A Theology of Memory
Introduction
Martyn Lloyd-Jones said, “The greatest weakness in evangelical Christianity today is that it forgets God.”[1] That means the church has a memory problem. Memory is information that you hold in the mind; knowledge that you store away. But memory is not the same as data storage. God gave you a vast capacity for memory because you are intended to move through the story he is writing.[2] Memory is the ability to retrieve information from the past, use the information in the present, and project the information into the future. Memory is a repertoire of knowledge that can be summoned in a way that travels freely between the past, the present, and the future. It is this conjectural thinking that provides life with the depth perception necessary for faithfulness.[3]
Memory is a gift. What if there were no memory? Think of the chaos. The world would appear as a random, fuzzy collection of objects. There would be no meaning, only the arousal of innate reflexes. There would be no basis for interpretation, only the elapsed and deserted moments of the past. There would be no knowledge of the external world, only unintegrated events that lack unity and intention.
One doesn’t form memories. One is inhabited by them. The reason the world is in such a moral mess is that it is in the grip of a demonic inhabitation, willfully possessed by the dark daydreams of solipsism. If your memory canvas is painted with an amoral, asymmetrical human world, void of aesthetics and substantive only in the meaning of power patterns, then it’s no wonder people occupy a gallimaufry cosmos with no solid meaning, order, or wisdom. Love and trust become empty rationalizations, bowdlerized buzzwords that merely flatter the dominant patterns of the zeitgeist.
Lest you are already missing the point, here it is more plainly: The memories that inhabit you really do matter. A person with the wrong memory, or no memory at all, becomes barbarous, easily tyrannized by sin, obeying a nihilism masquerading as advancement.
Different Types of Memories
There are two main types of memories. The first type consists of memories of your past experiences. These experiences live in your head not just by images, but by the ability to feel emotion. There is sensory memory, such as the smell of fresh-baked bread or the sound of your favorite song, that triggers a broader recollection of your past world. There are the traumatic memories of unhealed wounds. There are embodied memories, such as the skill of riding a bike or the habit of making your bed in the morning. These experiences don’t necessarily begin as words, but they do eventually translate into language and are reborn in the imagination. Then there are memories gone askew. When psychologists note that people’s memories tend to be populated with inaccuracies, they’re pointing to a common human tendency to analyze our present circumstances and unconsciously reshape the past to make sense of who we are now.
The second type of memory is communal and inherited. Your mind contains not only what you’ve personally experienced but what others have told you. There are all kinds of influences that come into your life. There are all kinds of documents that live in your head; all kinds of narratives and images and characters—real and chimerical—that reside in the human imagination. Family stories, historical accounts, biblical symbols, cultural myths, and fictional narratives. You know characters from novels as intimately as childhood friends. You remember the Exodus, though you weren't there. The Civil War, the Resurrection, and your grandfather’s war stories all dwell in you as memory, though not as personal experience. These transmitted memories, some factual, some legendary, some entirely invented, are the impressions, tidings, and tales that now inhabit you.
God’s Memories
God’s remembrances surpass even the strongest human memories (Is. 49:15). God’s mercy for his people is because of his memory of his people. This is part of God’s deep paternal affection (Jer. 31:20). There is an unfolding pattern of God’s memory across Scripture. In Genesis and Exodus, God’s remembrances initiate salvation. In Leviticus, God’s remembrance restores Israel, even in judgment. In the Psalms, God’s memory is cause for praise and faith. In the Prophets, the promise is renewed that God will remember his covenant despite Israel’s unfaithfulness. In the New Testament, Jesus comes as the ultimate fulfilment of God’s covenant remembrance.
The first person God remembered was Noah (Gen. 8:1a). Lest Noah get a big head, God also remembered the beasts and livestock on the ark (Gen. 8:1b). All this remembering led to action, the waters receded and preservation continued (Gen. 8:1c). Then God promised Noah that in the future he would remember the sign of the Noahic Covenant, the rainbow, ensuring preservation of the earth (Gen. 9:15f; Ps. 98:3). Lot is spared because God remembers Abraham, establishing that God’s covenant loyalty extends to Abraham’s family (Gen. 19:29). Then God remembered Rachel and ends her barrenness. This results in the birth of Joseph (Gen. 30:22). In Exodus 2:24-25, God hears the Israelites groaning and remembers his covenant with Abraham. This is the theological foundation for the Exodus (Ex. 6:5). After the golden calf incident, Moses appeals to God’s covenant memory as the reason for withholding punishment (Ex. 32:13; Dt. 9:27). God promises that even if Israel is in judgment and exile, he will remember his covenant. He will remember how he saved them from Egypt, and restore Israel (Lev. 26:42, 45; 2 Kings 13:23; Ps. 105:8; 106:45). In 1 Samuel 1:19, God remembers Hannah’s petition, and Samuel the prophet is born. God’s remembrances translate into ongoing provision for his covenant people (Ps. 111:5). Because of God’s remembrance of his people in their time of need, Israel will praise the Lord (Ps. 136:23). The birth of John the Baptist and the sending of Jesus the Son are because of God’s covenant remembrance (Lk. 1:72f). God remembers the almsgiving of Cornelius, marking out that in the New Covenant, God’s remembrance includes faithful Gentiles in covenant blessing.
Consider three key features of God’s memory. First, God’s remembrances lead to action, such as deliverance or provision. Second, God’s covenant is central. Most references connect God’s remembrance to his covenants with Noah, Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. Third, God’s memory is paradoxical. When God does not remember the covenant of brotherhood, judgment comes (Amos 1:9). When God does not remember the iniquity of the people, salvation comes (Heb. 8:12). God remembers His covenant by choosing to remember sins no more. God’s people are comforted as forgiven sinners because God’s memory has changed sides.
Human Memory
Since human memory should mirror God’s memory, that means human memory also ought to have three key features. First, godly memory leads to righteous action. When God commands Israel to remember the difficult forty years they had in the wilderness, including the testing and discipline, the goal is that these memories become the foundation for present obedience (Dt. 8:2). This is also why God establishes a perpetual liturgical memory. Israel keeps the Passover as a re-presentation of God’s faithfulness, which allows each new generation to participate in the founding salvation act that created the nation-state of Israel (Ex. 12:14; 13:8f). Likewise, Jesus institutes the Lord’s Supper as the New Covenant memorial (1 Cor. 11:24), where each believer participates in the salvation act of Christ’ sacrifice (Lk. 22:19; 1 Cor. 10:14-22). Through this participation, the people of God are instructed and molded into the church.
Second, godly memory is rooted in covenant truths. There is a reciprocal nature to covenant memory. God remembers his people and has mercy. God’s people remember God’s mercy and respond with obedience (Dt. 7:9; Ps. 103:17f). Also, there is an intergenerational nature to covenant memory. God’s people are supposed to “Remember the days of old; consider the years of many generations; ask your father; and he will show you, your elders, and they will tell you” (Dt. 32:7). It’s not just that memory is transmitted through testimony, but it’s a communal activity with God’s people in the past.
Third, godly memory forgets certain things. Christians forget the former life of sin to take a new life of holiness (Eph. 2:1-10; Phil. 3:13f; 1 Pt. 1:16). Forgetting the wrong things is spiritually dangerous. For example, forgetting God’s provision in a time of prosperity leads to pride and disobedience (Dt. 8:11-14). And forgetting God’s goodness leads to idolatry, like the golden calf (Ps. 106:21). By remembering the right things now, “the former things shall not be remembered or come to mind” (Is. 65:17) “He will wipe away every tear from their eyes, and death shall be no more, neither shall there be mourning, nor crying, nor pain anymore, for the former things have passed away” (Rev. 21:4).
Consider Four Further Functions of Memory
First, Memory Reinforces Relationships
Memory includes people. The people you can’t forget are the ones to whom you had a bond. Your ongoing memory of the person reveals the strength of your loyalty to the bond. It also reveals what, and who, you were paying attention to. When you forget a person, it may be simple absent-mindedness. Maybe you only met the person once. Maybe it was twenty years ago. It’s an innocent forgetfulness. Other forgetfulness is purposeful, a social excision and intentional severing of any link, a destruction of the relationship. When you remember a person, like Paul commands the Galatians to remember the poor (Gal. 2:10), you aren’t supposed to imagine some distant person in a far-off land. You are exercising your will to remember the particular poor people you know, to not remove them as if their need is undesirable to you. Your remembering is a purposeful interceding on their behalf.
Second, Memory Awakens Transcendence
Forgetfulness is part of the fall. Which means memory doesn’t just have an intellectual dimension, but a spiritual one. What is remembering? It’s internalizing knowledge. Once this knowledge was outside of you. Now it is part of you. It might be terms, people, patterns, or concepts. It might be smells, loves, feelings, or poetry. It’s all the sensory experiences impressed on the mind to form abstract associations between the seen and the unseen.
These sensory experiences relate to “real” spiritual ideas. The more angelical the memories, the stronger the potential exists to see the true nature of things. This is near what Augustine is getting at in chapter ten of his Confessions, where memory serves as a vessel of grace. Memory becomes the mind’s capacity—the soul’s capacity—to feel the ineffable compound of Joy and Wonder, of strangeness and familiarity, in the consuming sense of Transcendent Truth. Some memories are terrifying. Others beautiful. Others mysterious. Because each person is colonized by eternity (Eccl. 3:11), each person possesses the potentiality of spiritual institutions such as faith, hope, and love. This potentiality forms the calling of every human being: to submit their human identity to the Lordship of Christ for the glory of God.
For some people, the Spirit’s sovereign sway awakens the human spirit to see the unmistakable stamp of cosmic reality, and their heart is opened to pay attention to the divine witness (Acts 16:14). The heart is freed to receive the world as something given to them, as something they inherit and experience. The heart is enabled to learn the patois of God’s universe.
For other people, the vitality and resoluteness of this Transcendence denervates their souls. They look in the mirror and see the mark of Cain, so they flee the glory cloud, preferring to vaunt the dark nakedness of an ugly autonomy rather than the beauty of the glory of the grace of God. Their heart is hardened to the unassailable facts of sex, marriage, and decency as they overturn the fixities of human nature.
If forgetfulness is soul deep, then memory improvement is spiritual restoration. Memory of what, exactly? Above all, the goodness of God, his invisible attributes, eternal power, and divine nature. When this knowledge is integrated into your own being, then the soul will honor God and give thanks to him (Rom. 1:19-21). These memories are the very first sign of the renewal of the soul.
Third, Memory fights unbelief
Psalm 126:3 describes a deliberate act of remembering. The psalmist recalls God’s past intervention, not as nostalgia, but as a foundation for renewed trust in the present. Memory has a purpose. It is not passive recollection; it is active resistance against despair. By remembering how “the LORD restored the fortunes of Zion” (Psalm 126:1), the people are strengthened to pray, “Restore our fortunes, O LORD” (Psalm 126:4). Memory turns past joy into present faith. It reorients the heart from what is to what God can do again. Memory becomes the bridge between sorrow and joy, linking what God has done with what we believe He will do.
The restored are not merely those who experience joy again. They are those who learn to remember rightly. Memory, for them, is not a gallery of fading photographs but a weapon against unbelief. In Psalm 126, joy begins not with new circumstances, but with the recollection, “The LORD has done great things for us” (Ps. 126:3). This is not sentimentality. It is theological clarity. The restored learn that to forget God’s past faithfulness is to surrender to present despair.
Righteous remembering is to anchor the soul in a truth deeper than circumstance. They rehearse the miracles, not to live in the past, but to insist that God is still who He was. Memory is about establishing thoughts based on God’s character, which is never changing. When you remember God’s character, you stop obsessing about your always-changing life situation. In this way, memory is an expression of faith looking backward, so the person can walk forward in faithfulness. Thus, memory is a spiritual weapon, not a mere mental exercise.
Fourth, Memory aids obedience
Psalm 132 refers to David’s affliction suffered while he was faithful to God in trying to find a place for the ark. Verse one asks Yahweh to “remember” David’s affliction, and so should we. At least fifteen times in the New Testament, believers are commanded to “remember.” Knowing this biblical history is important. With a biblical memory, you have two thousand years of experience from which to make off-the-cuff obedient responses to every kind of situation. If the church is going to live adequately and maturely as the people of God, we need more memories to work from than our own experience can give us.
We need the theological narrative of the Bible. This biblical history is not a museum of moral tales; it is a fortress against madness. Without it, we are at the mercy of every mood, every fashion, every gust of opinion that blows through the culture like a leaf in a storm. Modern man prides himself on spontaneity, but without the right memory, his spontaneity is merely ignorance in motion. True biblical memory is a treasury of battle-tested wisdom. And biblical memory is not just any memory; it is the memory of a people who have walked with fire and cloud, sung in prisons, and prayed in lions’ dens.
The Bible gives you commandments etched in stone and stories etched in blood, stories of the One True God and his people walking in deserts. To live without this biblical memory is to set out to sea with no map and no stars. Your own experience is a thimble of water beside the ocean of Scripture (Job 8:9). If you are to live not just impulsively, but rightly; not just reactively, but faithfully, you must root your reflexes in divine revelation.
Conclusion
The Bible is not yesterday's news. It is yesterday’s wisdom that is alive, divine, and desperately needed today. And that is why it is good for you to study the Bible, and not just the epistles of Paul, but the stories of the Old Testament. These are not merely ancient tales. They are buried treasure. You must read the stories of Scripture and look for the typology, the history, and the theology of the Bible. This will teach you what life in God’s covenant is all about.
So you must not remain ignorant of Abraham, called from the land of Ur, the Hebrews enslaved in Egypt, David battling the Philistines, Jesus arguing with the Pharisees, or Paul rebuking the Corinthians. The obedience of memory creates a Christian who has David in his bones, Jeremiah in his bloodstream, Paul in his fingertips, and Christ in his heart. It is through biblical memory that you learn that obedience is not a stodgy plodding in the ruts of religion; it is a hopeful race toward God’s promises. That’s why learning the stories of the Bible leads to mature obedience.
Jason Cherry is an elder at Trinity Reformed Church in Huntsville, Alabama, as well as a teacher and lecturer of literature, history, and economics at Providence Classical School in Huntsville. He graduated from Reformed Theological Seminary with an MA in Religion and is the author of the books The Culture of Conversionism and the History of the Altar Call and The Making of Evangelical Spirituality.
[1] Martyn Lloyd-Jones, The Great Doctrines of the Bible: God the Holy Spirit (Crossway, 1997), 127.
[2] N.D. Wilson, Death by Living (Thomas Nelson, 2013), 96.
[3] Abby Smith Rumsey, When We Are No More: How Digital Memory is Shaping Our Future (Bloomsbury Press, 2016), 12.
Martyn Lloyd-Jones said, “The greatest weakness in evangelical Christianity today is that it forgets God.”[1] That means the church has a memory problem. Memory is information that you hold in the mind; knowledge that you store away. But memory is not the same as data storage. God gave you a vast capacity for memory because you are intended to move through the story he is writing.[2] Memory is the ability to retrieve information from the past, use the information in the present, and project the information into the future. Memory is a repertoire of knowledge that can be summoned in a way that travels freely between the past, the present, and the future. It is this conjectural thinking that provides life with the depth perception necessary for faithfulness.[3]
Memory is a gift. What if there were no memory? Think of the chaos. The world would appear as a random, fuzzy collection of objects. There would be no meaning, only the arousal of innate reflexes. There would be no basis for interpretation, only the elapsed and deserted moments of the past. There would be no knowledge of the external world, only unintegrated events that lack unity and intention.
One doesn’t form memories. One is inhabited by them. The reason the world is in such a moral mess is that it is in the grip of a demonic inhabitation, willfully possessed by the dark daydreams of solipsism. If your memory canvas is painted with an amoral, asymmetrical human world, void of aesthetics and substantive only in the meaning of power patterns, then it’s no wonder people occupy a gallimaufry cosmos with no solid meaning, order, or wisdom. Love and trust become empty rationalizations, bowdlerized buzzwords that merely flatter the dominant patterns of the zeitgeist.
Lest you are already missing the point, here it is more plainly: The memories that inhabit you really do matter. A person with the wrong memory, or no memory at all, becomes barbarous, easily tyrannized by sin, obeying a nihilism masquerading as advancement.
Different Types of Memories
There are two main types of memories. The first type consists of memories of your past experiences. These experiences live in your head not just by images, but by the ability to feel emotion. There is sensory memory, such as the smell of fresh-baked bread or the sound of your favorite song, that triggers a broader recollection of your past world. There are the traumatic memories of unhealed wounds. There are embodied memories, such as the skill of riding a bike or the habit of making your bed in the morning. These experiences don’t necessarily begin as words, but they do eventually translate into language and are reborn in the imagination. Then there are memories gone askew. When psychologists note that people’s memories tend to be populated with inaccuracies, they’re pointing to a common human tendency to analyze our present circumstances and unconsciously reshape the past to make sense of who we are now.
The second type of memory is communal and inherited. Your mind contains not only what you’ve personally experienced but what others have told you. There are all kinds of influences that come into your life. There are all kinds of documents that live in your head; all kinds of narratives and images and characters—real and chimerical—that reside in the human imagination. Family stories, historical accounts, biblical symbols, cultural myths, and fictional narratives. You know characters from novels as intimately as childhood friends. You remember the Exodus, though you weren't there. The Civil War, the Resurrection, and your grandfather’s war stories all dwell in you as memory, though not as personal experience. These transmitted memories, some factual, some legendary, some entirely invented, are the impressions, tidings, and tales that now inhabit you.
God’s Memories
God’s remembrances surpass even the strongest human memories (Is. 49:15). God’s mercy for his people is because of his memory of his people. This is part of God’s deep paternal affection (Jer. 31:20). There is an unfolding pattern of God’s memory across Scripture. In Genesis and Exodus, God’s remembrances initiate salvation. In Leviticus, God’s remembrance restores Israel, even in judgment. In the Psalms, God’s memory is cause for praise and faith. In the Prophets, the promise is renewed that God will remember his covenant despite Israel’s unfaithfulness. In the New Testament, Jesus comes as the ultimate fulfilment of God’s covenant remembrance.
The first person God remembered was Noah (Gen. 8:1a). Lest Noah get a big head, God also remembered the beasts and livestock on the ark (Gen. 8:1b). All this remembering led to action, the waters receded and preservation continued (Gen. 8:1c). Then God promised Noah that in the future he would remember the sign of the Noahic Covenant, the rainbow, ensuring preservation of the earth (Gen. 9:15f; Ps. 98:3). Lot is spared because God remembers Abraham, establishing that God’s covenant loyalty extends to Abraham’s family (Gen. 19:29). Then God remembered Rachel and ends her barrenness. This results in the birth of Joseph (Gen. 30:22). In Exodus 2:24-25, God hears the Israelites groaning and remembers his covenant with Abraham. This is the theological foundation for the Exodus (Ex. 6:5). After the golden calf incident, Moses appeals to God’s covenant memory as the reason for withholding punishment (Ex. 32:13; Dt. 9:27). God promises that even if Israel is in judgment and exile, he will remember his covenant. He will remember how he saved them from Egypt, and restore Israel (Lev. 26:42, 45; 2 Kings 13:23; Ps. 105:8; 106:45). In 1 Samuel 1:19, God remembers Hannah’s petition, and Samuel the prophet is born. God’s remembrances translate into ongoing provision for his covenant people (Ps. 111:5). Because of God’s remembrance of his people in their time of need, Israel will praise the Lord (Ps. 136:23). The birth of John the Baptist and the sending of Jesus the Son are because of God’s covenant remembrance (Lk. 1:72f). God remembers the almsgiving of Cornelius, marking out that in the New Covenant, God’s remembrance includes faithful Gentiles in covenant blessing.
Consider three key features of God’s memory. First, God’s remembrances lead to action, such as deliverance or provision. Second, God’s covenant is central. Most references connect God’s remembrance to his covenants with Noah, Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. Third, God’s memory is paradoxical. When God does not remember the covenant of brotherhood, judgment comes (Amos 1:9). When God does not remember the iniquity of the people, salvation comes (Heb. 8:12). God remembers His covenant by choosing to remember sins no more. God’s people are comforted as forgiven sinners because God’s memory has changed sides.
Human Memory
Since human memory should mirror God’s memory, that means human memory also ought to have three key features. First, godly memory leads to righteous action. When God commands Israel to remember the difficult forty years they had in the wilderness, including the testing and discipline, the goal is that these memories become the foundation for present obedience (Dt. 8:2). This is also why God establishes a perpetual liturgical memory. Israel keeps the Passover as a re-presentation of God’s faithfulness, which allows each new generation to participate in the founding salvation act that created the nation-state of Israel (Ex. 12:14; 13:8f). Likewise, Jesus institutes the Lord’s Supper as the New Covenant memorial (1 Cor. 11:24), where each believer participates in the salvation act of Christ’ sacrifice (Lk. 22:19; 1 Cor. 10:14-22). Through this participation, the people of God are instructed and molded into the church.
Second, godly memory is rooted in covenant truths. There is a reciprocal nature to covenant memory. God remembers his people and has mercy. God’s people remember God’s mercy and respond with obedience (Dt. 7:9; Ps. 103:17f). Also, there is an intergenerational nature to covenant memory. God’s people are supposed to “Remember the days of old; consider the years of many generations; ask your father; and he will show you, your elders, and they will tell you” (Dt. 32:7). It’s not just that memory is transmitted through testimony, but it’s a communal activity with God’s people in the past.
Third, godly memory forgets certain things. Christians forget the former life of sin to take a new life of holiness (Eph. 2:1-10; Phil. 3:13f; 1 Pt. 1:16). Forgetting the wrong things is spiritually dangerous. For example, forgetting God’s provision in a time of prosperity leads to pride and disobedience (Dt. 8:11-14). And forgetting God’s goodness leads to idolatry, like the golden calf (Ps. 106:21). By remembering the right things now, “the former things shall not be remembered or come to mind” (Is. 65:17) “He will wipe away every tear from their eyes, and death shall be no more, neither shall there be mourning, nor crying, nor pain anymore, for the former things have passed away” (Rev. 21:4).
Consider Four Further Functions of Memory
First, Memory Reinforces Relationships
Memory includes people. The people you can’t forget are the ones to whom you had a bond. Your ongoing memory of the person reveals the strength of your loyalty to the bond. It also reveals what, and who, you were paying attention to. When you forget a person, it may be simple absent-mindedness. Maybe you only met the person once. Maybe it was twenty years ago. It’s an innocent forgetfulness. Other forgetfulness is purposeful, a social excision and intentional severing of any link, a destruction of the relationship. When you remember a person, like Paul commands the Galatians to remember the poor (Gal. 2:10), you aren’t supposed to imagine some distant person in a far-off land. You are exercising your will to remember the particular poor people you know, to not remove them as if their need is undesirable to you. Your remembering is a purposeful interceding on their behalf.
Second, Memory Awakens Transcendence
Forgetfulness is part of the fall. Which means memory doesn’t just have an intellectual dimension, but a spiritual one. What is remembering? It’s internalizing knowledge. Once this knowledge was outside of you. Now it is part of you. It might be terms, people, patterns, or concepts. It might be smells, loves, feelings, or poetry. It’s all the sensory experiences impressed on the mind to form abstract associations between the seen and the unseen.
These sensory experiences relate to “real” spiritual ideas. The more angelical the memories, the stronger the potential exists to see the true nature of things. This is near what Augustine is getting at in chapter ten of his Confessions, where memory serves as a vessel of grace. Memory becomes the mind’s capacity—the soul’s capacity—to feel the ineffable compound of Joy and Wonder, of strangeness and familiarity, in the consuming sense of Transcendent Truth. Some memories are terrifying. Others beautiful. Others mysterious. Because each person is colonized by eternity (Eccl. 3:11), each person possesses the potentiality of spiritual institutions such as faith, hope, and love. This potentiality forms the calling of every human being: to submit their human identity to the Lordship of Christ for the glory of God.
For some people, the Spirit’s sovereign sway awakens the human spirit to see the unmistakable stamp of cosmic reality, and their heart is opened to pay attention to the divine witness (Acts 16:14). The heart is freed to receive the world as something given to them, as something they inherit and experience. The heart is enabled to learn the patois of God’s universe.
For other people, the vitality and resoluteness of this Transcendence denervates their souls. They look in the mirror and see the mark of Cain, so they flee the glory cloud, preferring to vaunt the dark nakedness of an ugly autonomy rather than the beauty of the glory of the grace of God. Their heart is hardened to the unassailable facts of sex, marriage, and decency as they overturn the fixities of human nature.
If forgetfulness is soul deep, then memory improvement is spiritual restoration. Memory of what, exactly? Above all, the goodness of God, his invisible attributes, eternal power, and divine nature. When this knowledge is integrated into your own being, then the soul will honor God and give thanks to him (Rom. 1:19-21). These memories are the very first sign of the renewal of the soul.
Third, Memory fights unbelief
Psalm 126:3 describes a deliberate act of remembering. The psalmist recalls God’s past intervention, not as nostalgia, but as a foundation for renewed trust in the present. Memory has a purpose. It is not passive recollection; it is active resistance against despair. By remembering how “the LORD restored the fortunes of Zion” (Psalm 126:1), the people are strengthened to pray, “Restore our fortunes, O LORD” (Psalm 126:4). Memory turns past joy into present faith. It reorients the heart from what is to what God can do again. Memory becomes the bridge between sorrow and joy, linking what God has done with what we believe He will do.
The restored are not merely those who experience joy again. They are those who learn to remember rightly. Memory, for them, is not a gallery of fading photographs but a weapon against unbelief. In Psalm 126, joy begins not with new circumstances, but with the recollection, “The LORD has done great things for us” (Ps. 126:3). This is not sentimentality. It is theological clarity. The restored learn that to forget God’s past faithfulness is to surrender to present despair.
Righteous remembering is to anchor the soul in a truth deeper than circumstance. They rehearse the miracles, not to live in the past, but to insist that God is still who He was. Memory is about establishing thoughts based on God’s character, which is never changing. When you remember God’s character, you stop obsessing about your always-changing life situation. In this way, memory is an expression of faith looking backward, so the person can walk forward in faithfulness. Thus, memory is a spiritual weapon, not a mere mental exercise.
Fourth, Memory aids obedience
Psalm 132 refers to David’s affliction suffered while he was faithful to God in trying to find a place for the ark. Verse one asks Yahweh to “remember” David’s affliction, and so should we. At least fifteen times in the New Testament, believers are commanded to “remember.” Knowing this biblical history is important. With a biblical memory, you have two thousand years of experience from which to make off-the-cuff obedient responses to every kind of situation. If the church is going to live adequately and maturely as the people of God, we need more memories to work from than our own experience can give us.
We need the theological narrative of the Bible. This biblical history is not a museum of moral tales; it is a fortress against madness. Without it, we are at the mercy of every mood, every fashion, every gust of opinion that blows through the culture like a leaf in a storm. Modern man prides himself on spontaneity, but without the right memory, his spontaneity is merely ignorance in motion. True biblical memory is a treasury of battle-tested wisdom. And biblical memory is not just any memory; it is the memory of a people who have walked with fire and cloud, sung in prisons, and prayed in lions’ dens.
The Bible gives you commandments etched in stone and stories etched in blood, stories of the One True God and his people walking in deserts. To live without this biblical memory is to set out to sea with no map and no stars. Your own experience is a thimble of water beside the ocean of Scripture (Job 8:9). If you are to live not just impulsively, but rightly; not just reactively, but faithfully, you must root your reflexes in divine revelation.
Conclusion
The Bible is not yesterday's news. It is yesterday’s wisdom that is alive, divine, and desperately needed today. And that is why it is good for you to study the Bible, and not just the epistles of Paul, but the stories of the Old Testament. These are not merely ancient tales. They are buried treasure. You must read the stories of Scripture and look for the typology, the history, and the theology of the Bible. This will teach you what life in God’s covenant is all about.
So you must not remain ignorant of Abraham, called from the land of Ur, the Hebrews enslaved in Egypt, David battling the Philistines, Jesus arguing with the Pharisees, or Paul rebuking the Corinthians. The obedience of memory creates a Christian who has David in his bones, Jeremiah in his bloodstream, Paul in his fingertips, and Christ in his heart. It is through biblical memory that you learn that obedience is not a stodgy plodding in the ruts of religion; it is a hopeful race toward God’s promises. That’s why learning the stories of the Bible leads to mature obedience.
Jason Cherry is an elder at Trinity Reformed Church in Huntsville, Alabama, as well as a teacher and lecturer of literature, history, and economics at Providence Classical School in Huntsville. He graduated from Reformed Theological Seminary with an MA in Religion and is the author of the books The Culture of Conversionism and the History of the Altar Call and The Making of Evangelical Spirituality.
[1] Martyn Lloyd-Jones, The Great Doctrines of the Bible: God the Holy Spirit (Crossway, 1997), 127.
[2] N.D. Wilson, Death by Living (Thomas Nelson, 2013), 96.
[3] Abby Smith Rumsey, When We Are No More: How Digital Memory is Shaping Our Future (Bloomsbury Press, 2016), 12.
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