He Remembers
There are moments in our lives where we don’t know what to say, but we know we will never forget.
160 years ago, President Abraham Lincoln had to imagine what to say to a war-torn country struggling to understand the loss of life. “The world will little note nor long remember what we say here,” declared the President, “but it will never forget what they did here.”
Never forget. It’s a phrase used in most holocaust memorials. It speaks to the sense that deep in our consciousness–deep in our psyche–we think there is something worse than death: to be forgotten.
In the 49th chapter of Isaiah, the people of God feel abandoned. “Zion says the Lord has forsaken me. My Lord has forgotten me” (v.14). It may be easy to sympathize. Have you ever had a moment when you thought all you had ever done would be laid in the sands of the earth, and all you have been working for will be forgotten?
In Washington, D.C., stands the Vietnam Veterans memorial wall, completed in 1982. A young Yale university student designed the wall for an extra credit project for his architecture class. It starts as a small triangle in the corners, standing only 8 inches in height. As you walk along, the wall rises, 250 feet long, and meets in the middle at about 10 feet tall. And etched in stone along these granite walls are 55,185 names! It is a reflecting wall–not just to reflect the names of those who died but the face of the people standing there. Most of us go looking for names of people we know; and when we are done, we follow our curiosity by looking for anyone who bears our name. Here is where the design works best: as you look at the names, you see yourself; you see the common bond you have with those who have gone before.
In Isaiah 49, what hits God like a ton of bricks is to hear his people say “I am forgotten!” And so, God responds:
“Can a woman forget her nursing child,
that she should have no compassion on the son of her womb?
Even these may forget,
yet I will not forget you.
Behold…your walls are continually before me.
[And] I have engraved you on the palms of my hands.” [Isa 49:15-16 ESV]
You know, writing on the palms of one’s hands goes away. Any schoolboy who has made the mistake of trying to cheat that way knows this. But engraving is permanent. God engraves memories in the palms of his hands.
Perhaps you remember a story recorded in John 20. Jesus appears in the middle of a room where the apostles are reflecting on the loss of their Lord. And then, the risen Jesus says to Thomas “put your fingers in the holes in my hands” … as if to say “I will never forget you for the memory of what I did for you is ever before me—engraved in the palms of my hands.”
Writing names is a metaphor for knowing we are in the hands of a God who does not forget us. In Luke 10, Jesus told his followers, don’t rejoice because you are able to cast demons out; rejoice because your names are inscribed in heaven (Luke 10:21 NCB). In Revelation 21, the heavenly city, the New Jerusalem, is described as a great walled city with 12 gates, guarded by 12 angels, and on each gate are engraved the names given to the people of God (Rev 21:12 EHV). God doesn’t forget. God remembers. When it comes to you, the difference you make, the kind of person he has called you to be, my God does not forget.
He remembers you.
When we forget how loved we are, how saved we are, how infinitely better life is for us knowing Jesus Christ, let us follow the advice of the Apostle Paul: “remember that you were once separated from Christ, aliens from the covenant of promise, with no hope and without God in the world” (Eph 2:11-12). But God remembered his covenant. God remembered his plan of love. And God remembered you.
When the messenger from God appeared to Cornelius in a vision, he said, “God has heard your prayer, and your gifts to the poor have been remembered by God” (Acts 10:31). God knows you, loves you, watches you, is with you, and he remembers you.
And when you feel as though you are surrounded by nothing but pain, and sorrow, and loss–hear the stirring anecdote from the Apostle to Timothy: “Remember Jesus Christ, risen from the dead, the offspring of David, as preached in my gospel” (2 Tim 2:8).
We are held up, held on, and held forth by a power greater than sin, death, and the grave. It was Jonah who, in the darkness of the deep, declared, “when my life was fainting away, I remembered the Lord, and my prayer came to You, in your Holy Temple” (Jonah 2:7). Good thing. Because in the words of Paul, “remember it is not you who support the root, but the root supports you” (Rom 11:18). When Israel fell and fell again, they found ways to return, to start anew; the Psalmist puts it this way: “They remembered that God was their rock” (Psalm 78:35).
And so it is–that we are at times tempted to forget; but He will not forget. We are prone to lose track of it all; but He will never loosen his gaze upon us. And when we feel helpless and alone, staring face to face with only the tragedy of our lives, where we can only muster up the courage to say what the thief said to Jesus: “Remember me when you come into your kingdom,” Jesus looks back tenderly to us, you and me, precious children, living and loving in the light of His grace, and he whispers sweetly to us, “I already have. It is finished. Behold all things are new.”
–Nathan Guy