Exploring God’s Memory
Exploring God’s Memory.
“O the depth of the riches and the wisdom and knowledge of God! What a deep wealth of wisdom and knowledge He has! How incomprehensible are His decisions, how unsearchable His judgments! How undiscoverable are His paths, how mysterious His ways, beyond finding out! Who has understood the mind of Yahweh? Who knows how the LORD thinks, or what His thoughts are? Can anyone discern the LORD’s intentions, His motivations? Who knows enough to give Him advice? Is there anyone qualified to be His counselor? Who has given Him so much that He needs to pay it back? Who could ever have a claim against Him? For everything was created by Him, everything lives through Him, and everything exists for Him; So to Him must be given the glory forever! Amen!” (Romans 11:33-36, also Isaiah 40:12-14).
WANTED: Adventurers who want to explore creation’s Final Frontier, the greatest Wonder of the World; must be extremely curious about the nature of God’s Being; motivated to know more about God than you know presently; inspired by the thrill of discovery; need to be challenged and changed in the process of exploration; have the courage to step into a safe unknown; able to invest considerable mental energy to pursue life inside God with a mustard seed of trust in Him; be comfortable with the certainty of endless exploring; have the patience to pursue the quest one step at a time for as long as it takes; must explore with the vision of C. S. Lewis in his Narnia tales, “Further Up and Further In!”
Contemporary Frontiers. What are the most compelling frontiers in our world that we could explore… Outer space with its 100 billion galaxies, each of them having 100 billion stars? Inner space where protons and electrons and all the subatomic particles seeming to be dancing in joy? The ocean floors across the earth, 80% of which are unexplored? Or perhaps land areas such as remote mountain ranges, untraveled deserts, impenetrable jungles and rainforests, the frozen tundra of the Arctic, isolated islands in the middle of nowhere, or virgin caverns and caves that are largely hidden from humanity? These are all worthy frontiers, but there is a final frontier that tops them all… God. And whatever might be discovered about the Person of God, it’s only the tip of the eternal iceberg.
Exploring God’s Memory.
God doesn’t need to remember, therefore He doesn’t have a memory.
God does not remember anything, but neither does He forget anything.
Whatever God brings to mind has already been there.
Whatever is not on His mind has never existed.
God’s mind has eternally contained more data than the universe can hold.
God doesn’t need a reservoir of memories from which to retrieve what is in the past.
There is no past with God, so of what use is a memory?
God doesn’t need a mental savings bank to save His memories for timely withdrawals.
God is already thinking of whatever it is that He remembers.
God’s memory involves His decision to focus like a laser beam coming from the light of the world.
When God remembers, He is preparing for action.
When God remembers, He is deciding to focus on something in particular along with everything else.
When God remembers, He is Personally participating in His thought.
When God remembers, He is applying an eternal truth to the present reality.
When God remembers, His divine attention will surely bring about divine intervention.
When God remembers, He is choosing to be faithful to a promise.
God doesn’t need to memorize for a test.
God doesn’t need to recall something that is already there.
God doesn’t need to collect his thoughts, since they are already collected at the top of His mind.
God has no memory, for His mind is outside of time,
a timeless mind that contains everything there is to know, all at once, all the time.
God Remembers Noah. “God remembered Noah, every living thing and all the livestock with him in the ark; so God caused a wind to pass over the earth, and the water began to go down. Also the fountains of the deep and the windows of the sky were stopped, the rain from the sky was restrained.” (Genesis 8:1-2). By “remembering,” God decided to intervene, He was moved into action, it was the fullness of time according to His timetable, and sure enough the waters receded. When God decides to focus on one thing, He participates in that thought by springing into action. God never forgot Noah. God didn’t have an earlier memory lapse.
God Remembers Abraham. “When God destroyed the cities of the plain, He remembered Abraham and sent Lot out, away from the destruction, when he overthrew the cities in which Lot lived.” (Genesis 19:29). When God “remembered” Abraham just before the complete destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, He was mindful of his friendship with Abraham, His loyalty to him, His recent discussion about justice and mercy regarding God’s judgment, and He brought to mind the eternal covenant He made with Abraham. God never “forgot” Abraham. God doesn’t have memory lapses. God decided to focus on Abraham in such a way as to spring into action.
God Remembers Rachel. “God remembered Rachel’s plight, God answered her prayers, and He opened her womb.’ (Genesis 30:22). God never “forgot” Rachel, of course. So He didn’t need to remember her. God was mindful of Rachel’s prayers all along, her repeated requests to be blessed with a child by Jacob, and in the fullness of time according to Him, He jumped into action. God doesn’t need a memory, He doesn’t need to be reminded, He holds everything in the universe in the top of His mind at all times. For God to “remember” is for God’s light to focus like a laser in order to act, to intervene. God becomes mindful when He wants to act.
God Remembers the Chosen People. “So God heard their groaning; and God remembered His covenant with Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. And God looked upon the children of Israel, and God knew them.” (Exodus 2:24-25). Four hundred years? God forgot His Chosen People slaving away in Egypt for four hundred years? If you are a believer in the God who is outside of time and is a Spirit (John 4:24), we trust that God was not just sitting round twiddling his thumbs all that time. The act of remembering in Scripture implies acting upon whatever was on top of the mind. God was mindful of His Covenant with Abraham, always. God needs no memory, because He has everything at the top of His mind at all times. He doesn’t need to recall anything, because nothing has ever left His mind. Remembering in the Scripture is an act of preparation to intervene, to move into action.
God Remembers Hannah. “Hannah had no children, for the Lord had closed her womb… Then Elkanah and Hannah arose early in the morning and worshipped before Yahweh, and returned again to their house near Bethlehem. And Elkanah knew (had relations with) Hannah his wife, and the Lord remembered her. And it came about in due time, after Hannah conceived, that she gave birth to a son; and she named him Samuel, saying, “Because I have asked him of Yahweh.” (1 Samuel 1:2, 5, 9-20). God had been listening to Hannah’s desperate prayers for a child, and the right time in God’s mind had come. The time was right for the pivotal prophet Samuel to be conceived and born, and Hannah was the one selected. God was mindful of Hannah and Samuel and Israel’s history, and He was moved into action. He remembered her in her barrenness. He never forgot her, of course. God was waiting for the right time. The time had come.
God Remembers Mercy. “God has helped His servant Israel, remembering to be merciful to Abraham and his descendants forever, even as He said to our fathers.” (Luke 1:54-55). No, God didn’t forget to show mercy. God doesn’t forget anything, so neither does He remember anything. The biblical concept of “remembering” implies action, preparing for action. So in this case, God remembers in the sense that He is focusing on something big, the Big Event, on the pregnancy and birth and life of His very Son. God is preparing for His eternal Son to take on flesh and enter the world and transform it and save it.
God Remembers Our Human Condition. “God remembers that we are creatures of flesh. He is mindful of how He formed us, that we were made from mere dust. He knows that we are frail, fragile, and short-lived… like a passing breeze that does not return; or like a wildflower in the field that flourishes and then it is gone, as if it had never been there. Our brief, vulnerable life on earth is like a wisp of morning fog catching a brief bit of sun before disappearing. God is mindful of all this and is always prepared to help us in our time of need. Despite our brevity on earth and our human condition, God in His mercy will not break a bruised reed, and he will not extinguish a dimly burning wick.” (Ps. 78:38-39; Ps. 103:14-16; James 4:14; Hebrews 4:16; Isaiah 42:3). Out of sheer mercy, the Lord is mindful of our humanity, that we have soft spots and are vulnerable as we, along with all creation, groan for final redemption. God is high and holy and better than perfect, and yet amazingly is sympathetic to our human frailties. At one point in human history, a person would be right to challenge God and respectfully say… ‘But God, you seem to be so hard on us, and you don’t know what it’s like to face these challenges at the human level! You don’t know what it’s like to be flesh and blood!’ But now, because of Jesus, we have no right to even consider that, do we? God so identifies with our earthly plight that He became flesh and blood! He knows what it feels like! God knows firsthand that life is brief and that we are faced with our human condition every day. God is always mindful, He constantly remembers, our frailty. And He stands ready in His grace to do what is necessary to meet us where we are and love us into the New Creation. When we show our humanity, that we are made of dust, God is poised to intervene and redeem the soft spots in His strength and power. When we are human, God keeps His promises.
God Remembers the New Covenant. “Jesus took some unleavened bread called matzah, and gave thanks to God. Then He broke it in pieces and gave it to the disciples, saying, ‘This is my body, which is given for you. Do this in remembrance of me.’ After supper He took another cup of wine and said, ‘This cup is the New Covenant between God and His people – an agreement confirmed with my blood, which is poured out as a sacrifice for you.’” (Luke 22:19-20). When Jesus declared the New Covenant at His Last Supper, He was boldly claiming that the New Covenant as predicted in Jeremiah 31 and hinted at in Ezekiel 36 was now being ratified, inaugurated, put into place. By remembering the New Covenant like He did with His disciples, Jesus is preparing to make good on God’s age-old promises of redemption. Jesus declared that He will now fulfill those prophecies from the Hebrew Bible. Even Moses anticipated the New Covenant in Deuteronomy 29:4, when he told the gathered Israelites, “Yet to this day the Lord has not given you a mind to understand, or eyes to see, or hears to hear.” Moses knew that there would come a day when his observation would come true with the people of Israel. Jesus confirmed that day has indeed arrived, the Passover’s Cup of Redemption is now fulfilled in the Person of Jesus Messiah.
Full-Bodied Remembering. When Jesus said, “Do this in remembrance of me,” He wasn’t limiting remembrance to merely a mental activity. Jesus was referring to the biblical understanding of remembrance, that remembering involved personal experience. Remembering something always brought with it the purpose of bringing the past into the present, of having the person doing the remembering participate in the memory. Jesus wants the New Covenant to be brought into the current reality whenever we remember His body and blood. Jesus intended the Communion act to have an impact on the person who is doing the remembering. He wants the body and blood of the past sacrifice to remain real and effectual, taking effect now as surely as it did during Christ’s Passion. The elements of Communion, through faith in Jesus and the work of the Spirit, are intended to become a part of our spiritual digestive system, a vital part of who we are in our current spiritual walk with God. The body and the blood of the past is intended to become present to us now in its original power and fullness, real spiritual food, enabling us to grow in the Lord.
Will The Lord Remember Me (Live At The Ryman)
A Reminder about Remembering. To “remember” something, in biblical language, is not merely the act of recalling something that has been forgotten. After all, God doesn’t forget anything, and yet the Scripture repeatedly points to the fact that “God remembered.” With reference to God, remembering means, not to recall, but to be mindful of something, to acknowledge something, to choose to focus on something. And in the Bible the word “remember” implies God’s action, intervention, about Him doing something about what He is mindful of. God often remembers in order to be faithful to a promise. When God remembers, be prepared to see God in action. When God remembers, there is a focus of divine attention, and the action soon to come makes clear what God is mindful of. God doesn’t just think about something when He remembers, God actually does something about it. When God remembers, He chooses to participate with what is on His mind.