God who remembers
Psa
25:6 Remember,
O LORD, your great mercy and love, for they are from of old.
Tomorrow
we'll look at the next verse which is about God forgetting, but before
we get there comes the verse about remembering. Memory is an amazing
feature of being a human being who is made in the image of God (Gen
1:26). Most of us take it for granted. I certainly did until my father-in-law
had a series of strokes which left him with no short term memory.
When you walked in, he would ask you how you were and what was happening
to you and you'd tell him. Three minutes later he would be repeating
the questions and three minutes after that you'd start the cycle again
and again. Thinking about that I realized how much of our conversation
is about the past. Our conversations are mostly based on what has
already happened – you watch yourself over the next day. In fact if
you take that in, you'll see that if we had no memory, we even forget
we who we are. That is the problem of the person who wakes up in a
hospital after a serious accident and suffering amnesia, they can't
remember who they are.
So
here we are now in the above verse with David basically saying, “Lord
remember who you are, remember what you're like!” You want to see
more of the significance of that? Stop and think about your life when
things are going wrong. On a good day you might be thinking (in accordance
with Scripture and your experience), “I am a child of God with all
of the grace of God available to me. I am full of His Spirit and all
of His characteristics, I am a child of the king!” Then suddenly you
are attacked with a verbal attack that takes your breath away. Suddenly
you forget who you are and you go on the defensive and attack back.
You shouldn't but sometimes you do, because the emotions that suddenly
arrive overwhelm you and make you forget who you are. That's why David
is saying, “Lord remember who you are” because he knows the experience
of forgetting in the face of adverse emotions.
Now
of course the funny thing is the Lord never forgets who He is. He
has no cause to feel defensive, but David needs to remind himself
of these characteristics of the Lord. Some times when we pray things
about the Lord, it's not because the Lord needs telling them – He
already knows – but it's for our own benefit; we need reminding, we
need encouraging by the truth.
So
here is the truth that David is declaring: the Lord won't forget who
He is. The Lord won't forget that He is full of mercy and love. Moses
had to tell his people that the Lord would not forget His covenant
(Deut 4:31). Sometimes David asked the Lord not to forget, because
it seemed the Lord was not moving and had forgotten. Of course He
hadn't; He was just biding His time. Hence David asked the Lord not
to forget the helpless – himself (Psa 10:12 ) or him generally (Psa
13:1). One of the other psalmists asked the Lord not to forget their
oppression (Psa 44:24). The Lord declared through Isaiah, “O
Israel , I will not forget you” (Isa 44:21).
For
the Lord to forget His children today is an impossibility. You forget
someone who is away from you perhaps, but the Lord actually dwells
within His children today by His Holy Spirit. How can he possibly
forget us? He won't, but there may be times when, for His own purposes,
He may appear to delay and we'll find ourselves saying, “Lord don't
forget….” because that's the fear we have, of being forgotten by our
loving heavenly Father and being left alone in the corner of upset.
It's all right, you're not alone, He hasn't forgotten (Deut 31:6,
Heb 13:5,6)