Forgetting God

Deuteronomy 8:11 (Message)

Make sure you don't forget God, your God, by not keeping his commandments, his rules and regulations that I command you today.

I have been reading Kent Hughes 1992 book Disciplines of a Godly Man (Crossway Books, 2006; original publication 1991).  In his chapter on “Discipline of Purity”, he quoted Dietrich Bonhoeffer (Temptation, SCM Press, 1961, p 33) that I have not quit thinking about:  “When lust takes control, at that moment, God loses all reality……Satan does not fill us with hatred of God, but with the forgetfulness of God.” 

Forgetting God is a characteristic of wickedness.  Indeed, God would consider a person wicked who never thinks about Him.  Wicked moments in our lives are a result of forgetting God.  There are many passages in the Bible that speak about the tragedy of forgetting about God.  Human pride in the form of self-sufficiency causes people to forget God (Deuteronomy 8:12-14, Hosea 13:6).  When people backslide, God is forgotten (Jeremiah 3:21-22).  When you start following other gods (money, pleasure, human achievement, etc.), you forget about God (Deuteronomy 4:23, II Kings 17:38).  Indeed, the cycle of sin and confession (sin—sorrow—confession--repentance—forgiveness/ restoration—sin again) written about throughout the Old Testament is fundamentally the result of forgetting God in everyday life. 

James 1:14-15 gives the “LSD” of sin:  “Lust-Sin-Death”.  Note that verse 14 says that you can be “carried away” or “dragged away” by lustful temptation(s).  Lust is simply the desire for things forbidden by God and His Word.  Lust lures you away from the safety of self-restraint to sin and when you sin you are separated from God.  Being separated from God prevents you from remembering Him and His commandments; you simply forget about Him.  The most common sin committed by men is sexual lust; the most common sin committed by women is pride (according to a 2009 Vatican survey).  If you are a man reading this and you start thinking about sexual lust, why might you continue to think about this subject?  Because you have forgotten the presence of God in your life.  The same is true of women when entangled by pride and envy.   

The Bible commands that you not forget God.  You are not to forget His works (Psalm 78:7, 106:13), His benefits (Psalm 103:2), His Word (Hebrews 12:5, James 1:25), His commandments (Psalm 119:176), and His past deliverances from whatever sin you committed (Judges 8:34, Psalm 78:42). 

One approach you can make to keep from forgetting God is simply to resolve in your heart never to do so.  Psalms 119:16 and 93 simply proclaim that “I will not forget Thy Word”.  Another approach, of course, is to keep feeding yourself spiritually by daily reading and meditation of the Bible.  Evangelist Joseph T. Larsen wrote in the Moody Bible Institute Monthly (July 1993) that America is progressing toward forgetting God “by largely banishing the Bible from schools and by misinterpreting it in universities, criticizing it in theological seminaries and colleges, and scoffing at it among the infidels and atheists of the nation.”

“We have been the recipients of the choicest bounties of heaven. We have been preserved, these many years, in peace and prosperity. We have grown in numbers, wealth and power, as no other nation has ever grown.  But we have forgotten God. We have forgotten the gracious hand which preserved us in peace and multiplied and enriched and strengthened us; and we have vainly imagined, in the deceitfulness of our hearts that all these blessings were produced by some superior wisdom and virtue of our own.  Intoxicated with unbroken success, we have become too self-sufficient to feel the necessity of redeeming and preserving grace, too proud to pray to God that made us! It behooves us, then to humble ourselves before the offended Power, to confess our national sins, and to pray for clemency and forgiveness.”--Abraham Lincoln, Proclamation for a National Day of Fasting, Humiliation and Prayer, April 30, 1863