Daily Devotional for Thursday, July 18

Israel’s Past Glory

“We have heard with our ears, O God, our fathers have told us, what work thou didst in their days, in the times of old,” Psalm 44:1.

Oh, the good old days, when sodas were ten cents and candy bars a nickel. Anyone over twenty-five longs for times when there were less bills, less joint pain and less worry. Schools revel in nostalgia, posting pictures of past triumphs and past buildings. Towns remember fondly the times before change came or before the interstate came through or before the plant shut down. Even churches get caught in nostalgia, trying to relive the days of some past preacher or some past revival.

Nostalgia is nothing new. It can even be found in the pages of Scripture. Most certainly we are commanded to remember the days of God’s deliverance. We are to recount His faithfulness in the past, retelling the stories of Abraham and the Red Sea and of Elijah and all that God has done. The point has always been, though, not to look at how good it was then compared to now. God wants us to remember what He has done in the past so that we can go forward in faith to accomplish what He has set out for us to do in the present.

We must spend time in the past. Repeatedly the Bible shows that these events are for us as well, so that we can reap the benefits of what God did then. As we do that, we must look back with the goal of looking forward. Even the memorial supper that we do in remembrance of Jesus shows the Lord’s death until He comes. Our past brings us a promise of our future.

REFLECTION
We look back to the past only so that we can look forward to the future with greater hope, not with greater nostalgia.

Jason Rutherford