded Gospel of the New Testament, and the children born out of Tamar and Judah's deceptive incest become ancestors of Jesus Christ!
There are also the accounts of Rahab the harlot (Joshua 2, 6), Ruth (see her story in the Old Testament account named after her), and also the wife of David, who had been the wife of Uriah (2 Samuel 11-12). In these respective accounts, a prostitute, a despised Moabitess (a descendant of incest, no less), and an adulteress gave birth to ancestors of Jesus Christ our Lord.
So, we should never feel compelled to run from our past, for fear of the reproach of men, for in our weakest moments, and even in our greatest sins, God's grace superabounds (Romans 5: 20) and provides
Yet many believers try to forget their past altogether still. What's the problem?
The verse in Isaiah 54 spells out what God promises to remove from us: the shame of our youth; the reproach of our widowhood. Too many children of God feel shame, guilt, and condemnation about their past. They still feel that they have to make it right, that they have to correct the mistakes or make up for the sins which they committed. They have yet to learn that when Jesus died on the Cross, He took all of our sins, and the condemnation attached to these sins, and paid for them all.
He also bore the reproach and shame for the things which were done against us, too.
For me, I struggled with painful moments in which I had allowed people to be abusive to me, and I had castigated myself for so long, often wondering what I could or should have done to prevent that abuse.
I have since learned that He is always watching out for us, and we have no need to avenge ourselves of our enemies. For a long time, I had believed that I had to right the wrongs which I had endured, that I had to fight back and "teach people a lesson." God blesses us in spite of the terrible things which we have endured, and He takes away the shame of what was perpetrated against us.
For too long, I had tried to forget the moments in the past, when God had taken away the reproach and shame of those trying times in my life. Because there is no condemnation in Christ Jesus (Romans 8: 1), we have no reason to be ashamed of anything in our past. We are taken from dead in our trespasses to seated in heavenly places with Christ Jesus (Ephesians 2: 4-8), and we receive all things freely with Christ (Romans 8: 32)
Do not try to forget your past. Rest in the righteousness of God, which you are in Christ (2 Corinthians 5: 21). Reckon yourself dead to all sin (Romans 6: 11), for Jesus has taken away the pain, and He will grace your past and bless you in the present and fill your future full of His blessings.
We must not fall for the lie that we must forget.