I remember the day my little daughter put her failure to remember in exactly this way. She said, “Mommy, it’s not about forgetting. It’s a matter of remembering.”
In Psalm 78, another Maskil of Asaph, a wisdom psalm meant to be a teaching tool, the psalmist’s focus is on teaching them (children and succeeding generations) not to forget. How must they do that? By remembering – not forgetting their deliverance from difficulties when brighter, easier days arrived,
People have been prone to forget while the good times roll. And when hardship strikes, they somehow remember how much better it was in “the good old days”.
Is that why, when situations take a drastic turn for the worse, some religious persons experiencing that sudden hardship often blame themselves, their bad memory of God’s goodness and they adjust with obvious display of heightened religiously?
I’ve been through natural disasters in the Caribbean and I can tell you. It’s not unusual for faith questions to pop up when things turn bad. People suddenly remember the good they had forgotten. Church attendances increases, talk of divine provision and protection are on everybody’s lips, and good neighbourliness is in vogue and right liv8ng is presented as the new normal.
So, in this psalm we read the contrast between God’s goodness, God’s enduring faithfulness and Israel’s history of rebellion and forgetfulness. It’s a merry-go-round of forgetting in spite of the call in verses 2-4, “I will utter dark sayings from old, things that we have heard and known, that our ancestors have told us. We will not hide them from their children; we will tell to the coming generation the glorious deeds of the Lord and his might and the wonders that he has done.”
They ought not have forgotten to remember, to Teach and Tell as they had been instructed from the start. “He has established a decree in Jacob and appointed a law in Israel, which he commanded our ancestors to Teach to their children, that the next generation might know them, the children yet unborn, and rise up and tell them to their children, so that they should set their hope on God, and not forget the works of God but keep his commandments: and that they should not be like their ancestors. A stubborn and rebellious generation whose heart was not steadfast, whose spirit was not faithful to God.” (verses 4-8).
So then. Will we wait for hardship to strike again to force us to remember? Or will we Teach and Tell? And even when we do, watching the way things have gone on for generations, will our children and grandchildren remember not to forget?
God help us.
