Throughout Scripture, God’s people are repeatedly told to remember; remember what God has done, remember His covenant, remember His faithfulness. Jesus also told His disciples at the Last Supper, “Do this in remembrance of me.”
At the same time, people are sometimes called to leave the past behind and move forward.
What is the difference between remembering the past faithfully and living in it?
You must be listening to the wrong people. You do want to remember the commandments, though.
Ignorance of the past is doomed to repeat it.? I had to look it up. “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” (from The Life of Reason, 1905) When the Bible speaks about the past, it carefully distinguishes between what you are meant to release and what you are meant to retain.
Leave the past behind. This is essentially a call for you to let go of what is holding you back. Passages about leaving the past behind focus on freedom, growth, and forward motion. The past is meant to be a place of reference, not a place of residence.
Scriptures like Isaiah 43:18–19
“Remember not the former things, nor consider the things of old. Behold, I am doing a new thing; now it springs forth, do you not perceive it? I will make a way in the wilderness and rivers in the desert.”
Address people paralyzed by past failures, shame, or exile. Holding onto past sin or regret prevents spiritual transformation. Refusing to live in nostalgia or regret: In Philippians 3:13–14, the Apostle Paul writes about forgetting.
“Brothers, I do not consider that I have made it my own. But one thing I do: forgetting what lies behind and straining forward to what lies ahead, I press on toward the goal for the prize of the upward call of God in Christ Jesus.”
Paul was a former persecutor of the church; if he dwelt on his past, he would have been paralyzed by guilt. Conversely, longing for “the good old days” can breed complacency.
Remember what God has done. Anchoring your faith. Commands to remember are about gratitude, trust, and perspective during present trials. Building trust for the future: In passages like Psalm 77:11 or Deuteronomy 8, Israel is commanded to recall how God delivered them from Egypt and sustained them in the wilderness. Remembering past faithfulness provides courage when facing new, uncertain difficulties.
Human nature tends toward amnesia during good times, assuming success was entirely self-made, and panic during hard times. Actively recalling God’s action keeps faith grounded in historical reality rather than temporary feelings.
Be blessed, be a blessing, and Jesus is LORD!
Peter
I think the difference is what our remembering produces. Scripture tells us to remember God’s faithfulness so that we trust and obey Him today, not so that we remain trapped in yesterday. As Paul says in Philippians 3:13–14, we can leave what is behind while still remembering the God who has faithfully brought us this far.
Being able to remember is key to learning as well as a curb on doing whatever we feel like at the moment.
I think it’s our remembering of God’s past faithfulness throughout Scripture and throughout church history that gives us the courage to move forward in the present, knowing he has never abandoned his people, and he won’t now.
@ellenvera, if you do a word study of all the passages with the word “remember,” as I have, and consider all the contexts, you will see that it is much more than a mental remembering. It involves obedience to God’s will as revealed in the Bible as God’s Word. For example,
Deu 8:1 “The whole commandment that I command you today you shall be careful to do, that you may live and multiply, and go in and possess the land that the LORD swore to give to your fathers.
Deu 8:2 And you shall remember the whole way that the LORD your God has led you these forty years in the wilderness, that he might humble you, testing you to know what was in your heart, whether you would keep his commandments or not.
Deu 8:3 And he humbled you and let you hunger and fed you with manna, which you did not know, nor did your fathers know, that he might make you know that man does not live by bread alone, but man lives by every word that comes from the mouth of the LORD…
Deu 8:17 Beware lest you say in your heart, ‘My power and the might of my hand have gotten me this wealth.’
Deu 8:18 You shall remember the LORD your God, for it is he who gives you power to get wealth, that he may confirm his covenant that he swore to your fathers, as it is this day.
Deu 8:19 And if you forget the LORD your God and go after other gods and serve them and worship them, I solemnly warn you today that you shall surely perish.
Deu 8:20 Like the nations that the LORD makes to perish before you, so shall you perish, because you would not obey the voice of the LORD your God.
God doesn’t call His people to simply remember the past, but to inhabit it and bring it forward. That’s why Jesus saying “Do this for the remembrance of Me” in the Last Supper is not Jesus saying, “This act of eating bread and wine is just a token act of sentimentality” but is actually built into the long and ancient tradition of God’s call to His people to remember. This is why, even today, when the Jews get together for Passover they are not just saying, “Wasn’t it so nice when, a long time ago, God rescued our ancestors from slavery?” They are saying, “We were slaves in Egypt”, “God delivered us”. God’s actions are not mere memories, but enduring truths that define who God is and who God’s people are.
When we receive the bread and wine of the Lord’s Supper, we are partaking of the very body and blood of Jesus (1 Corinthians 10:16), the act of remembrance (Greek: anamnesis) is not memorialism. It’s both inhabiting the past and bringing the past forward into the present: This is what God has done, this is who our God is. God is the One who rescued us from Egypt. Jesus Christ’s body was broken and His blood shed for us, and it’s right here–in this bread and wine we eat and drink.
God’s people do not leave the past behind and move on–we are a people for whom the past is alive, and is right here with us, right now.