The People Who Keep Forgetting a Faithful God

Three Hours Into the Prayer Meeting

Picture a prayer meeting that has been going for three hours. This is a scene and not a report, but anyone who has sat through a Nigerian vigil will know how the room smells by then, of candles and sweat and the particular honesty that comes when people have run out of plans. A woman in the third row is crying with her whole body. She wants God to show up. She wants proof that he is near and has not forgotten her.

Now suppose her history, because the scene needs it. Her father’s kidney trouble eased years ago, against what the doctors had told the family. Her school fees were once paid by a stranger’s transfer on the very morning she was due to be sent home. None of it was small. And tonight she is praying as if God has never done a thing in her life and she must start the case from the beginning.

I don’t tell this to scold her. Nearly everyone who prays has stood where she stands. The point is how ordinary it is. A great deal of the trouble in the Bible begins at exactly this place, with people who forget. They forget what God did, and so they stop expecting him to do it again, and then they start looking around for something else to lean on. A few months after the sea, Israel is melting down gold jewellery to make a calf, because Moses is taking too long on the mountain. Not long after that they are complaining that the manna is boring. You want to shake them. Did you not see it? Then you look at your own prayer journal, or the absence of one, and you go quiet.

The Bible knows this about us, and it doesn’t answer with a lecture. It answers by building memory into things you can touch.

Why God Told Joshua to Carry Stones

When the nation crossed the Jordan on dry ground, nobody could have been in doubt about what had happened. That was the morning to hold a long meeting about remembering, and Israel didn’t. Instead God told Joshua to choose twelve men, one from each tribe, and have each carry a stone out of the riverbed to the place where the people would camp that night (Joshua 4:2 to 3). The stones were God’s idea before they were Joshua’s. Joshua also set up twelve more in the middle of the river itself, where the priests had stood, and the writer says they were still there when he wrote (Joshua 4:9).

What were they for? The text is clear.

“that this may be a sign among you. When your children ask in time to come, ‘What do those stones mean to you?’ then you shall tell them that the waters of the Jordan were cut off before the ark of the covenant of the LORD. When it passed over the Jordan, the waters of the Jordan were cut off. So these stones shall be to the people of Israel a memorial forever.”

— Joshua 4:6 to 7 (ESV)

Notice who the stones are built for. They are built for a child who wasn’t there. The people who walked across never needed a monument; they had wet feet to remind them. The pile exists so that a ten year old, years later, will point and ask, and so that someone will be obliged to answer. A stone with no question put to it is only a stone. Joshua says elsewhere in the chapter that the audience is wider still, “that all the peoples of the earth may know that the hand of the LORD is mighty” (Joshua 4:24, ESV). The memory is meant to travel.

There is a point about the word itself here. The Old Testament scholar Brevard Childs argued in his 1962 book Memory and Tradition in Israel, as I understand it, that the Hebrew verb for remember rarely means a quiet inner recollection. In his reading, it often means to attend, to keep a command, to act, and its opposite, forgetting, is close to abandoning God altogether. If that is right, the stones are an instruction to do something, and the pile is where the doing begins.

How Comfort Wears Memory Thin

You might expect people to forget in a crisis. The Bible says they forget in comfort. Before Israel entered the land, Moses warned them about the very thing that lay ahead of them, which was success.

“lest, when you have eaten and are full and have built good houses and live in them, and when your herds and flocks multiply and your silver and gold is multiplied and all that you have is multiplied, then your heart be lifted up, and you forget the LORD your God.”

— Deuteronomy 8:12 to 14 (ESV)

A few verses later he adds a warning against a sentence that sounds harmless, “My power and the might of my hand have gotten me this wealth” (Deuteronomy 8:17, ESV). Anyone who has watched a church member get a promotion, then a car, then a Sunday job that takes him out of the pew, will know the pattern. He didn’t decide to leave God. He just stopped telling the story of how he got there.

So the stones are not a decoration for hard days. They are insurance against good ones.

The Crowd Around the Track

Hebrews 11 is the long roll of people who trusted God without seeing the end, and it is easy to preach it as a list of heroes. The writer doesn’t stop at the list. He turns straight into the next sentence, though the chapter break hides it.

“Therefore, since we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses, let us also lay aside every weight, and sin which clings so closely, and let us run with endurance the race that is set before us.”

— Hebrews 12:1 (ESV)

Readers have long disagreed about whether these witnesses are sitting in the stands watching us run, or are simply people whose lives testify. I lean to the second, since the whole of chapter 11 is about what their lives attest, but the argument doesn’t depend on settling it. Either way the effect on the runner is the same. When you recall what God did for Abraham, who set off for a country he had never seen, or for Moses, who preferred the company of God’s people to the comforts of a palace, you are not wandering into history for entertainment. You are putting people around you. The cloud isn’t behind you. It is on every side, and every one of them finished.

What Oral Memory Has Always Known

The Bible is not the only place to learn that a people keeps its past by deliberate effort. Amadou Hampâté Bâ, the Malian writer and scholar, spent a lifetime recording and defending the oral traditions of West Africa. In a chapter he wrote for UNESCO’s General History of Africa, titled “The Living Tradition”, he said that “where writing does not exist, man is bound to the word he utters”, and that “the world’s earliest archives or libraries were the brains of men.” He said that “generally speaking, every old man in Africa is a master of knowledge in some historical or traditional field.”

You will often hear this compressed into a saying credited to him, that when an old man dies in Africa, a library burns. I could not trace those exact words to a first text. The earliest dated mention I found is a 1960 remark at UNESCO credited to him by others, and the wording changes from one version to the next. His own written words are enough.

I should be careful about what I claim. Bâ’s examples come mainly from Mali and its neighbours, and Nigeria is a large country with many peoples who keep their memories in different ways. I am not claiming that West Africans worked out the Hebrew insight on their own, or that the Hebrews borrowed it. I don’t know, and I distrust anyone who says they do. The modest claim is better, and I think it holds. In places where people knew that a community can lose itself in one generation, they set up structures to prevent it. In Israel the structures were stones, festivals and a family table. In many African societies they were elders whose job was to remember.

The church inherits both. Think of the testimony time in a Nigerian service, when a woman stands to say what God did for her this week. It’s easy to treat that as a warm interval before the sermon. I would put it closer to Joshua’s pile of stones. Somebody in that room is at the edge of a river of their own, and they need to hear that it has been crossed before.

A Book Written While Nobody Watched

Malachi writes to people who are back in the land, with the temple standing and the offerings going on, and the fire gone out of it all. Some say that serving God is pointless, because the arrogant seem to do well. In the middle of that grumbling, the prophet notices a smaller conversation.

“Then those who feared the LORD spoke with one another. The LORD paid attention and heard them, and a book of remembrance was written before him of those who feared the LORD and esteemed his name.”

— Malachi 3:16 (ESV)

Look at what this describes. A handful of people keep talking about God when talking about him costs them something, and God keeps a record of it. I don’t want to stretch the verse into a promise that every private prayer is filed somewhere. It doesn’t say that. It says that faithfulness in a dry season is noticed and written down by the one who has never needed reminding. For a believer, that’s the courage to keep a notebook of your own. Writing down the healing that came late, the money that arrived through the wrong person, the door that opened in what looked like a wall, is not therapy with a pastel cover. It is your own small pile of stones, kept where you can find it when the water rises.

The Table Where We Rehearse It

On the night he was betrayed, Jesus took bread and said words the church has repeated in languages he never spoke and countries that didn’t exist.

“This is my body, which is for you. Do this in remembrance of me. … This cup is the new covenant in my blood. Do this, as often as you drink it, in remembrance of me.”

— 1 Corinthians 11:24 to 25 (ESV)

He didn’t ask for analysis, and he didn’t ask for a debate about exactly how bread and cup relate to his body. He asked for remembrance, and he put it into a meal that would come round again and again, because he knew what happens to a memory that has to survive a busy week. The Lord’s Supper is the same kind of thing as the stones. Something happened once, and a physical act has been put in place so that nobody has to depend on a good mood to recall it.

Which Memory Wins in the Dark

Here the argument turns, and I should say plainly that I have made remembering sound easier than it is.

Not every memory is a comfort. Take the poet of Lamentations, whom tradition names as Jeremiah, though the book itself doesn’t say. Jerusalem has fallen, and he is writing out of the ruins. In the middle of the third chapter, he first asks God to remember, and then admits what his own memory is doing.

“Remember my affliction and my wanderings, the wormwood and the gall! My soul continually remembers it and is bowed down within me.”

— Lamentations 3:19 to 20 (ESV)

Read that slowly. He has not failed to remember. His trouble is that he remembers too well, and the memory of the bad days follows him everywhere and drags him down. Then comes the sentence that the church has held on to for centuries.

“But this I call to mind, and therefore I have hope: The steadfast love of the LORD never ceases; his mercies never come to an end; they are new every morning; great is your faithfulness.”

— Lamentations 3:21 to 23 (ESV)

He calls something to mind. He does not receive it as a pleasant idea on a calm afternoon. He pulls it forward on purpose, and he sets it down beside the ruins without pretending the ruins aren’t there. Two memories are in the room, and he picks the one he will feed.

Psalm 77 works the same way from the inside. The psalmist can’t sleep, and his soul “refuses to be comforted” (Psalm 77:2, ESV). By the middle of the psalm he is asking whether God’s love has ended for good (Psalm 77:8, ESV). Even remembering God at first only makes him groan. Then he makes a decision, and it is a decision, not a mood.

“Then I said, ‘I will appeal to this, to the years of the right hand of the Most High.’ I will remember the deeds of the LORD; yes, I will remember your wonders of old. I will ponder all your work, and meditate on your mighty deeds.”

— Psalm 77:10 to 12 (ESV)

Nothing in the psalm says the darkness lifted that night. What changes is that the record of what God has done has been brought into the argument. The same move is behind God’s own words to Israel in exile, when they were tempted by the impressive gods of Babylon.

“remember the former things of old; for I am God, and there is no other; I am God, and there is none like me.”

— Isaiah 46:9 (ESV)

That is a case made from evidence. You can’t hold that no one is like God and also panic as though he has run out of options, and the record exists to stop the panic. I wouldn’t call this warfare, though some do, because it does not need an enemy in the room. It is closer to a witness being called. The record doesn’t cancel the pain. It makes the despair answer for itself.

Back to the Third Row

Go back to the woman in the third row, who may be in Lagos or Lusaka or a church hall in London. God has shown up for her before, and for her mother, and for Abraham, and for the poet who sat in the ruins and chose which memory to follow. The question was never whether he is faithful. The question is whether she will call to mind what she already knows, and whether somebody will make that easy for her.

So here is something small and specific. Before the next meeting, write down one thing God has done in your life, with the date, the way you’d label a stone. Don’t polish it. Then find a person who is waiting at their own river, and tell them. If you are the woman in the third row tonight, you needn’t stop praying or pretend you aren’t desperate. Only say, between the tears, what you remember. He has never needed reminding. You do, and so do the rest of us.

References

Biblical References

Deuteronomy 8:12 to 14, 17 (ESV). Moses warns that prosperity is where forgetting takes hold, which supports the argument that remembering must be built into structures.
Joshua 4:2 to 9, 24 (ESV). The twelve stones taken from the Jordan and the twelve set in the river, commanded by God, with the child’s question and the witness to the nations as their purpose.
Joshua 4:6 to 7 (ESV). Quoted as the stated purpose of the memorial.
Psalm 77:2, 8, 10 to 12 (ESV). The psalmist’s despair and his deliberate decision to remember God’s works.
Isaiah 46:9 (ESV). God’s command to remember the former things as the basis for trusting that he has no equal.
Lamentations 3:19 to 23 (ESV). The poet’s plea that God remember his affliction, his own painful memory of it, and the second memory he chooses to call to mind.
Malachi 3:16 (ESV). The book of remembrance kept for those who feared the LORD in a dry season.
1 Corinthians 11:24 to 25 (ESV). The Lord’s Supper as built in remembrance.
Hebrews 12:1 (ESV). The cloud of witnesses around the runner.

Other Sources

Childs, B. S. (1962). Memory and tradition in Israel. SCM Press.
Hampâté Bâ, A. (1981). The living tradition. In J. Ki-Zerbo (Ed.), General history of Africa: Vol. 1. Methodology and African prehistory. UNESCO; Heinemann Educational Books. https://iniva.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/04/The-Living-Tradition.pdf
Popik, B. (n.d.). “When an old man dies, a library burns to the ground” (proverb). The Big Apple. https://barrypopik.com/blog/when_an_old_man_dies_a_library_burns_to_the_ground_proverb

Translation Notices

ESV: Scripture quotations are from the ESV® Bible (The Holy Bible, English Standard Version®), © 2001 by Crossway, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers. Used by permission. All rights reserved.