It’s surprising how as humans we have a selective memory that will choose to forget this, but not that. Causing a similar effect to short-term memory loss. One of the hardest questions I get asked is: “What did you eat yesterday?” I twist my head and look back with my eyes as I struggle to figure out what I had to eat the day before. The same thing happens when we lose our phones or the remote control.

In the Scriptures we read today, we are confronted by short-term memory loss when it comes to the things of God. We forget the miracles He graciously performed in our lives. We see the Egyptian king suddenly realizing what they had lost, the Israelite slaves, but completely disregarding the plagues that his people had to go through.

14.5When the king of Egypt was told that the people had fled, Pharaoh and his officials changed their minds about them and said, “What have we done? We have let the Israelites go and have lost their services!”

Then we encounter the people of God in an emotional crisis because Pharoah was pursuing them, and even asserting that they were better off as slaves.

14.11They said to Moses, “Was it because there were no graves in Egypt that you brought us to the desert to die? What have you done to us by bringing us out of Egypt?12Didn’t we say to you in Egypt, ‘Leave us alone; let us serve the Egyptians’? It would have been better for us to serve the Egyptians than to die in the desert!”

16.3The Israelites said to them, “If only we had died by the LORD’s hand in Egypt! There we sat around pots of meat and ate all the food we wanted, but you have brought us out into this desert to starve this entire assembly to death.”

On an anthropological level, we could call this short-term memory loss for the things of God. On a spiritual level, it is our constant battle with the things of the flesh versus the things of the Spirit. It was the food, the pleasures, the comfort, etc. that fought against the faith. I believe a long-lost personal practice that we see time and time again in the Bible is that of building an altar of remembrance. Let’s take a moment and slow down from our fast-paced world to remember the testimonies of what God has done!