When God forgives us, he takes our sins away and treats us as if we had never sinned at all.  We see this from the Parable of the Prodigal Son, which also teaches us what we have to do to get God’s forgiveness.

The Parable of the Prodigal Son

In the Parable of the Prodigal Son, there was a well-to-do farmer who had two sons.  One day the younger son came to him and asked for the money which was to come to him when his father died.  What it came to was that he wanted the money there and then without having to wait until his father was dead.  You can see what an awful thing it was to ask.  So his father gave him his share.

Good times became bad times

A few days later the young man, having packed his things, left home and set off for a far country to have a good time.  He had never had so much money in his life and it seemed as if it would last for ever.  So he spent it like water and he soon found he had plenty of friends to share it.  But gradually it got less and less until it was all gone.  Then came the famine.  Food became very scarce and cost more than it had ever done before.  Now that he had no money, his so-called friends had no more use for him.  He tried to get work, but all the best jobs were given to the local inhabitants and he was a foreigner.  In the end he had to take the worst job a Jew could do, looking after pigs – for the Jews regarded the pig as an unclean animal.  And even then he was glad to eat some of the pigs’ food.