At the end of When We Re-member, I left us with a question.
Throughout Scripture, we encounter a curious phrase: “God remembered…” God remembered Noah, Rachel, Hannah, and His covenant.
But God is omniscient. He doesn’t forget where He put His keys, walk into a room and wonder why He went in there, or suddenly remember something He was supposed to do three weeks ago.
Those are my kinds of remembering.
If God cannot forget, what does it mean when God remembers?
The Hebrew word translated remembered is zākar. It can mean to remember or call something to mind. But throughout Scripture, when God remembers, His remembering is often followed by action. It marks a turning point in the story: something is about to happen.
So when we read “God remembered,” we should lean in.
Something is about to happen.
The first time Scripture uses the phrase gives us a pretty good clue.
But God Remembered Noah
Noah obeyed God. He built the ark according to God’s instructions, gathered his family, welcomed the animals, and entered the ark.
And then God shut the door.
The parts of me that avoid closed-in spaces and large bodies of water always shudder at that verse. No, I don’t do cruises.
The flood came just as God had said it would. Genesis 7 describes the devastation in stark terms: everything on dry land that had the breath of life died.
And Noah waited…
The floodwaters covered the earth for 150 days. God had given Noah remarkably detailed instructions for building the ark—its dimensions, its materials, even where to put the door—but He hadn’t given Noah a calendar for what would happen once that door closed.
I can’t help wondering what the conversations inside that ark sounded like during those very long five months. How long are we going to be in here? When will the water go down? What happens next?
Maybe Noah wondered those things too. I am certain his wife did! He had obeyed what God told him to do, and now he had no choice but to wait for God to tell him what came next.
I know something about that kind of waiting.
Sometimes God sends us on a journey. We pray, seek wisdom, and receive what we believe is confirmation that it’s time to move, to change, to start—or perhaps to stop. We take the step.
And then…
Nothing.
The God who seemed so clear when He sent us suddenly seems silent once we’re on the journey. But God’s silence should never be confused with God’s absence.
God may be silent, but He never releases control or leaves us unattended.
Then come five words at the beginning of Genesis 8:
“But God remembered Noah…” (Genesis 8:1)
God hadn’t forgotten Noah or suddenly remembered that somewhere out there was an ark full of people and animals. Noah had been in God’s care every moment of those long months. It was simply time for the next step. God sent a wind over the earth. The waters began to recede, and eventually dry ground appeared. Noah, his family, and the animals stepped out of the ark into a world beginning again.
Everything outside that ark had been marked by death. Now God told Noah and his family, “Be fruitful and increase in number and fill the earth” (Genesis 9:1).
Life.
God remembered—and it was time for life to begin again.
Remember Me
Noah isn’t the only person Scripture says God remembered. Throughout the Bible, we encounter women who knew the pain of barrenness, and thousands of years later, that ache remains.
During my years with Women in the Word, I have known couples who have struggled with infertility. Some are walking through it now; others can look back on years of praying and waiting. I have seen enough of that pain to know that waiting can feel an awful lot like being forgotten.
Rachel knew that feeling. She watched her sister Leah have child after child while she remained barren. Her anguish eventually spilled out in the desperate words, “Give me children, or I’ll die!” (Genesis 30:1).
Then, after years of waiting, “God remembered Rachel; he listened to her and enabled her to conceive” (Genesis 30:22).
Rachel gave birth to Joseph.
God remembered. New life began.
Generations later, Hannah prayed from that same place of longing. She had endured years of barrenness and the cruelty of Peninnah, her husband’s other wife. Finally, Hannah poured out her anguish before the Lord:
“LORD Almighty, if you will only look on your servant’s misery and remember me, and not forget your servant…” (1 Samuel 1:11)
Remember me.
Hannah wasn’t suggesting that God had misplaced her. She was asking Him to see her, hear her, and act on her behalf.
A few verses later, “The LORD remembered her” (1 Samuel 1:19), and Hannah conceived and gave birth to Samuel.
Rachel was remembered, and Joseph was born. Hannah was remembered, and Samuel was born.
God remembers. God acts. New life begins.
But Rachel and Hannah’s stories do not give us a formula that says if we pray long enough or faithfully enough, God will eventually give us the child—or the marriage, healing, job, reconciliation, or anything else—we have asked Him for.
Sometimes God answers exactly as we prayed. Sometimes He says no or not yet. And sometimes His answer looks nothing like the one we had imagined.
A couple longing for a child may eventually welcome one through adoption or foster care. A woman who never becomes a mother may discover that God has given her extraordinary opportunities to pour into the lives of children, students, younger women, nieces, nephews, or an entire church family. The life she once imagined for herself may not be the life God gives her, and yet His goodness may meet her there in ways she never could have planned.
That isn’t a consolation prize or God’s second-best plan because the first one didn’t work out.
God’s “no” is not forgetfulness. Neither is His “not yet.” And sometimes His answer is something we never knew to ask for.
Even in the waiting, when we cannot yet see what God is doing, we are not unseen.
God remembers.
God Remembers His Covenant
God keeps His promises.
When Noah finally stepped out of the ark, God made a covenant with him: never again would a flood destroy all life on earth. God placed the rainbow in the clouds as the sign of that covenant and said, “Whenever the rainbow appears in the clouds, I will see it and remember the everlasting covenant…” (Genesis 9:16).
There’s our word again: remember.
God certainly didn’t need a rainbow because He might forget His promise.
God provided the rainbow because we forget.
Every rainbow points us back to a promise made thousands of years ago and a God who has never failed to keep it. It reminds us that God remembers His covenant even when we need help remembering that He does.
And that pattern continues.
Years later, God made another promise—this time to Abraham. He promised that Abraham’s descendants would become a great nation, as numerous as the stars in the sky.
Sarah was barren, but Isaac was born. Isaac fathered Jacob, and Jacob fathered Joseph—through Rachel.
Rachel, the woman we just read that “God remembered.”
Through an extraordinary series of events, Joseph became the means God used to preserve Jacob’s family during a devastating famine. The family moved to Egypt, settled there, and prospered.
Eventually, however, their comfortable groove of life became the rut of slavery.
Generations passed. The Israelites groaned under their oppression and cried out to God. And then we encounter our word again:
“God heard their groaning and he remembered his covenant with Abraham, with Isaac and with Jacob. So God looked on the Israelites and was concerned about them.” (Exodus 2:24–25)
Look at those verbs: God heard, remembered, looked, and was concerned.
And then Exodus 3 begins.
Moses.
God had not forgotten His people during their years in Egypt. He had not forgotten Abraham or His covenant. The time had come for God to act on what He had promised.
Moses was called. Pharaoh was confronted. The Israelites were released. And when God’s people eventually found themselves trapped between Pharaoh’s army and the Red Sea, God made a way where there appeared to be no way.
They walked through the sea on dry ground.
Remembering That God Remembers
Maybe we’re beginning to see what Scripture means when it tells us that God remembers. It doesn’t describe a God who had forgotten and suddenly recalled something. It points us toward a God who sees His people, remains faithful to His promises, and acts according to His purposes at the right time.
And that’s important when we’re the ones waiting.
Jesus reminded His followers that our heavenly Father feeds the birds of the air and knows what we need. He never promised that following Him would mean an easy life. In fact, Jesus said quite the opposite: “In this world you will have trouble. But take heart! I have overcome the world” (John 16:33).
God’s faithfulness does not mean we will never find ourselves waiting inside an ark, praying year after year like Hannah, enduring our own version of Egypt, or standing at the edge of a sea with no visible way forward.
It means we are never forgotten by Him, no matter where we find ourselves.
Maybe the problem isn’t that God forgets.
Maybe the problem is that I do.
Crowder puts it perfectly in Good God Almighty:
“I get amnesia; I forget that You keep coming around.”
Yep. That.
I forget the prayers He has already answered, the provision that arrived at exactly the right time, the doors He opened, the doors He closed that needed to stay that way, and the troubles He has already brought me through. Then the next impossible situation arrives, and I act as though God has never been faithful to me before.
Maybe that’s why Scripture spends so much time telling us to remember. God doesn’t have the memory problem.
We do.
Perhaps sometimes faith looks remarkably simple:
Remembering that God remembers.
And maybe we need something tangible to help us do that—something we can look at and say, This is where God brought me through.
After all, tangible reminders were God’s idea. Remember the rainbow?
A journal. A photograph. A tattoo? Hey, why not?
Or maybe…
some stones.
