Pop’s Page

Jeremiah prophesied that some day there would be a new covenant established between God’s people and Himself. Yet, in the pages of the New Testament we continue to see passages where the writers clearly have the original old covenant in view. The first of these is heard through the lips of Zechariah, the father of John the Baptist. The passage is Luke 1:67ff:

His father Zechariah was filled with the Holy Spirit and prophesied:
“Praise be to the Lord, the God of Israel,
because he has come and has redeemed his people.
He has raised up a horn of salvation for us
in the house of his servant David
(as he said through his holy prophets of long ago),
salvation from our enemies
and from the hand of all who hate us–
to show mercy to our fathers
and to remember his holy covenant,
the oath he swore to our father Abraham:
to rescue us from the hand of our enemies,
and to enable us to serve him without fear
in holiness and righteousness before him all our days.
And you, my child, will be called a prophet of the Most High;
for you will go on before the Lord to prepare the way for him,
to give his people the knowledge of salvation
through the forgiveness of their sins,
because of the tender mercy of our God,
by which the rising sun will come to us from heaven
to shine on those living in darkness
and in the shadow of death,
to guide our feet into the path of peace.”

The locus of Zechariah’s words revolve around the word “remember.” The Lord remembered the covenant to Abraham and reiterated by the prophets “long ago.”

Two things strike me about this “song” from Zechariah. The first is the use of the word “remember” when it comes to God. How can God forget anything: He is God! When I was a young boy I remember distinctly standing behind a baseball diamond backstop while Bill Bunting told me that God writes down everything we do in a big black book. I had never heard that before: I hadn’t gone to church much in those days. In the past I’ve looked back at that incident–which for some reason has been burned into my memory banks–with that same skepticism that an adult looks back at anything in his childhood. Yet, since I’ve begun memorizing Psalm 139 where the psalmist says “Before a word is on my tongue, behold, O Lord, you know it altogether,” I’ve had to do a double take. Instead of a big black book, I visualize a videotape–or better yet, a DVD–with a record of everything I’ve ever done or said projected in living color. (Didn’t Jesus say that every word whispered in secret would be shouted from the rooftops?)

Sometimes it does feel like God has forgotten us. During Susan’s last illness I recited Psalm 103 over and over, especially that line which says: “Bless the Lord O my soul and forget not all His benefits……who heals ALL your diseases.” Clearly He didn’t heal the last one. Did He forget that particular benefit? Even the Lord on the cross cried out, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me.”

So it seems that there is an aspect of God’s dealing with His creatures and even with the Uncreated Man (Jesus) in which His lack of action appears to be a failure to “remember.”

I am well acquainted with this failure to remember from another point of view: my aging brain has increasing “senior moments” where I do in fact forget things– sometimes important things. (The most annoying of these moments is when I have sprinted upstairs intent on getting something, and then completely forgetting what it was.)

Certainly we don’t think of God having senior moments like these. But I suppose that God being able to do all things consistent with His character could, if He so chose, “forget.” We certainly hope–and the Scripture seems to suggest–that this is exactly what He does with our forgiven sins. “He remembers them no more.”

In fact, sin and evil, seem to be a kind of fulcrum around which forgetting and remembering balance. In our previous study of Jeremiah we saw how the Lord seemed to want to banish the thought of the rebellious Israelites out of His mind. Their evil–particularly their idolatry–had become so great. So on one side of the fulcrum is the purposeful forgetting by the Lord of His people because they had so immersed themselves in wickedness. His holiness could not tolerate their evil. But on the other side–only illuminated by the work of the Son of God–is the forgetting of, not His people, but the sin of His people. And so, with the birth of John the Baptist who prepared the way for the Son and His ministry of the forgiveness of sins, there was indeed a remembrance of the original covenant–that covenant with Abraham, who–as Paul points out in Romans–was a man of faith. A man who believed God and so had his belief count as righteousness.

So what about us? Has the Lord forgotten us or has He remembered us? When I read Paul’s struggles with sin (remember he was an apostle) in Romans 7, and compare them to my own, I can see the logic of why God would want to forget me. “Wretched man that I am, who will deliver me from this body of death,” Paul cries out as he reviews his own life. We are truly wretched. These days of grief over my beloved wife have exposed just how wretched I am as a sinner vulnerable to emotions gone out of control. I deserve to be forgotten by God. How is it ever possible that I could serve God in the “holiness and righteousness” that Zechariah speaks of in his song?

Yet from the nadir of his wretchedness in Romans 7, the apostle rises in Romans 8 to the zenith of his proclamation, “there is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus.” Why? “Because the law of the Spirit of life has set you free in Christ Jesus from the law of sin and death.”

Which brings me to the second striking thing from Zechariah’s song. That’s the phrase “long ago.” How many hundreds of years had the faithful believers like Zechariah (and his wife Elizabeth, and her cousin Mary, and her husband-to-be Joseph) waited for the promised salvation of the Lord? Where was He? The answer was: He is come. Now. In our day. Two babies born. John, then Jesus. How incredible that they found themselves–sinners like us–characters on the cosmic stage that would change human life forever.

We could ask the same question. Where is He? With all the troubles in the world. The evil. The rebellion. Surely, this would be a good time for Him to return. It has been a long, long time since He was here.

But of course, that is to miss the obvious. He said that He went away so that the Spirit would come. And indeed He has. He lives in every believer. Our body is in fact the temple of the promised Spirit of God. He witnesses with our spirits that we are children of God and fellow heirs with Christ. So in fact the very power of the holy and righteous God lives in us to give to us the very things that Zechariah said would be ours: his holiness and righteousness. Oh, not all at once. Sanctification is a process that will only be completed when we join the Lord in glory. Yet in the lives of fellow believers we see that process inexhorably moving toward that glory that is to be ours. I saw it in Susan’s life, particularly as she neared the end. “His plan is perfect, and each day is a gift,” she would always say even as her body faded away.

And so, gentle reader, as you probably suspected I would do, I return to my beloved wife in these pages. It seems I always do. I can’t seem to help it. It’s not just grief that leads me to her. I want to experience the sanctifying work of the Spirit in my life, and so I naturally turn to the one where that process was expressed so clearly. It was real in her life. I am a witness to that. And so my prayer for myself and all that read these pages is that you will find that “tender mercy of God” that Zechariah proclaimed and which I saw so beautifully demonstrated in the life of Susan Gayle Dishman.

And now, if I could only remember why I came upstairs…..