God Remembers The Chosen People

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 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 action, on acting upon whatever was on top of the mind. God was mindful of His Covenant with Abraham, always. He doesn’t forget. Actually, neither does He remember in the human sense. 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. To be mindful is coupled with to act. When God remembers, He acts on what He is focusing on.

God always has a master plan. He knows the big picture and always takes the long view, to our way of thinking. But he is always right on time in the fullness of time. In this case, God was always mindful of His Chosen People, and He knows that He opened the curtain of time with Abraham and told him that the people of the Covenant would be in Egypt for four hundred years. “Know certainly that your descendants will be strangers in a land that is not theirs, and will serve them, and they will afflict your descendants for 400 years.” (Genesis 15:13). And now God in His eternal wisdom knew that the time had come to liberate His people, and nothing would impede Him as He made that happen.

The promise that God decided to put into action was the eternal Covenant He made with Abraham and without Abraham’s approval. God promised, and Abraham accepted the promise. God had made a binding, everlasting promise to Abraham, and that Covenant was always on God’s mind. God is faithful to His promises, always. The Abrahamic Covenant was extraordinary, a singular event in the history of mankind. God promised in His covenant with Abraham: that his descendants would be a blessing to all the nations of the world, hinting at a coming Messiah from his family line; that God would give the lands of Abraham’s wanderings to his descendants as an everlasting possession, a treasured Land of Promise; that God would be the loyal, faithful, all-sufficient God of all his descendants, and that his family line would remain God’s Chosen People in the world; God promised that Abraham’s descendants would come through Abraham and Sarah, and no one else.

Exodus 2:24-25 reveals a God of action. God heard, a Hebrew word that implies action; He remembered, a biblical concept that implies intervention; He saw, which involves acting upon what one has perceived; and He knew, a theme in Scripture that is experiential and active. God here is on the move for His Chosen People, with wisdom, purpose and compassion.

When Scripture says that God heard, remembered, saw and knew, what is hard if not impossible to understand, is that as a Spirit God doesn’t have ears to hear, He doesn’t have a memory to remember, he doesn’t have eyes to see. But we humans have always had to give to God human traits in order to try to describe in our meager ways something outside our experience. God is so profoundly separate from creation, from human understanding, that we need to attribute human features to Him so we can relate to Him, so we can begin to understand His actions, His qualities and personality. Without this, how would we capture Him in our imagination, our faith? God’s actions, God’s words, need to be described in human terms, because that is all we know. The sharp eyesight of a formless Spirit without eyes is beyond our comprehension The acute hearing ability of a Spirit without ears is in another dimension from us. Nonetheless, as Scripture makes clear, our God is a personal God, He hears, remembers, sees, and knows intimately. That’s all true even if we don’t understand it. His thoughts are not our thoughts, but in His mercy He is making Himself understandable in His Word and through His Spirit.

God heard their groaning. The Hebrew Bible is full of references to God’s ability to hear humans when they pray, when they seek to be heard by God. It is a matter of faith that God has the ability and desire to listen to us. Once again, we are outside of human understanding. The fact is that God’s hearing transcends words. Our prayers don’t have to be carefully constructed as if from an English professor. God first listens to the heart, then the words. He is able to listen to what is going on in the heart before He hears the thoughts of our mind. God’s radar is constantly in the “on” position, ready to listen to whatever we have to say or think, with or without words. God’s fingers, in other words, is constantly on the pulse of the heart. God’s ears are always open. God is all ears at all times.

We trust that God hears our thoughtful prayers, even before we speak. “It shall come to pass that before they call, I will answer; and while they are still speaking, I will hear.” (Isaiah 65:24). A common refrain in the Psalms is the firm belief that God would hear their prayers: “His ears are attentive;” “Does He who implanted the ear not hear?” “I have called aloud to the Lord with my voice, and He heard me.” “The Lord will hear when I call to Him;” “Blessed be the Lord, because He has heard my supplication.” “God surely listened.” And we have a standing promise from the Lord… “Call to me and I will answer.” (Jer. 33:3).

The hearing of God is so miraculous that he can actually hear thoughts, He can hear human emotions, sighs, tears, growls and halting breath. And as is clear form Exodus 2, God can hear wordless groans. In biblical terms, a groan and a sigh are interchangeable, and is a wordless sound uttered in pain, grief, or distress; a visceral sound full of deep emotion but without language; a personal expression of inner disturbance; the Greek word for groan is rooted in the word for ‘to give birth;’ a deep wordless prayer offered to God when in distress or difficulty. God can hear all these things without fail.

The Hebrew understanding is that their word for hearing (shama) involves more than opening the ear and taking a listen. Hearing is the opposite of something going in one ear and out the other. Hearing in the biblical sense implies action, giving heed, acting on what was heard, acting on whatever was understood. The fact that God heard means that He understood what was going on, and He was ready to spring into action. When the children of Israel groaned in Egypt, God heard/acted, He understood/intervened, He listened/took heed. Why? As Yahweh later told Moses on Sinai, when a person in distress “cries out to Me, I will hear him, for I am gracious. (Ex.22:27).

God remembered the Covenant. The promise that God decided to put into action was the eternal Covenant He made with Abraham and without Abraham’s approval. God promised, and Abraham accepted the promise. God had made a binding, everlasting promise to Abraham, and that Covenant was always on God’s mind. God is faithful to His promises, always. The Abrahamic Covenant was extraordinary, a singular event in the history of mankind. God promised in His covenant with Abraham: that his descendants would be a blessing to all the nations of the world, hinting at a coming Messiah from his family line; that God would give the lands of Abraham’s wanderings to his descendants as an everlasting possession, a treasured Land of Promise; that God would be the loyal, faithful, all-sufficient God of all his descendants, and that his family line would remain God’s Chosen People in the world; God promised that Abraham’s descendants would come through Abraham and Sarah, and no one else.

The biblical report that God “remembered?” We try to understand this, but God has no memory, so God doesn’t need to remember. God does not remember anything, but neither does He forget anything. Whatever God brings to mind is already there. Whatever is not on His mind has never existed. God’s mind contains more data than the universe can hold, all the time. God doesn’t need a reservoir of memories from which to retrieve what is in the past. There is no past with God. God doesn’t need a savings bank to save his memories from which to draw them out later. God is already mindful of something that he remembers, when he decides to focus like a laser, like a 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 while keeping everything else in mind. When God remembers, He is participating in his thought. When God remembers, He is applying an eternal truth to the present reality. When God remembers, the 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. Remember, God has no memory. His mind is outside of time, a timeless mind that contains everything there is to know, all the time.

God looked upon the children of Israel. If there’s one truth that Scripture makes clear about our God, it is that He is a personal God. He is not a distant Supreme Being who is indifferent, uninvolved, or blind to what is happening on His earth. We are not invisible to God. The Lord is a God who sees. Our God is the world’s eternal watchman. Like a compassionate shepherd, God tends His flock, the human race, and somehow gives all of us His personal, undivided attention. He not only sees but He responds.

Just as God is all ears without ears, He is all eyes without eyes. The biblical sense of seeing (ra’ah) is to experience what was observed, taking heed to what was discerned, to look into what was seen. An important aspect of our faith is that nothing can escape God’s attention. He is able to observe everything in the universe, all at once, from the movements of the subatomic elements in every cell to the movement of the stars in every galaxy, God sees all. “Who is like the Lord our God, who is enthroned on high, who humbles Himself to behold the things that are in heaven and in the earth?” (Ps. 13:5-6).

There are some beautiful Scripture passages that refer to God’s divine vision, including: Ps. 121; Ps. 139:13-16; Ps. 33:13-15; Prov. 5:21; Job 28:23-24; Heb. 4:13; and 2 Chron. 16:9. 

And God knew them. In the memorable words of Yahweh as spoken to Moses at the burning bush, He said, “I have surely seen the affliction of My people who are in Egypt, and have given heed to their cry because of their taskmasters, for I know their pain.” (Ex. 3:7). Not only does God hear, remember, and see the distress of His Chosen People, but He intimately knows of their suffering in such a way as to join with them in their distress. He identifies with His suffering people so completely that he suffers along with them. As Isaiah recalled of this rescue of the Lord, “In all their affliction, He was afflicted.” (Is. 63:9).

As it turned out, God indeed “knew” their pain in the biblical sense. This Hebrew word “yada” is jam-packed with meaning. On the one hand it implies acquiring something factual through the intellect. It is mentally grasping some piece of knowledge and remembering it. When you know something, your mind says, “I got this.” So on the one hand, knowing is a mental exercise. But on the other hand yada is so much more. In the Hebrew meaning, knowing implies an intimate understanding of something. Knowing is a deep personal union (Adam “knew” Eve), a personal experience with truth. In the Hebrew mind, one didn’t really know something until it became a part of you, until you could live it out. To know was to be involved, to participate in that truth at a personal level. Something isn’t truly known unless it changes the knower. To know a truth means the knower is responsible to use it properly in his life. True knowledge is a personal relationship with the truth. To know is to have a commitment to what is known and to take it personally.

Deliverance. So what was God moved to do when He heard, remembered, saw and knew their pain? Yahweh first went to a man of the Chosen People called Moses, who was raised in Egypt as a son of the princess, then spent forty years in the wilderness learning all those survival skills. The gospel idea of a savior started with Moses. He delivered the Jewish nation from slavery in Egypt, and he brought them to the Promised Land forty years later. Moses freed his people from bondage. God gave Moses the mission of delivering his people, and Moses succeeded. The Exodus has been used ever since in Christian thought as an historical picture of a spiritual truth. God appointed Moses to be a savior. God appointed Jesus to be the Savior. Jesus’ mission spiritually fulfilled Moses’ mission. Moses brought the Jews salvation from slavery. Jesus brought all people salvation from sin. Moses brought the physical reality of deliverance, Jesus brought the spiritual reality of deliverance. Moses illustrated the gospel story, while Jesus embodied it. Moses led the old Exodus. Jesus led the new Exodus, the exodus of the soul, freeing humanity from the bondage of, not Egypt, but sin.