The God Who Remembers

Since September I’ve been making a slow journey through Genesis on Wednesday nights with a brilliant group of folks. It’s been an incredibly life-giving journey for me. One of the things that has struck me is the way we are sometimes hesitant to engage Scripture. We all have certain assumptions about God, expectations that have been shaped over time by our study, our communities, and our experiences in life. It can be challenging when we really engage Scripture and come face to face with things that don’t fit very neatly into our tidy categories about God and life in the world. (This is, in my opinion, one of the very reasons that we should read, discuss, and engage Scripture together with others in humble love and faith.)

The Bible uses some striking language to talk about God. Admittedly, God is bigger than the limited language that we use to make sense of God. But, that doesn’t make necessarily make it easier to engage the biblical stories, especially when we encounter some strange descriptions of God and God’s actions. The God that we encounter in Genesis is a God that seems to be learning how to be in relationship with this new creation as things progress from one scene to the next. As a relational being, the God of Genesis is deeply committed to maintaining a relationship with creation. We find there a God similar to the descriptions we’ve recently seen in Hosea 11 of a parent who paces over a rebelling child.

At the end of the day, we might just think that God will want to forget this whole “creation experiment” and return to the ways things were before God spoke creation into existence. Yet, this is not what we get. We see that God is constantly rethinking things, searching to discover new ways to engage creation, to try to calm the chaos that remains in the world, ways of surprising and unexpected grace. With each trial and failure, God commits and covenants to find new ways for people to “walk with God” (Gen 2:8, 5:22, 6:9, 17:1).

This struggle is seen pretty clearly in the wake of the serious crisis surrounding the flood in Genesis 6-9. There are so many things that are both brilliant and deeply troubling about his scene. (We had a great conversation about some of them on last Wednesday.) What I love about this scene, though, what really strikes me is a line that pops up unexpectedly at the beginning of chapter 8. “But God remembered Noah.”

“But God remembered….” For some people, the thought of God remembering may stir up serious anxiety. You’ve been to some dark places in life, rebellious places, places where chaos seems to reign. Yet, this simple line is far from something that should instill fear or anxiety. God’s remembering is a surprising act of grace. In the wake of the flood, God remembers, and when God remembers, new creation begins! God remembers and does something surprising through God’s Spirit or God’s ‘wind’ to breathe new life into creation, once again stilling the chaotic waters and bringing a new possibility. (Reread 8:1-5 along side Genesis 1.) God even puts the bow in the sky so that God will remember the everlasting covenant between God and every living creature” (9:15-16).

“But God remembered….” At a time when God might have preferred to forget, to abort creation and leave the waters of chaos wreaking havoc on the world, “God remembered.” The Holocaust survivor and Nobel laureate Elie Wiesel once wrote, “God is God because he remembers.” In a world where memories are short, where we are constantly bombarded with new news that is hardly newsworthy, Genesis reminds us that our God remembers. And that is truly news worth sharing. That is gospel!