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Scripture is full of waiting stories. It may be days or decades. How we wait oftentimes says as much about us and how we go through the wilderness, floods and catastrophes of our lives. Even Noah had to wait for God to remember.
“But God remembered Noah and all the wild animals and the livestock that were with him in the ark, and he sent a wind over the earth and the waters receded.”
We are troubled by the possibility that God forgets or needs loud noises to startle him awake. Sometimes he remembers on his own (like the suffering of the Israelites in Egypt) or other times he needs the incessant prayers of the faithful (like Hannah.) Each case only confirms the picture we have of him as absent minded, detached from the world and distracted by other things more pressing. It sounds like he makes promises and promptly forgets what he pledged. However, when we think about the words “remember” and “forget” we want to explain it away and are often left wondering how the Old Testament authors could have used such words to describe an all-knowing and never slumbering God. Maybe once we could excuse but why are there so many instances of God remembering?
We go to great lengths untangling why this doesn’t mean what looks obvious. Theologians come up with sophisticated doctrines. We invent all sorts of complex word games to explain it away. Clearly, we are far less comfortable with a God who needs prompting than the people of the Bible were. But God seems not to be bothered by our discomfort. Otherwise, I suspect he would have said to the writers at the time, “Let’s change that word about my remembering. It sounds like I had a lapse of memory or was preoccupied with something else and lost my focus for a few hundred years or it slipped my mind for a few days that the flood ended.” In other words, God does not appear to be all that concerned about how we perceive his attention span. For the people of the time it really did make sense that there could be no other reason things were not going as they would have planned had they been in charge. God appears to have forgotten when things are not going our way but he always remembers just before something good happens - freedom, deliverance, the birth of a child. If only we could get his full attention more often.
Maybe the people of the Old Testament had a better understanding of their relationship with God as creatures than we do. Maybe they were not as uncomfortable with the thought that God was not preoccupied with their every wish every moment of the day and had the right or the intention of letting even hundreds of years pass before acting. They could imagine they were not the ever present center of his attention and all he had to think about was hearing their prayers and responding Yes/No/Maybe to them upon arrival. Perhaps we could say with them that God remembers as a way of confessing that God has no obligation to be thinking about us all of the time. We are uneasy with the thought that we are not continually on his mind while wanting him to be preoccupied with us. There is very little mention of all the lives of people who were born, lived and died unremarkable lives during the periods when God was silent in the Old Testament. We have no record of people assuming that God was constantly planning ways to make their lives full of meaning, purpose and significance. That’s not the case with us, is it? For us, God can never be silent so we fill the void with what we think he should be saying to us or what he should be teaching us in every circumstance. We are too often like children desperately wanting to be the center of attention and the thought of adults having a conversation without our being noticed makes us shout louder “Look at me. Look at me. Why are you not paying attention to me?”
Paul talks about putting away childish things and in the same way we may need to put away our childish need for God to be always acting, speaking or teaching us lessons in our lives. We should no longer press for constant reassurances that he has not forgotten us or that we should be the center of his attention. In time and as we mature we become, hopefully, more comfortable with fewer evidences of his visible activity in our lives and more aware that the goal is to be faithful, patient and mature without God having constantly to perform. Maybe his silence is a mark of progress.
Art by Abraham van Dijck
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