Remember – Part 1

 Isaiah 46:9-11 “Remember the former things of old; for I am God, and there is no other; I am God, and there is none like me, declaring the end from the beginning and from ancient times things not yet done, saying, ‘My counsel shall stand, and I will accomplish all my purpose,’ calling a bird of prey from the east, the man of my counsel from a far country. I have spoken, and I will bring it to pass; I have purposed, and I will do it.

Our church is half way through the Focus on the Family’s “The Truth Project” series in our mid-week Bible study. This last week, we were covering “Historical Revisionism” in America today. A part of the inference of the session is that there is something in our culture that is the opposite of, and in direct opposition to “truth”. The assault on God began in the first Historical Revision in Genesis 3:1, when the great deceiver, clothed as a serpent asked: “Did God really say …?”, in a direct attempt to restate the past. The answer is never to pretend that the attacks are not happening, but to give a defense of God and His holy Word, Will and Way, by first knowing and understand the truth, then, as a light of that truth in the darkness, stand firm and speak the truth in love that all may see and know. The rewards are awesome.

Ephesians 4:14-16 So that we may no longer be children, tossed to and fro by the waves and carried about by every wind of doctrine, by human cunning, by craftiness in deceitful schemes. Rather, speaking the truth in love, we are to grow up in every way into him who is the head, into Christ, from whom the whole body, joined and held together by every joint with which it is equipped, when each part is working properly, makes the body grow so that it builds itself up in love.

Historical Revisionism is a process where history is altered or the past is reinterpreted in order to accomplish a particular agenda or objective. The principle is that what you believe in the present is determined by the past. If you rewrite the past, you can make people believe whatever you want in the present. Because of this principle, history becomes critical in the cosmic battle of who determines “right” from “wrong”. Our Friday night Small Group home Bible Study group has been going through a Kay Arthur series: “Being a Disciple – Counting the Cost” and it also illuminates the struggle between the darkness and “the Light”, because it is real. Professor Dr. Del Tackett says that there is a large liberal agenda to maliciously rewrite history in order to leave Christian themes and God out of public academia. If atheistic secular humanism can change your historical context, they can change the way you view the present.

Deuteronomy 8:10-14 “And you shall eat and be full, and you shall bless the Lord your God for the good land he has given you. “Take care lest you forget the Lord your God by not keeping his commandments and his rules and his statutes, which I command you today, lest, when you have eaten and are full and have built good houses and live in them,  and when your herds and flocks multiply and your silver and gold is multiplied and all that you have is multiplied, then your heart be lifted up, and you forget the Lord your God.”

• George Orwell, writer of such dystopian classics as Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four, stated: “He who controls the past, controls the future.” 
• German philosopher, economist, sociologist, historian, journalist and revolutionary socialist Karl Marx said: “A people without a heritage are easily persuaded.”
• English writer, retired prison doctor and psychiatrist Theodore Dalrymple expels: “The importance of knowing history is that one realizes that one is the recipient of a tradition, that the world did not begin with one’s self nor will it end with one’s self. Ignorance of history has the effect that people don’t think even of their own lives in historical terms. Without history nothing has meaning. People don’t understand that life is a biography and they don’t actually see that what they have done earlier in their lives has any impact on what happens to them afterward. If you don’t have a certain knowledge of history then you can’t understand anything about the modern world.” 
• English author and social critic Os Guinness declares: “Where we came from, the past and history, is the key to who we are, and those who do not know history have no sense of identity and no sense of wisdom as they explore where they are going to go. Without history, we are lost – both in terms of identity and in terms of the wisdom of the way that we will go.”
• Philosopher, essayist, poet, and novelist George Santayana is known for his famous saying, "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”

I'll finish this study on the importance of history and remembering God's Providence, Promises, Plans and Purposes on the next post. Blessings to you and yours.

In Christ, Brian