Does God forgive sins?
The passages offer forgiveness, deny it to Joshua's audience, and make it depend on forgiving others. They give different answers and conditions rather than one unrestricted promise.
- Textual conflict
- Interpretive tension
- The passages pull in different directions, but the conflict depends on how their wording, scope, or narrative context is read.
- Importance
- Foundational
- A central claim about origins, salvation, divine justice, or religious authority.
Promises of forgiveness contrast with Joshua's categorical refusal, but the audiences and conditions are not securely identical.
An editorial assessment of the quoted passages. Importance describes the stakes; it does not increase certainty. Reading order weighs both.
God promises forgiveness to people who repent or confess
If my people, which are called by my name, shall humble themselves, and pray, and seek my face, and turn from their wicked ways; then will I hear from heaven, and will forgive their sin, and will heal their land.
And they shall teach no more every man his neighbour, and every man his brother, saying, Know the Lord: for they shall all know me, from the least of them unto the greatest of them, saith the Lord: for I will forgive their iniquity, and I will remember their sin no more.