Dear all at IPC,

What does God know about you and what does God remember about you? 

In Psalm 103:14 we are told that amongst the many things that God knows, he knows our frame, and amongst the many things he remembers, he remembers we are dust. It is a beautiful reminder of how our Lord views us, and a reminder of our limitations.

Psalm 103 is one of the greatest of Psalms, full of wonderful expressions of God’s character and love and his overwhelming grace. We bless and praise him because he forgives, redeems and satisfies. He is a God who can be relied on and he has proved his faithfulness to his people from generation to generation.

The way he relates to us is by his covenant promise….
“The Lord is merciful and gracious,
    slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love.
He will not always chide,
    nor will he keep his anger forever.
He does not deal with us according to our sins,
    nor repay us according to our iniquities.
For as high as the heavens are above the earth,
    so great is his steadfast love toward those who fear him;
as far as the east is from the west,
    so far does he remove our transgressions from us. 
As a father shows compassion to his children,
    so the Lord shows compassion to those who fear him.” (Psalm 103:8-13)

It is at this point we have this wonderful reminder of what he knows and what he remembers. We move from the cosmic and the extremes of the universe,  the heights  – ‘as high as the heavens are above the earth’ and the breadth ‘as far as the east is from the west’ – where they are talking about infinite measurements, and we come to v13. Like Google Earth, we zoom in from outer space, to the globe, to the satellite pictures of the continent, to the country, to the city, to the borough, to your street and to your very home. It is here God says, “I know your frame and I remember you are dust”

When the Psalmist thinks on this doctrine in Psalm 139 it’s no wonder he says ‘such knowledge is too wonderful for me’. He looks upon us with compassion.

The word ‘frame’ that the Psalmist uses, has the idea of ‘intention’ behind it. It is used of pottery and sees something being made with a purpose. So a cup is made to be drunk from, a vase is meant to hold flowers. God knows how you were made, he knows for what purpose you were made. How we look, who we are, our constitution, our temperament, our weaknesses and strengths: he knows our frame.

He then tells us that he remembers something. When God tells us in his word that he remembers, we must never think that he forgot and it has come back to his memory. As if God’s memory needs jolting. When God remembers, he is recalling truth in order to act. So when God remembers the people of Israel in slavery in Egypt, he is saying he is getting ready to act.

In Psalm 103:14 he remembers a rich biblical term that we are ‘dust’.  In Genesis 2:7 ‘the Lord God formed the man out of the dust of the ground’. In Genesis 3 after the fall, the serpent is told he will eat dust (v14) and Adam is told ‘for you are dust and to dust you shall return’ (v19). The word dust occurs around 110 times in our bible.

Job says to God, ‘Remember that you have made me like clay; and will you return me to the dust?’ (Job 10:9).

This is a wonderful reminder to us of our limitations. When I was growing up in the 1980s, the Prime Minister was nicknamed the iron lady, the heavyweight boxing champion was called ‘Iron Mike’. That prime minister has died, the boxer is a shadow of what he was. Both are just dust. Our lives, as we are reminded at funerals, are ‘from dust to dust’.

Too often we forget this. We push ourselves mentally and physically to the point of exhaustion. We can judge others who are  – to our minds – not strong enough to bear the loads that we possibly can. It is a wonderful thing to know that our Father in heaven never overloads us and he never fails to gives us strength equal to what we need (2 Cor 9:8, 12:9) because he knows our frame and he remembers we are dust.

A good friend of mine says around this time every year he loses his wife for a few weeks because she goes into a Christmas frenzy of exhaustion, all of which pressure she puts on herself. God has no such expectations of you this Christmas!

WS Plumer writes beautifully, ‘This knowledge of God embraces our constitutional temperament, the feebleness of our understanding, the strength of our fears, the shattered state of our nerves, the violence of temptations, our readiness to sink into melancholy, and everything calling for tender compassions.’

The Lord knows everything there is to know about us. There is not a molecule he didn’t personally design. He understands the complexity of our brains, the unpredictability of our feelings, the subtleties of our genetics, the powerful influence of our upbringing, the lusts of the flesh, and the temptations that afflict us. He understands the mystery of birth and the terror of death, he knows temptations of Satan.  There is nothing about a human being that God does not know. When the spirit is willing but the flesh is weak, he knows. When I’m fearful and overwhelmed, that is not unknown to him.

There is of course an even more glorious truth to this verse and that is in the incarnation that the Lord of heaven became the dust of the earth. The Lord Jesus took on our humanity in its fullness – he was fearfully and wonderfully made in Mary’s womb.

He assumed our nature to redeem it and as he steps out to accomplish it to begin his public ministry, his father in heaven shouts down from heaven, ‘This is my son with whom I’m well pleased’. He lives a dusty life like we do – his father knows his frame and remembers he is dust. He lives for us, he goes to the cross for us, he is risen for us and he ascends to heaven for us and is seated at the right hand of the throne on high for us.

It is why Rabbi Duncan can famously and gloriously say, ‘the dust of the earth is on the throne of the Majesty on high’.

Our Saviour has been given a resurrected body and one day we will share in that – “The first man was from the earth, a man of dust; the second man is from heaven.As was the man of dust, so also are those who are of the dust, and as is the man of heaven, so also are those who are of heaven.Just as we have borne the image of the man of dust, we shall[f] also bear the image of the man of heaven.1 Cor 15:47-49.

I recently heard of an old Welsh Minister whose final words were, ‘Thanks be to God for remembering the dust of the earth’.

It is a beautiful thing that God knows our frame, he remembers we are dust

Your Minister and Friend

Paul

PS. We used to sing this hymn in the church where I grew up. It is a magnificent meditation on the dustiness of Jesus by Joseph Hart, to the tune Beethoven

A Man there is, a real Man,
With wounds still gaping wide,
From which rich streams of blood once ran,
In hands, and feet, and side.
‘Tis no wild fancy of our brains,
No metaphor we speak;
The same dear Man in heaven now reigns,
That suffered for our sake.
This wondrous Man of whom we tell,
Is true Almighty God;
He bought our souls from death and hell;
The price, His own heart’s blood.
That human heart He still retains,
Though throned in highest bliss;
And feels each tempted member’s pains;
For our affliction’s His.
Come, then, repenting sinner, come;
Approach with humble faith;
Owe what thou wilt, the total sum
Is canceled by His death!
His blood can cleanse the blackest soul,
And wash our guilt away;
He will present us sound and whole
In that tremendous day.