Remembering God

"...how often they rebelled against Him in the wilderness and grieved His heart in that dry wasteland.  Again and again they tested God's patience and provoked the Holy One of Israel.  They did not remember His power and how he rescued them from their enemies."

Psalm 78:40-43

The older I get, the more aware I become that I have an amazing ability to forget things.  Truly, I am a really good "forgetter."  (Just ask my wife!)  I don't think it's the early onset of Alzheimer's (although having walked with my dad through the dementia of his final years, that possibility has crossed my mind more than once).  The forgetfulness to which I refer is a condition which I believe is more common to all of us - it seems to be part of the human condition.  Perhaps you can relate.

I find I am especially forgetful when it comes to the things of God.

God has sustained me all of my years; He has provided for my family and for me in innumerable ways.  Yet the economy goes soft, and my response is to become anxious about the future.  Forgetting His undeniable goodness, I worry what will happen to us if the market crashes or the government goes bankrupt (as if it's not already).

I have committed a pretty good portion of God's word - the Bible - to memory, including the part which assures me that "a soft answer turns away wrath," and that "a fool always loses his temper, but a wise person holds it back."  Yet I am so quick to forget these truths in favor of lashing out when crossed by those closest to me, only to recall afterward that He observes and keeps track of all my sins: thoughts, words, and deeds.

There is a small comfort in the fact that my condition is not exclusive with me personally.  Psalm 78, and many other passages in the Bible, reveal that even those who lived with God's presence in the form of a pillar of fire by night and a pillar of cloud by day - were also prone to forget Him.  Go figure!  They had seen God's work in drowning an entire army where they, themselves, had just walked through the middle of a sea on dry land.  They had seen Him produce water when they were thirsty, meat when they were hungry, bread from heaven for them to eat daily.  They had possession of stone tablets inscribed with rules for life by the very finger of God.  Yet they forgot.

No wonder God tells them - and us - over and over to "remember."  We are to remember His words, His character, and His works.  We are to pass them on to our children, teaching them carefully of God's mighty acts of provision - not just for Israel, but in our own experience as well.  The regular recounting of God's good works on our behalf provides protection against the inclination to forget, and we must never grow weary of repeating those accounts.

As a student of history, it occurs to me that the greatest task of the historian is not just to examine what happened  in the past, but to preserve the truth of what God did in the past.  Since He is at work in all things, historians can do a great service if they will glorify Him by reminding us all of God's hand in history
   - lest we forget!