Memorial Day – a day for remembering the people who died while serving in America’s armed forces – is a day of remembrance. Remembrance, of course, is a constant theme in Scripture – memorials have always been important to God.
The failure to remember the past – the things that God calls us to remember – can create real problems. In Joshua 2:10, for example, Scripture says, “After that whole generation had been gathered to their fathers, another generation grew up, who knew neither the LORD now what he had done for Israel.” Clearly, the previous generation had failed to remember the past and pass it along to their children.
This is why God creates a “day of remembrance” for the church today – so we don’t forget. So we don’t fall prey, as the Ephesian church did, to forgetting our “first love” (Revelation 2:4).
“So Joshua called together the twelve men he had appointed from the Israelites, one from each tribe, and said to them, “Go over before the ark of the Lord your God into the middle of the Jordan. Each of you is to take up a stone on his shoulder, according to the number of the tribes of the Israelites, to serve as a sign among you. In the future, when your children ask you, ‘What do these stones mean?’ tell them that the flow of the Jordan was cut off before the ark of the covenant of the Lord. When it crossed the Jordan, the waters of the Jordan were cut off. These stones are to be a memorial to the people of Israel forever.”
Joshua 4:4-7 (NIV)