Job 14:13, ‘…that you would appoint me a set time, and remember me!’
There’s much to see in the first half of v.13, but today’s image comes from a consideration of just those final two words: ‘remember me!’ What does it mean to be remembered by God? There is a sense in which it means being rescued or saved by God; His salvific and compassionate attention.
But there is another sense in which God ‘remembers’ us. Without getting too deep into the metaphysical weeds (See Book 11 of the Confessions for more), just ask yourself the question, ‘why am I the same entity from one moment to the next?’ What causes us to persist in not only our being, but our identity through individual moments of time? Surely the ultimate answer is because God ‘remembers’ me.
Apart from the shaping and ordering and preserving knowledge of God, I would dissolve like a mist, not just my body, disintegrating to atoms etc., but my very self. My knowledge and perception of myself as an entity, my persistence in being over time, my identity from moment to moment—all that I am would dissipate to non-existence but for God Himself knowing who I am and ordaining that I should be; but for God *remembering me.*
If I exist, I am remembered…If I exist, it is because I am known. If I know myself, if I perceive the entity entitled ‘self,’ it is because that same self is first and fundamentally known by a greater Knower, One whose knowledge encompasses and gives intelligibility to that self.
And the knowledge of this Knower by which I am constituted and in which I subsist, is not an impersonal knowledge…it is, in fact, the Person of the Son. The Son Himself is the Knowing by which the Father knows and so constitutes all that is….To be embraced in, to subsist in, to possess being and intelligibility by virtue of union to the Son—in whom and by union to whom alone all things have their being (Col1.16-17)—is to be known, is to be *remembered* by God.
And—it must be said before the end—this inability to be unknown by God in Christ will be to us consummate joy or ceaseless terror depending on whether the self (that receives its existence in Him) turns toward Him in love or from Him in rebellion.
