Elephants never forget.

That was what they told us when we were children. I don’t recall why they mentioned that piece of trivia to us, or who mentioned it in particular but then… I’m not an elephant.

God, on the other hand, is all powerful, all knowing and everywhere present simultaneously. How could God ever forget anything? He who made elephants “un-forgetting” must posses the very same quality Himself, right?

“I, even I, am the one who wipes out your transgressions for My own sake, And I will not remember your sins.” Isaiah 43:25

Then in Jer 31:34, Heb 8:12, and 10:17 God repeats Himself saying in essence the very same thing. Perhaps He doesn’t want us to forget to remember that He forgets to remember!

Unlike, us God intentionally forgets.

Clara Barton, founder of the American Red Cross, was reminded one day of a vicious deed that someone had done to her years before. But she acted as if she had never even heard of the incident. “Don’t you remember it?” her friend asked. “No,” came Barton’s reply, “I distinctly remember forgetting it.”

So too, when we commit some besetting sin that we have asked God to forgive us for repeatedly in the past, and then say “O God please forgive me…again!” He replies “Of course I forgive you my child, but what do you mean, “again?”

I don’t know about you, but I for one am very much in need of God’s forgetfulness!

But God also remembers:

In Genesis 8:1 we read: “But God remembered Noah…”

Good thing! No one else was available to “remember” Noah, not the Red Cross or the National Guard, or well… anybody! Talk about the old commercial “When you’re all alone out there!”

According to the rest of the verse, the way God remembered Noah wasn’t very dramatic. It simply says “…and God caused a wind to pass over the earth, and the waters subsided”.

In other words, the flood waters upon which Noah and his family had been floating around aimlessly for five long months, started to wane. It wasn’t a quick fix, no giant stopper suddenly removed from the earth’s crust, or even some supernatural evaporation process. Just a wind. But it was the way God would eventually bring Noah and his crew to the end of the flood and the start of a promised future.

So too, God makes promises that He never forgets.

Joseph had dreams. He was going to be exalted above his brethren and even his parents.

David had an amazing “word” from God concerning his life. He was anointed by Samuel the prophet to become God’s chosen one, Israel’s king!

Yet both Joseph and David would wait many long years in which it would appear that their dream, their word from God, was only a distant, fading memory. Joseph wasn’t living anywhere near his family and he had become dead in his father’s eyes. David was living outside of the land of Israel too and had even been consigned to live among the enemies of Israel.

Yet God, who gives beauty for ashes, will raise both men up to glorious heights in spite of how impossible it must have seemed. Why? Because God remembers!

God forgets your sins but He remembers His promises! Hallelujah!