Forgetfulness reflects fallenness; it is a manifestation of our human condition in Adam. Forgetfulness is another way of describing disobedience. Israel and her kings “forget” the Lord their God by disobeying and forsaking him (cf. Jer. 2:29 and Jer. 2:32; 3:21). We forsake because we forget. And we forget because we choose to forget—deliberately, willfully, consciously. We forget our Creator—his character and covenant and commands, his ways and works and words; we forget our Redeemer—his promises and precepts, his redemption and righteousness. 

We human beings are forgetful by nature. I do not mean in a finite sense but in a fallen sense. We forget because we choose to forget—at least that is the case when it comes to our response to God’s character and covenant and commands, to his ways and works and words. We forsake our Maker because we choose to forget our Maker.
Biblical history testifies to this truth, especially the Old Testament. In Eden, Adam chooses to forget the goodness of God in giving him the freedom and pleasure to eat from every tree of the garden, bar one (Gen. 2:15–17). After the flood, Noah forgets the righteousness of God that he had preached about prior to the flood: he becomes drunk and is defiled by his son (Gen. 9:20–25). In Canaan, Abraham forgets the promise of God that he would provide him with a son from Sarah’s womb; instead, he takes matters into his own hands with Hagar (Gen. 16:1–6). Israel forgets God’s promise to be with them as he leads them out of Egypt; they complain of his absence in the wilderness (Exod. 17:7). Before entering the land, God warns Israel repeatedly to “take care” lest they “forget” the Lord once they are in the land (Deut. 4:9, 23; 6:12; 8:11, 14, 19; 9:7; 25:19; 26:13). When they enter the Promised Land, they fare no better. Not long after the conquest under Joshua, a generation grows up that does not know the Lord or the work that he has done for Israel (Judg. 2:10); they forget the Lord their God and serve the Baals (Judg. 3:7; cf. 1 Sam. 12:9). Israel’s kings are also forgetful of God and his covenant and commands. Saul forgets to devote the enemy to complete destruction; as a result, the kingdom is stripped from him (1 Sam. 15:10–23). David forgets the commandments of God and steals another man’s wife, committing adultery with her (2 Sam. 11); as a consequence, the son conceived by his affair dies and his family dissolves into bitter and deadly infighting (2 Sam. 13–18). Solomon forgets the fear of the Lord which is the beginning of his wisdom; he exchanges wisdom for folly and is led into idolatry (1 Kings 11:1–8); in so doing, the kingdom splits (1 Kings 11:11–13). During the divided kingdom of Israel and Judah, the prophets spotlight forgetfulness as a besetting sin of God’s people (Isa. 17:10; 51:13; Jer. 2:32; 3:21; 13:25; 18:15; 23:27; Ezek. 22:12; 23:25; Hos. 2:13; 4:6; 8:14; 13:6). In the end, Israel’s forgetfulness leads them into exile where they are made not to forget the judgment of God.
Forgetfulness. Since the day Adam transgressed the commandment concerning the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, we have been a race prone to forgetfulness. Forgetfulness reflects fallenness; it is a manifestation of our human condition in Adam. Forgetfulness is another way of describing disobedience. Israel and her kings “forget” the Lord their God by disobeying and forsaking him (cf. Jer. 2:29 and Jer. 2:32; 3:21). We forsake because we forget. And we forget because we choose to forget—deliberately, willfully, consciously. We forget our Creator—his character and covenant and commands, his ways and works and words; we forget our Redeemer—his promises and precepts, his redemption and righteousness. Moses captures well Israel’s problem and ours:
You were unmindful of the Rock that bore you, And you forgot the God who gave you birth. (Deut. 32:18)
Given this aspect of our fallen humanity, it is unsurprising to find commands in the Old and New Testaments to “remember” God and what he has done for us. In the Old Testament, we are exhorted to “remember” God as our Creator in the days of our youth (Eccl. 12:1); we are encouraged to “remember” him as our Redeemer and “the wondrous works that he has done, his miracles, and the judgments he uttered” (Ps. 105:5). The psalmist exhorts us, “Bless the Lord . . . and forget not all his benefits” (Ps. 103:2). This kind of remembrance has formal expression in Israel’s weekly observance of the Sabbath and their yearly observance of various festivals.
Most of these festivals point Israel back to events in their past, serving to remind them of what God has done on their behalf, so that they will not forget him. The Sabbath is a weekly reminder of the rest that God entered following his work of creation; it is a reminder to Israel that they too should rest at the end of their working week. In the Passover, Israel remembers their redemption by God from the angel of death and from their enemy, the Egyptians; the victory is further commemorated in the seven-day Feast of Unleavened Bread; in the Feast of Weeks (Pentecost), Israel remembers the giving of the law at Sinai, as well as offering the firstfruits of their wheat harvest to the Lord; on the Day of Atonement, Israel recalls their sins of the past year, repents of them with fasting and prayer, and asks God to forgive them through sacrifices offered by the high priest; in the Feast of Tabernacles, Israel contemplates God’s faithfulness in their forty years of tent dwelling in the wilderness; and in the Feast of Purim, God’s people are reminded of his gracious protection of them through Esther and Mordecai unmasking the evil plot of Haman to annihilate the Jewish people.
For Israel, these festivals serve as weekly and yearly reminders of God’s gracious work in creation and redemption, and as such, they encourage God’s people to remember the Lord and forget not all his benefits.
Read More
Related Posts:

False teachers are, or once were, professing believers. Peter even speaks of them in a way that sounds like Christ had saved them, since outwardly they looked connected to the Savior. But inwardly, something very different was going on, and their outward connection to Christ made their indulgent behavior and false teaching all the more damnable. Of all people, they should have known better. Their fakeness made them that much more accountable.

A few years back, an evangelical organization where I lived put on a debate. It pitted a Christian professor at a well-known university, who was also an ordained minister, against an atheist professor. At one point, the Christian minister was asked an easy question meant to let him defend the evidence for Christ’s resurrection. I can still remember what he said instead: “Of course, when we Christians talk about the resurrection, we’re not saying that Jesus literally walked out of the grave in a bodily fashion. We’re just speaking about a spiritual resurrection of some kind.”
A few weeks later, the committee of Christians who had planned the debate invited me to meet with them. The meeting began with discussion about how the debate had gone, and the response was generally positive. When I raised a concern about the Christian minister denying the bodily resurrection of Christ, one person on the committee said, “Oh yes, I mean, apart from the heterodoxy, I think it was a great success. We all knew that minister was a bit heterodox, but the debate got the most downloads on the internet we’ve ever had!”
What struck me that day was not an inability to discern false doctrine. The gentleman on the committee admitted this minister was heterodox—out of line with right doctrine. No, what struck me was the indifference and apathy toward false doctrine. In the Bible, false teaching is never a matter of indifference or apathy. It is serious business. False prophets and false teachers get damned for it. (For example, see Deuteronomy 13:5; Jeremiah 23:14–15; Matthew 7:13–15; Galatians 1:8.)
That’s because false teaching is a deadly virus that attacks the organism of Christ’s body, the church. Peter repeatedly says these heresies lead to “destruction.” In the New Testament, the word he uses often means damnation to hell. The response of Christ’s body to such viruses should be to identify them and then eliminate them. The church must have a doctrinal immune system.
False teachers will always be with us. Peter points out how they have hidden among God’s people since Old Testament days. In fact, it all began in the garden of Eden with the first false teacher, the serpent—Satan himself—who twisted God’s words, leading to death.
Read More
Related Posts:

During this season we wait in earnest for Christ’s second coming while we wonder in awe at his first coming. To be clear, the season is not about what we can do for Christ by our work or prayers or fasting; rather, it is about what he has done for us in his work and prayers and fasting—a work that began in his first coming in humility and which will conclude in his second coming in glory. 

A Future Orientation
As early as Eden, God’s people have been a waiting people. Following the fall of our first parents, God made a promise that permanently oriented his people toward the future. God told the serpent directly, and the guilty pair indirectly:
I will put enmity between you and the woman,and between your offspring and her offspring;he shall bruise your head,and you shall bruise his heel. (Gen. 3:15)
It was, in short, the promise of a coming, conquering son. The promise encapsulated every promise in the Old Testament and, as such, shaped God’s people into a waiting people. This anticipatory posture can be seen throughout the Old Testament, as men and women of faith look forward to what God would do in the future through a promised son. Lamech names his son Noah in the hope that he will rescue the chosen line from the curse of sin and death (Gen. 5:29), yet it is six hundred years before Noah enters the ark at the time of the flood (Gen. 7:6). God promises Abraham that he will make him into a great nation through a son from his own body (Gen. 12:2; Gen. 15:4; Gen. 17:16), but he has to wait twenty-five years for the birth of Isaac (Gen. 21:1–3). Isaac, in turn, has to wait twenty years for the birth of Esau and Jacob, his twin boys (Gen. 25:20, 26). Jacob works for seven years to get his wife Rachel, but in the end is deceived into marrying Leah (Gen. 29:20–30), from whom he receives Judah, the son of the promised line (Gen. 29:35; Gen. 49:10). Naomi has to wait to see if her line will continue, following the death of her husband and two sons. Even when her daughter-in-law Ruth faithfully follows her back to the promised land and pursues Boaz at the threshing floor, they both have to wait to see whether Boaz will be the kinsman to redeem Ruth (Ruth 3:12–18). Their godly patience allows Boaz to negotiate his way into marriage with Ruth, from whom comes Obed, the father of Jesse, the father of David (Ruth 4:18–22). It is only in Naomi’s old age that her life is restored (Ruth 4:15). Hannah has to endure years of barrenness, like the matriarchs preceding her, before the Lord opens her womb and gives her a son called Samuel (1 Sam. 1:1–20), the one who would anoint David as God’s chosen king (1 Sam. 16:1–3). However, David’s ascension to the throne does not come immediately. While he is anointed in his youth (1 Sam. 16:10–13), he has to go through several years of humiliation and suffering before his ascension to the throne at thirty years old (2 Sam. 5:4); and God’s subsequent promise to David that his son will sit on his throne forever (2 Sam. 7:12–16) is not ultimately fulfilled until the coming of his greater son, Jesus Christ—some one thousand years later. Indeed, adding up the ages in the biblical genealogies reveals that God’s promise in Eden of a coming, conquering son takes about four thousand years to become a reality.

For individuals and families, this 40-day liturgical devotional guides readers through Advent, Christmas, and Epiphany—helping Christians retain their focus on Jesus and meditate on the mystery of his incarnation.

Waiting. From the beginning of history, God calls his people to be a people waiting for the coming of his promised Son. New Testament writers capture the relief at Jesus’s arrival after the prolonged wait. Luke the evangelist describes Simeon as a righteous and devout man who has been “waiting for the consolation of Israel” (Luke 2:25). Taking Jesus in his arms, Simeon utters words that would become an integral part of Christian liturgy from the early centuries of the church—the Nunc Dimittis:
Lord, now you are letting your servant depart in peace,according to your word;for my eyes have seen your salvationthat you have prepared in the presence of all peoples,a light for revelation to the Gentiles,and for glory to your people Israel. (Luke 2:29–32)
The prophetess Anna has a similar experience on the same day, as she gazes upon the baby Jesus. Unable to contain her excitement, she speaks about Christ “to all who were waiting for the redemption of Jerusalem” (Luke 2:38).
Read More
Related Posts:

This is the simple yet profound good news of Christianity: God and man may be reconciled through the God-man, Jesus Christ. This is orthodox Christianity, the Christianity that Machen worked so fearlessly to defend and that modern liberalism still works so fiercely to oppose.

J. Gresham Machen lamented the loss of the conception of God and the consciousness of sin on the modern mind. According to Machen, modern liberalism had, in the first instance, challenged the need even to have a conception or knowledge of God. To inquire after a knowledge of God is the death of religion, it was argued. We ought not to know God but to feel Him; and if we are to conceive of Him, we must do so in vague and general terms. God is Father, but this means nothing more than His universal fatherhood for all creatures, which in turn encourages a universal brotherhood among all peoples.
Machen was, of course, willing to acknowledge that the Scriptures speak in one sense of God’s universal fatherhood (see Acts 17:28; Heb. 12:9). But only a few isolated texts provide support; the predominant understanding of God as Father in the Scriptures is in relation to His redeemed people. For Machen, however, the fatherhood of God was not the center or core of the Christian doctrine of God. Rather, a single attribute “render[s] intelligible all the rest”: the “awful transcendence of God.” Machen was speaking about the awesome holiness of God—His distinctness, His otherness. This, for Machen, was the truth of which modern liberalism had lost sight. As a result, liberalism had erased the Creator-creature distinction that is so fundamental to true Christianity. It had instead produced a pantheistic God who is simply part of the “world process.” God was no longer a distinct being; His life was in our life and our life was in His life. In Machen’s own words:
Modern liberalism, even when it is not consistently pantheistic, is at any rate pantheizing. It tends everywhere to break down the separateness between God and the world, and the sharp distinction between God and man.
A corollary of this (mis)conception of God was a (mis)understanding of man and, in particular, “the loss of the consciousness of sin.” Since God is no longer conceived of as holy and transcendent, He rests lightly on the modern mind, and thus does sin as well. Machen sought to discern the precipitators for this shift in modern thinking. Writing shortly after World War I (1914–18), he believed that war produced an overfocus on the sins of others to the neglect of one’s own sins. In war, where one side is viewed as the embodiment of evil, it is easy not to see the evil in one’s own heart. There was also the problem of the collectivism of the modern state, in which everyone is a victim of circumstances, obscuring “the individual, personal character of guilt.” Behind the shift in the modern doctrine of sin, however, Machen saw a more sinister and significant cause: paganism. By paganism, Machen did not mean barbarianism. During the height of the Greek Empire, paganism was not grotesque but glorious. It was a world-and-life view that found “the highest goal of human existence in the healthy and harmonious and joyous development of existing human faculties.” That is to say, humanity is essentially good and can attain the good, through the proper engagement and discipline of its mind and body. For Machen, such a perspective had become dominant in his day, replacing the Christian view of sin and personal guilt before a holy God.
Read More
Related Posts: