Our Memorial Day
Memorials are good things! Everything from regularly repeated national holidays every year to historical markers on the sides of dusty back highways. They place before our eyes and minds that there is something worth remembering, and thus something to be gained from remembering. The opposite of memorials and remembering is forgetfulness. It’s when we forget that we often stray off and lose our way. In Scripture, to forget is placed on the same level as despising God’s gifts, refusing to heed His words and outright unbelief. A quick perusal through Psalm 106, for example, makes this connection clear. The writer describes how YHVH delivered His people from Pharaoh and Egypt through the plagues and the Red Sea, and how the people of God responded to this great deliverance, “Then they believed His words; They sang His praise” (v.12). But then, with an almost breathless speed: “ They soon forgot His works ; They did not wait for His counsel, But lusted exceedingly in the wilderness,...