It’s quite a statement to say that there is only one man and his family that is worth saving as we read in Chapter 6. “The Lord saw how great man’s wickedness on the earth had become, and that every inclination of the thoughts of his heart was evil all the time. The Lord was grieved that he had made man on the earth, and his heart was filled with pain.”

It would be easy to think that Noah was completely righteous on his own but that is not the case. Noah was part of a line of righteous people. It does not say he was perfect but it does say he was blameless among the people. In other words, he had not done anything wrong to anyone in spite of their being completely given over to wickedness. He had never made up an excuse to get even or return an insult. He never chose to fight fire with fire. He walked with God – not with other men. He chose the right company to keep the thoughts of his own heart from being inclined toward evil all the time. David says in Psalm 1 that we are not to walk in the counsel of the wicked or stand in the way of sinners or sit in the seat of mockers. Noah practiced that long before David and made it a discipline in the face of almost impossible opposition. He never allowed the fact that others had made wickedness normative or even rewarded to keep him from walking with God. Using sit, stand and walk is a way of describing everything in our life. Noah lived in the midst of total corruption and yet chose another way of life. He lived for 600 years in the worst of circumstances before God called him to build the ark. It reminds me of Caleb who stayed with the Israelites wandering in the wilderness for 40 years before proving he was right about Canaan. We often say about new challenges, “That’s a young man’s game” but often Scripture tells us just the opposite. There are some tasks God reserves for old age. It takes almost a full lifetime of preparation for what God has in mind.

Second, Noah had been prepared for that choice. Look at his forbearers. He came from a long line of righteous men. None of the men in his line are described in the way we see Noah’s world. None of them are consumed with evil thoughts. What does it say about his great-grandfather Enoch?  He walked with God for 300 years and after 365 years he was no more because God took him away. His grandfather lived 969 years and his father Lamech looked to his son for God’s comfort. Noah was not simply an isolated good man. God had prepared his line for generations. There were expectations for his life – even though his life is two-thirds over before his real mission begins. You may be part of a line of preparation for a future time that you cannot see.

We are influenced – especially now – to make our choices and predictions based on what the polls tell us. What do most people think? What do the majority of people believe? We forget what God will do with one person who has been prepared and chosen to walk with God against all the pressure of the world around them. He does not need a movement or a majority. Sometimes it is just a single life against a flood of corruption and wickedness.

Noah, the animals and his family are in the ark for a little more than a year. Forty days during the flood itself and then the balance waiting for the waters to recede and the earth to dry. It’s a time of waiting and after 40 days I imagine the ark is not the most pleasant place in the world – even if it is the safest. But he waits patiently and with anticipation. How we wait says a great deal about us. What happened in the parable of the man who went away and left his servants in charge of his vineyards? They could not wait to take everything as their own. What happened in the parable of the pounds when the master went away and left three servants with talents. Some made the waiting productive and one waited immobilized by fear. What about the ten virgins? Five of them went to sleep and five of them were wise and prepared for the wait. Scripture is full of stories of those who wait. Abraham waits. Jacob waits. Joseph waits. Hannah waits. Job waits. Then there are those who cannot wait. Sarah; Esau; Rachel; Samson; How we wait oftentimes says as much about us as how we go through the floods and catastrophes in our lives.

But it is the first verse in Chapter 8 where I want to focus this morning.

“But God remembered Noah and all the wild animals and the livestock that were with him in the ark, and he sent a wind over the earth and the waters receded.”

There are many places in Scripture where we read the phrase that God remembers:

Genesis 19:29 “So when God destroyed the cities of the plain, he remembered Abraham, and he brought Lot out of the catastrophe that overthrew the cities where Lot had lived.”

Genesis 30:22 “Then God remembered Rachel; he listened to her and opened her womb.”

Exodus 2:24 “And God heard their groaning, and God remembered his covenant with Abraham, with Isaac, and with Jacob.”

Numbers 10:9 “..blow an alarm with the trumpets; and you shall be remembered before the Lord you God, and you shall be saved from your enemies.”

1 Samuel 1:19 “and Elkanah knew his wife; and the Lord remembered her.”

Psalms 78:39 “For he remembered that they were but flesh; a wind that passes away, and comes not again.”

Psalm 98:3 “He has remembered his mercy and his truth toward the house of Israel:”

Luke 1:72 “..he has remembered.. his holy covenant he swore to our father Abraham.”

Acts 10:31 “Cornelius, God has heard your prayer and remembered your gifts to the poor.”

We are sometimes troubled or confused by the thought that God forgets or that he needs loud noises to remind him and goes for 400 years before the suffering of his people is great enough to get his attention. Sometimes he remembers on his own (like remembering the suffering of the Israelites in Egypt) and sometimes he needs the repeated prayers of the faithful (like Hannah.) It only confirms the picture we have of him as an old man detached from the world and distracted by other things more pressing. It sounds like he makes promises and then forgets what he pledged. Maybe the only thing that stirs him to act is the blowing of trumpets or the loud prayers of the righteous in an emergency. Maybe he forgot to put something important on his calendar – like a birthday or anniversary. Maybe he has one area of his life that is more like us than we would like to consider or admit. How many times in Scripture does God instruct us to remember but then turns around and forgets himself? How many times are we commanded not to forget and then it looks like God himself sometimes forgets and has to be reminded. However, we think about the word “remember” we want to somehow explain it away and are often left wondering how the Old Testament authors could have used such a word to describe an all-knowing God. Maybe once we could excuse but why are there so many instances of God remembering? How can you remember if you are supposed to be incapable of forgetting?

Sometimes we go to great lengths for explaining why this doesn’t really mean what it seems. Theologians have come up with all kinds of explanations for why this does not really mean what it plainly says. We invent all sorts of sophisticated word games to explain it away. We seem to be far less comfortable with a God who needs prompting than the people of the Bible were.  It is as confusing as the parable of the unjust judge who finally gives the woman the justice she deserves only after being relentlessly pestered by her. Why did he need her being a constant nuisance for him to finally do something?

I think it is more like this. God puts a check mark on his calendar to take care of something at a particular time in the future that only he understands and we take that to mean he is not thinking about it until then. Maybe he does not need to think about it (in our human terms) because he knows exactly what he is going to do at that point in the future which is hidden from us. We see it as forgetting and he sees it as planning. 

Another way may be to say he can remember without having forgotten. What does he say about the people of Israel? Constantly remember. Constantly have these things in mind. Constantly be reminded long before you have forgotten. Do this in remembrance of me does not assume we forget about Jesus between the times we observe communion. Maybe that is the way it is with God. He does not remember because he has forgotten. He remembers because he is forever and constantly remembering. There is no chance of forgetting in the presence of constant remembering. 

We can only understand it as God having forgotten and he seems not to be bothered by our thinking that. Otherwise, I suspect he would have said to the writers at the time, “Let’s change that word about my remembering. It sounds like I had a lapse of memory or was preoccupied with something else and lost my focus for a few hundred years or it slipped my mind for a few days that the flood ended.” In other words, God does not appear to be all that concerned about how we perceive his attention span. For the people of the time it really did make sense that there could be no other reason things were not going the way they would have planned had they been in charge. God always seems to remember right before something good he is about to do for people. People are delivered out of slavery. People are saved from destruction. Women become pregnant. Babies are born. He never remembers and then something bad happens. In a sense, we are the same way. God appears to have forgotten us when things are not going our way but he always remembers just before something good happens. If only we could get his attention more often.

I’ve said this before and sometimes I am still reluctant to have God remember how much I have been blessed. I can actually hesitate to be thankful out loud for fear I might remind him of how much I have to be grateful for. I am afraid if he remembers he might say, “I forgot how much I have given him compared to so many others. It’s probably past time to even things up a bit.” I would rather not get his attention. People in the Old Testament on the other hand knew that God’s remembering always meant something good was going to happen. 

But let me put a twist on it this morning. I’m not pretending it is an explanation that will satisfy everyone. Maybe the people of the Old Testament had a better understanding of their relationship with God as creatures than we do. Maybe they were not as uncomfortable with the thought that God was not preoccupied with their every wish every moment of the day and he had the right to let even hundreds of years go by before acting. They could imagine they were not the ever present center of his attention and all he had to think about was hearing their prayers and answering them upon arrival. Maybe we could say with them that God remembers as a way of confessing that God has no obligation to be thinking about us all of the time. We are very uncomfortable with the thought that we are not constantly on his mind. We want him to be preoccupied with us. There is very little mention of all the lives of people who were born, lived and died unremarkable lives during the periods when God was silent in the Old Testament. We have no record of people assuming that God was constantly thinking of ways to make their lives full of meaning, purpose and significance. That’s not the case with us, is it? God’s time is best spent focused on how our lives can have impact and make a difference. For us, God can never be silent so we fill the silence with what we think he should be saying to us or what he should be teaching us in every circumstance. In some ways, we are like children who are desperately wanting to be the center of attention and the thought of adults having a conversation without their being noticed makes them shout louder “Look at me. Look at me. Why are you not paying attention to me?” 

Maybe it would be good for us to consider that God has things other than us on his mind or list of things to do. Maybe it’s not that we have to wake him up to get his attention but that he wants to help us learn not to need proof of his constant attention. We can learn to wait. We can live with his silence. We can even forget about ourselves for a time.

Paul talks about putting away childish things and in the same way we may need to put away our childish need for God to be always acting or speaking or teaching us lessons in our lives by constant reassurances that he has not forgotten us and needs to be reminded that we should be the center of his attention. In time and as we mature we become more comfortable with fewer evidences of his constant activity in our lives and more aware that the goal is to be faithful, patient, mature and comfortable without God having to constantly perform or pay attention. 

God remembers not because he forgets but because he is ever mindful. He never stops remembering.