Month: March 2024

Failing to remember is often a trait of old age or children. However, aside from normal forgetfulness, we too often forget what we should remember and remember what we should forget. To enhance our memories and keep us from forgetting, we use various methods: scrapbooks, trophies, certificates, and bracelets, to name a few. They each help us recall an event or accomplishment that conveys part of our life story. 

Every generation also uses artistic skills and technology to create pictures or take photographs to remember important events.  Today, of course, our pictures are stored in the memory banks of cell phones and computers where (theoretically) we can access them easily.    

On the other hand, nations use national holidays to trigger memories of the past. Holidays are essential because they anchor us in history and remind us of our identity. Our Judeo-Christian heritage is full of special holidays that remind us of important aspects of our faith, the most obvious ones being Christmas and Easter

Old Testament patriarchs accomplished the same goal by building altars of remembrance when they had a specific encounter with God.  Abraham built at least four altars.  Sometimes these altars were accompanied by giving God a name to commemorate how he showed up.  The altar Abraham built on Mt. Moriah is a good example.  God provided a ram as a sacrifice in place of Isaac, and Abraham appropriately named that altar “God sees and provides” (Jehovah Jireh).

In preparation for the Israelites entering the Promised Land, Moses gave them two final instructions.  The first was to remember and obey all God’s commands (Deuteronomy 4:1), and the second was not to forget all God had done for them.  “But watch out!  Be careful never to forget what you yourself have seen.  Do not let these memories escape from your mind as long as you live!” Notice he went on to say… “be sure to pass them on to your children and grandchildren” (Deuteronomy 4:9 NLT). 

God established several celebrations and festivals (at least seven) to help the Israelites remember how he delivered them from Egypt and brought them to the Promised Land.  The Passover is probably the most familiar.  However, when future generations forgot to celebrate the Passover and all it symbolized, they drifted into idolatry. 

Another memory marker comes from the story of Israel crossing the Jordan River to enter the Promised Land.  God specifically told Joshua to have the elders take 12 stones from the river bottom and pile them up to create a memorial. 

Joshua directed them, “Cross to the middle of the Jordan and take your place in front of the Chest of GOD, your God.  Each of you heft a stone to your shoulder, a stone for each of the tribes of the People of Israel, so you’ll have something later to mark the occasion.  When your children ask you, ‘What are these stones to you?’ you’ll say, ‘The flow of the Jordan was stopped in front of the Chest of the Covenant of GOD as it crossed the Jordan—stopped in its tracks.  These stones are a permanent memorial for the People of Israel.'” (Joshua 4:5-7 MSG). 

The Psalmist echoes this theme in Psalm 78:2-8 (NASB)   

“I will open my mouth in a parable; I will tell riddles of old, which we have heard and known, and our fathers have told us.  We will not conceal them from their children, but we will tell the generation to come the praises of the LORD, and His power and His wondrous works that He has done.  For He established a testimony in Jacob and appointed a law in Israel, Which He commanded our fathers that they were to teach them to their children so that the generation to come would know, the children yet to be born, that they would arise and tell them to their children, so that they would put their confidence in God And not forget the works of God…”

Like the Old Testament, the New Testament also has its celebrations for remembering; the most familiar is often called the “Lord’s Table.”  

“And he (Jesus) took bread, and when he had given thanks, he broke it and gave it to them, saying, “This is my body, which is given for you.  Do this in remembrance of me.” And likewise, the cup after they had eaten, saying, “This cup that is poured out for you is the new covenant in my blood.  Drink in remembrance of me” (Luke 22:19-20). 

In all the above examples, God uses specific symbols to help people remember his calling. The Passover celebration, the Feast of Booths, and the Lord’s Table are full of symbols.

Those are biblical examples, but what about us today?  What stories can we tell about how God showed up in our past?  What are our “memorial stones” that cause our children to ask, “What are these for?”  God knew that Israel needed memory aids to help them remember; so do we.  We may forget significant encounters with God in our past because we fail to recognize them in the first place, and/ or we fail to create appropriate “piles of stones” that trigger our ability to remember.

It should be noted, however, that remembering how God showed up in our past defining moments is more than just recalling events.  If we only recall the defining moments/the stories, we, by default, get the credit for whatever happened.  The story soon becomes all about us and little or nothing about God. 

Nehemiah 9 gives us an excellent example of remembering how God showed up.  After Nehemiah rebuilt the walls of Jerusalem, a revival broke out, and the people gathered to listen to the priests read Scripture.  Part of their celebration was recalling how God showed up in the past.  Read that chapter and notice that God is repeatedly credited for his intervention.  The people not only identified how God showed up, but they also declared an attribute of God or gave him a name, thereby giving him the glory for what he did.

We can also use symbols as triggers that help us connect with what we need to remember.  Over our journey, my wife, Mary, has created several scrapbooks containing pictures that symbolize God’s divine touch on our lives.  One is a picture of an old barn on the property God provided in our move to Kansas City. The old barn triggered a long list of divine touches on our family journey when our children were growing up.  The old barn is no longer standing, but the symbol is.   We love to pull out that scrapbook when the grandkids are over and show them pictures of the old barn.  In the motif of Joshua’s pile of rocks at the Jordan River, when the grandkids say, “Why is that old barn in your scrapbook, grandma?” she can say, “Well, let me tell you the story of how God put his divine touch on our journey back when your mom and dad were your age.”

In addition to giving God the glory and passing on to others what God has done, there is another reason why remembering is so essential for us.  In Deuteronomy 8, Moses continues to remind the Israelites not to forget, but this time, he includes a warning against hubris. 

When you have eaten your fill, be sure to praise the LORD your God for the good land he has given you.  “But that is the time to be careful!  Beware that in your plenty you do not forget the LORD your God … For when you have become full and prosperous and have built fine homes to live in, and when your flocks and herds have become very large …, be careful!  Do not become proud at that time and forget the LORD your God, who rescued you from slavery in the land of Egypt (Deuteronomy 8:10-16).

Does that not sound familiar? Our culture not only does not give God credit for our country’s successes but also denies that God had anything to do with them. The attitude in America is that we are so wealthy and strong we do not need God. We must not follow this example and become proud and self-satisfied with our accomplishments, which breeds an attitude of self-reliance rather than reliance on God.    

God is the Almighty and faithful Father who must be central to our life story.  Otherwise, we rob our children and grandchildren of the real power behind our story; the real meaning is lost, and our story is no longer a sacred song.

For Reflection

1.  What stands out to you from reading Nehemiah 9?
2.  Describe a “pile of rocks” that you have created to help you remember.

To stress the effect of a single, lone punctuation mark on the meaning of a sentence, English teachers, throughout the decades, have passed on an anecdote from the telegraph age.

In the mid-19th century, the telegraph was the internet of the day. It first spanned the continent and then reached Europe with the transatlantic cable. Priced by the word, it was costly, necessitating short, abbreviated messages. One version of this anecdote is as follows.

The Price of a Comma

A woman touring Europe cabled her husband the following message: “Have found wonderful bracelet. Price seventy-five thousand dollars. May I buy it?”

Her husband immediately responded with the message: “No, price too high.” However, the telegraph operator missed one small detail in his transmission — the signal for a comma after the word “No.”

The wife in Europe received the reply: “No price too high.” Elated by the good news, she bought the bracelet. When she returned to the United States and showed the new bracelet to her shocked husband, he filed a lawsuit against the telegraph company — and won!

From then on, telegraph rules required operators to spell punctuation rather than use symbols. No price was too high to avoid the same mistake.

The last blog discussed four “Spiritual Rules of Grammar.”  In this blog, I want to identify one more. This rule is frequently violated and often brings about unintended consequences of a “price too high.”

Rule #5:  Don’t turn a sentence into a paragraph. (Paul in Acts 21; King Saul in 1 Samuel 13,14; Elisha/servant in 2 Kings 6)

We have a tendency (learned or innate) to build a big picture from a small piece of information, even a single sentence. From this snapshot, we create an entire paragraph or a whole movie. 

During my year in Vietnam, I would send home small cassette tape reels that I usually recorded at night. It took a few weeks for the tapes to reach my parents in Iowa and another two weeks to get their reply. Therefore, several months passed before I learned that my parents heard explosions in the background of my taped messages. They assumed that, since I was in a war zone, I was under attack each time I made a recording. Once I learned of their concern, I explained that they heard outgoing artillery, not incoming. Extrapolating a sentence into a paragraph (a sound became an attack) brought them undue worry and concern.

King Saul made the same grammatical mistake early in his rule as king over Israel. In 1 Samuel 13, we learn that Saul faced a daunting attack by his Philistine neighbor. The Philistines had massed an army of 30,000 chariots and 6,000 cavalry, plus too many to count infantry. Saul had started with 3,000 men, but his numbers dwindled from desertion. Saul was down to about 600 men when the Philistine attack was imminent—hardly a fair fight.

Saul then does what we would naturally do: he panicked. 1 Samuel 13:8 tells us that Saul waited the appointed seven days for the prophet Samuel to arrive and make an offering to God. Sometime during the seventh day, Saul took the compound sentence: “Samuel had not arrived, and his army was shrinking,” and turned it into a story of defeat and disaster. His imagined scenario led him to make a fateful decision. He stepped outside his role as king into the role of a prophet, making the sacrifice himself. His false narrative led to unexpected consequences: Losing his heritage as king. (“a price too high”)

A chapter later, we learn that King Saul and his small contingency of soldiers were in a planned retrograde movement:  avoiding enemy contact.  His son, Jonathon, however, along with his armor-bearer, went on a recon mission to see where the Philistines were camped. He discovers a garrison of Philistines (approximately 200 to 300 soldiers) camped on a prominent hilltop. He turns to his armor bearer and suggests they climb the hill and take on the garrison single-handedly.

Rather than projecting a losing outcome considering their scant resources, Jonathon says to his armor-bearer, “Come, and let’s cross over to the garrison of these uncircumcised men; perhaps the LORD will work for us because the LORD is not limited to saving by many or by few!” (1 Samuel 14:6). In other words, let’s climb the hill and let God write the story. They did, and God did. God wrote a story they couldn’t have imagined. Not only was the Philistine garrison routed, but it also encouraged Saul’s fearful army to join the battle. Even the Hebrews who had defected to the enemy rallied to the cause of Israel.

When we expand our current human knowledge into a future reality, we easily exclude the “X factor” in discipleship. I define the X factor as the unknown or unpredictable influence on a given situation. To some, the X factor in life is “luck,” “fate,” or even “faith.”  But for the disciple, the X-factor is none of the above but God himself. 

Living by this rule of grammar requires humility, faith, and wisdom. We need to admit that we don’t have all the information needed to project a future outcome, and even if we did, we should not impose on God an outcome based on our logic.

Violating this grammatical rule comes from two errors. One is to think that our current knowledge of reality (the sentence) is adequate to project future results (the paragraph). Thus, we build a false narrative based on inadequate information.

The second is assuming that our current knowledge of reality is all we can and should know, being content with only a partial picture rather than seeking to understand more. The prophet Samuel made this mistake when God sent him to anoint a new king over Israel. He correctly went to the house of Jesse but evaluated his selection based on externals rather than the internal condition of the heart, which God was after. After God rejected all of Jesse’s sons except the youngest, Samuel probably reflected on the choice of King Saul, who looked kingly externally but was devoid of faith internally. How did that turn out?

We can avoid this grammatical error by learning to ask more questions. Rather than assuming I know all that I need to know or can know, I should assume there is more going on than I currently know – or maybe I can know. We should assume that each situation is more complex than we think. For example, when the checkout clerk is rude to us, rather than assuming they are just a rude person or we have done something to offend them, we could consider that maybe they just got the news that their spouse has terminal cancer. How would that thinking affect our response to their rudeness?

When tempted to extrapolate the current sentences of our own story into paragraphs of disappointment, defeat, and disaster, we should remember this spiritual rule of grammar. We need to let God finish the paragraph and write the complete story.

For Reflection

1.  Reflect on when you projected disaster, and it turned out well.

• Why do you think we so easily assume we know all we need to know about a given situation?