Daily Lesson for February 20, 2014

Today's Daily Lesson is from Psalm 105:

"7 He is the Lord our God;

his judgments are in all the earth.

8 He remembers his covenant forever,

the word that he commanded, for a thousand generations."

Last week I helped a family to bury their father and grandfather who died after having suffered with dementia for most of the last ten years. Before his illness he had been an attorney and JAG officer in the military. Everyone said he was a brilliant mind. 

It was painful to walk into the family's home and see all the man's books, knowing that all the man had read and learned over all those years had been forgotten. And that was of course just the surface. Depths of knowledge, and names, and memories, and accomplishments, and friendships, and family had also been forgotten. By the end, all was forgotten - the past, the present, and the future.

But God remembers. 

That is what I tried to tell the family at the memorial service - that God is the great rememberer. God remembered Noah and and the animals in the Ark. God remembered Abraham in his journey, God remembered Rachel in her barrenness. When we forget, I said, God remembers.

Psalm 105 is about God's remembrance. It tells the whole story of the Hebrew people and how time and time again when all seems lost God remembers His covenant - His promises to His people - and in the mystery of His own timing He acts to rescue them. 

In times of death the word we have for God's rescue is Resurrection. And we wait for it. We wait for God to remember and come and rescue us from the forgotten oblivion of death.

As the family recessed from the memorial service Great Is Thy Faithfulness was played. We were waiting. We were waiting in sure and certain hope that though we might forget all, God will be faithful to remember.

And He will be.