I've finished my Psalm a day, and then a month of Ecclesiastes a day, and now I'm on to a chapter of the Bible a day, starting at the beginning. I hit Genesis 8 this morning and came across this:
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. (Gen 8:1)
It reminded me of one of my favourite passages at the end of Exodus 2:
God heard their groaning and he remembered his covenant with Abraham, with Isaac and with Jacob. So God looked on the Israelites and was concerned about them. (Ex 2:24-25)
After four centuries of slavery in Egypt, the groans of Israel are about to be answered with action.
What was interesting was doing a quick search for God and Remembers (זכר + אלהים), and amazingly there's only four in the whole Tanach. I changed the search to include Yhwh, but that only added one further occurrence, 1 Sam 1:19. Here then are all the times when the Bible records God "remembering" his people. (If you have others which don't match the construction, let me know - this is just from a quick Accordance search.)
- God remembered the floating Noah (Gen 8:1) and caused the waters to recede
- God remembered the worried Abraham (Gen 19:29) and rescued his nephew Lot
- God remembered the barren Rachel (Gen 30:22) and gave her a child
- God remembered his covenant for the sake of his enslaved Israel (Ex 2:24) and began working to rescue
- Yhwh remembered the marginalised Hannah (1 Sam 1:19) and gave her a child
Obviously God remembering doesn't imply the opposite - that he could ever forget - rather it points to the fact that he has chosen that time to act and to intervene for the sake of those he loves.
