Lest You Forget
by R.C. Sproul Jr.

Only take heed to yourself, and diligently keep yourself, lest you forget the things your eyes have seen, and lest they depart from your heart all the days of your life. And teach them to your children and your grandchildren" (Deuteronomy 4:9).

Laurence has a friend who is a father. This father had a son. This son had a problem. He persistently forgot to bring home his math homework from school. The father warned and cajoled, warned and cajoled, until finally it was time for a spanking. The father sent the boy to his room, entered, explained that he had warned his son about forgetting his book, and proceeded to administer pain to the boy's posterior. The boy cried; his father held him. The father left the room, turned around and knocked on the door. "Son?" "Yes Daddy?" Did you remember your math book today?" "No Daddy." And so the father entered again, explained again that the son had been warned, and spanked the boy again. He turned, left the room, turned again, knocking on the door. "Son?" "Yes Daddy?" "Did you remember your math book today?" "No Daddy." And the whole process began again except this time the boy's tears did not stop when the pain subsided. "Daddy, why are you doing this? You already punished me." You know the punch line: "I did? I forgot."

Patriotism might be the last refuge of the scoundrel, but ignorance is surely the first. I don't know if they have secret meetings to talk about this, or if this is what they tell each other when talking baby talk. "Goo-goo, gah-gah" just may be baby talk for, "Hey, kid. If you ever find yourself in trouble, try either 'I forgot', or 'I don't know.' It works every time."

This passage in Deuteronomy tells us not only that forgetting is no excuse, but that it is a sin in itself. What we think gets us off the hook only tightens the noose. And for good reason. What is it that we are enjoined not to forget? Chapter four begins with God's instruction that the children of Israel listen as God instructs them in His statutes. He reminds them of the covenant stipulations, that obedience brings blessing, and disobedience cursing. But then God breaks out into a history lesson, "Your eyes have seen what the Lord did at Baal Peor; for the Lord your God has destroyed from among you all the men who followed Baal of Peor" (vs. 3).

It seems that the Lord hasn't learned the importance of a careful ordering of our fields of study. After all, history is history, and law is law, right? Wrong. God instructs the children of Israel in the law because it is His revealed will that they should obey it. But God's demand that we obey is rarely a bald command. If anyone could ever lay down law and tell us to obey, "Because I say so," it is God. He alone has absolute authority to command absolute obedience from the mere order of the universe. But we serve a God who condescends to us. In making covenant with us, in giving us the blessings and the cursings, God offers us secondary motivations for obedience. He could, because He is God, say, "Obey me, and things will go poorly for you. Disobey and you'll be fine." And our duty would be to obey.

But the mere prospect of the carrot or the stick is not all that God uses to motivate us to obedience. He tells us to remember the carrots and sticks He has used before. He commands not only that we remember His commands, His law, but that we remember His grace. And that hasn't changed. Because we are the children of Abraham, these were our fathers that God rescued from the heathens at Baal Peor. Because we are the children of Abraham, it was our fathers who crossed over the Jordan river on dry land before God destroyed Jericho for us. Because we are the children of Abraham, it was our fathers that God rescued from the fiery furnace.

Our failure to study the Old Testament leaves us not only bereft of the law of God, but of His mercy as well. Which, when we find ourselves with our backs to the sea, leaves us lacking in courage. We are a fearful bunch of individualists because we do not recognize this history as our history, and even when we do, we forget what our great God has done. And so we must sit together by the fire, telling each other of the great deeds of God, the miraculous deliveries He brought in the days of yore. And we must appropriate these stories as our very own. We have been adopted into this family, and so we have a duty to learn the family story.

God tells us in verse nine to take heed. This is work, something that we are responsible for. It is therefore something that we must pursue self-consciously. And perhaps more importantly, He commands that we pass on the lessons of history to the seed that He blesses us with. Our stories must become our children's stories, which makes the labor all the harder. The trouble with history is that there is more to learn with each passing day. God has not stopped working either with the coming of His Son, nor with the closing of His canon. And so we are not only the children of Abraham, but the children of Luther and Calvin and Knox. We are the children of the Covenanters and the Huguenots, of the Puritans and fundamentalists. God showers us with mercy in every generation, and we dare not forget, lest that mercy turn to judgment. If we forget the grace of God in our lives, we should expect that He too will forget it, that He, when we remind Him of all that we did, will respond, "Depart from Me. I never knew you."