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The SECOND EPISTLE to TIMOTHY.
#17.
"According to my gospel" (2: 8, 9).
pp. 13 - 17
In the preceding article of this series we have had brought before us the important
association of "considering" and "understanding". We now pass on to another most
wonderful faculty of mind, the exercise of memory:
"Remember that Jesus Christ of the seed of David was raised from the dead according
to my gospel" (II Tim. 2: 8).
Memory plays an important part both in Christian witness and Christian growth.
Personality and memory are so interlinked that, where the memory becomes an utter
blank, responsibility also ceases.
Both the faculty of memory and the failure of forgetfulness have played, and still play,
an important part in the experience of the believer. Look at the fickle memory of Israel:
"We remember the fish, which we did eat in Egypt freely; the cucumbers, and the
melons, and the leeks, and the onions, and the garlick" (Numb. 11: 5).
Yet they forgot the bondage, the burdens, and the bitterness of Egypt. We find
therefore in that great prophetic song of Jehovah's name* (* - see "Fundamentals of
Dispensational Truth", Volume XXIV, page 81) the charge laid against Israel that:
"Of the Rock that begat thee thou art unmindful, and has forgotten God that formed
thee" (Deut. 32: 18).
So also in the Divine summary of Psalm 106: we read,
"Our fathers understood not Thy wonders in Egypt; they remembered not the
multitude of Thy mercies; but they provoked Him at the sea, even at the Red sea . . . . .
They soon forgat His works" (Psa. 106: 7, 13).
On the one hand the Apostle urges us to "remember" our past alienation and hopeless
condition as Gentiles in the flesh (Eph. 2: 11, 12), but, on the other, to "forget" the things
that are behind, as we press toward the mark (Phil. 3: 13, 14), exhortations of which we
all are in constant need.
Paul invokes the power of memory in the opening of this second epistle to Timothy,
saying, "I have remembrance of thee" (II Tim. 1: 3); "Being mindful of thy tears" (1: 4);
"I call to remembrance the unfeigned faith that is in thee . . . . . Lois . . . . . Eunice" (1: 5);
and "I put thee in remembrance that thou stir up the gift of God, which is in thee by the
putting on of my hands" (1: 6).