God Remembers

Exodus 6:5 And I have also heard the groaning of the children of Israel whom the Egyptians keep in bondage, and I have remembered My covenant.

Here the question is, how can God remember?

Does God forget? Did God not think of his covenant for 400 years? That is not possible.

Does he have too many things to do?             I used to think that when I was a kid. That God had a bunch of things to do, obviously, and so there were things he didn’t concentrate on. Of course, nothing was ever neglected, but many things were deliberately put aside while other projects were undertaken. I used to think, in other words, that God had a series of really accurate internal alarm clocks.

But that is untrained and ill-conceived theology. Many of God’s attributes are violated by that notion of God’s being and activity. So that is not the way to understand it.

When it says that God remembers, it does not mean that God forgot. It is impossible for God to forget the slightest thing—that we know! Theology guiding us, then, we have to say that Moses is talking to us in language of accommodation. We have to understand that language the way Calvin understands the expression El Shaddai—not as literal but metaphorical. He is saying things that do not mean quite as we might naturally take it, because he is talking about something that goes beyond our experience.

It has to do with God’s eternity. God is not limited by time like we are. God’s eternity certainly means that he is everlasting, but it also means that he has no past and no future. We are limited to a slice of time called present, with the past irrecoverably gone and the future constantly out of reach. God is not so limited; his eternity is an eternal, unlimited present. God does not remember because he has no past from which to fetch his memories.

When God, then, tells us he remembered, it is something to do with us. It means that it looks to us like he remembered. It is language of accommodation. It is speaking of God’s eternal purpose to save his people. It is speaking of God’s eternal activity of deliverance – in its totality—manifested partially and progressively in time. In other words, it means it didn’t look to us like God was doing anything before, and now it looks to us like he is – we are aware of his saving activity from our limited perspective. That is what it means that God remembers.

There is a lot of theology in that. And it is there because God expects us to interpret, to think, to meditate, to study and understand these things: this is how God reveals himself, not just in obvious statements, but in more difficult expressions that require reflection and the coordination of what we know to evaluate our interpretive possibilities. What do we learn?

• God expects us to interpret corporately – this is not something we can do individually. I think in America especially we resist this. You can see the argument in Mark Noll’s America’s God. We tend to be suspicious of religion that the individual with his own few resources can’t figure out, and as a result are more contemptuous of training and the authority of tradition than we would be naturally. But we need to listen to the church as a whole when it comes to the interpretation of Scripture. We need to understand that the Holy Spirit has led his people into some truth, and recognize it as truth, so that we may continue being led into all truth.
• Because God expects us to interpret difficult things, and we need training to be able to do so, we also need that. Without speculative thought, you can’t formulate the doctrine of the Trinity. Speculative thought requires training. This is the problem with just going back to the New Testament and refusing to say more than Paul did. I am not arguing that we need to go beyond the things that were written, but I am saying that what was revealed needs to be developed. If it is not developed, it cannot be faithfully transmitted. Its implications need to be worked out, and those implications require an approach that goes beyond what Paul did, though not beyond what Scripture says. It requires concepts and methods developed subsequently, tested, tried by trained men, and assimilated so deeply that without them we can no longer confess what the church in all the ages has confessed.