Read vs 3-4, 9-13.

Verse 9 is saying: Remember the former things of old, for I’m God and there is no other.
The theme that I want to extract from Isaiah 46 is ‘Remembrance’
God wants us to make use of our memory every day. It is in our human nature not to think back of the happenings in our life. Especially the negative ones we easily suppress. But also we tend not to remember the facts in our spiritual life. We easily forget who we were before our conversion. We easily forget what grace has been offered to us when we got reconciled. We easily forget what blessings are poured out in our life.

When we would be more active in remembering, we surely will come to more worshipping and more trusting in our God.
We will go through God’s Word and discover at several places how importance it is to memorize.

Remember the deeds of the Lord
Deut 8:2-5
God wants us to look back in our life, including the good and worse events. During the years He has been testing us to see what was there in our heart. By means of bringing difficulties He made us being dependent on Him: only by the word of God we can live. By chastening He humbled us.
Perhaps we remember the bible study we once did about the ‘Journey through the dessert’. We concluded that the 40 years that the Israelites dwelt in the desert, clearly had significance. After the deliverance of the slavery in Egypt instead of bringing Israel directly into the Promised Land, He guided them into the desert where they had to suffer all kind of problems. But the Lord guided them and helped them out of each trouble. By this the Israelites started to know how much the Lord takes care for them. And the Lord, on the other hand, screened their hearts in order to know what was there for Him.

Read Deut 8:14-18.
The Lord knows that if things are going prosperously, our heart will lift up and we forget that it was the Lord Who did it all. We will just think that it was our own hand and cleverness that brought us blessings. In such a moment the Lord wants us instead to be conscious about the real facts and want us to memorize that it was Him Who caused it all.

Milestones
Jos 4:1-3, 8-9, 20-24.
Here we see the importance the Lord attaches to the word ‘remembrance’. Like the red Sea the Lord dried-up the river Jordan so that the people of Israel could pass and possess the Promised Land. During the crossing of the Jordan the Israelites had to pick up twelve stones, one per tribe, from the midst of the river Jordan to the Promised Land. The twelve stones were finally put in Gilgal as a monument. A second heap of twelve stones was placed in the riverbed itself to point out the place where God dried-up the river by a miracle. The heaps of stones where as milestones erected to remember the people and their descendants of the mighty presence and worthiness of the Lord during the long journey before entering the Promised Land. Being in the Promised Land they still should remember the situations in their old life and how the Lord changed all to the best.

Similar thing we see in 1Sam 7:11-12. After conquering their enemies Samuel set-up a stone to remember the Israelites that the Lord has helped them. Samuel called this stone ‘Ebenezer’.

We should also apply the principle of setting-up stones in our life. These figurative milestones should make us thinking back of the special moments that we experienced deeply Gods handling with us. This could be the day of our conversion, that moment that we escaped from great danger, that period that we so clearly felt Gods guidance, the moment we recovered from a severe illness or those special big blessings. Whenever we come in difficult situations or experience weakness in our lives we should automatically recall the milestones to regain our trust in Him.
When we do not have these milestones today we should sit down and review our life, searching to find milestones and engrave them in our memory. With this we worship the Lord! In chapter 46 in Isaiah we are clearly called always to remember how He has been dealing with us.

Milestones in the Bible
We do not necessarily need to have the experience by ourselves to get remembrances; we also can learn from others.
That is one of the reasons to read God’s Word every day. We can learn so many things from the events and people mentioned in the Bible. Just reading throughout the Old Testament affirms God’s interference with His people. Every story contains milestones to remember.
As an example how this works I want to review Heb 11.The author of Hebrews describes in chapter 11 how the men of the Old Testament testify about their faith. Also this author understood the effect of remembering that helps the believers so much in establishing their faith. The deeds of faith of the Old-Testament people and the deeds of God in their lives should become facts for us to remember.
To read whole chapter 11 takes too much time now, so I want to pick a few examples.

Heb 11: 4. Reading the act of faith of Abel we should always remember that God is not pleased by offering from out our own performance; He is only pleased when we realize that we are nothing and that we thank our life to the sacrifice of Jesus Christ.

Heb 11: 5. Again about pleasing God: Enoch pleased God so much in his life that he did not have to wait until he died to see God; no, the Lord took him into heaven. Let’s remember that we can please God!

Heb 11:7. Noah did, against the common sense of the people, just what God demanded him to do: to build an Arch on dry land and to wait until destruction of the world started. Let’s always remember this fact that we should trust God on His word as Noah did, even if this causes friction with the people around us. If he would not have done that, he would have been killed as the other people.

Heb 11:8. Abraham just followed the instructions of the Lord and dwelt in places far away from his home. We should remember that it is the Lord who guides us and not us ourselves. Only in this way we can expect great blessings and the fulfilment of God’s plan with us.

Heb 11:27. Moses did not fear people or Pharaoh when he came to the palace to bring God’s message. Also we should remember that fear for men is to be overcome when we want to fully obey God. The courage of Moses we should fix in our mind.

Heb 11: 31.As Rahab we should know that God is powerful enough to destroy a city without any violence and at the same time He is so merciful to spare her and her family. Remember the fall of Jericho that points at punishment of sin and remember the grace applied on Rahab since she was righteous in the eyes of the Lord because she believed. If we believe we also will be saved from God’s wrath, despite our sins.

Recalling milestones by our testimonies
We saw that the believers in the Bible can be great examples for us and that we should remember those stories that impress us so much.
We can also be encouraged by what our fellow-believers experience in their faith. Therefore it is important to listen to testimonies given by our brothers and sisters. The things that the Lord is working in their life can help us and urge us to set-up a remembrance stone for ourselves.
Such moments as this morning in church, when there is the opportunity to testify about God’s works in our life, just contributes to worshipping the Lord. Giving testimony first of all is recalling our milestone and secondly can help the other to overcome certain troubles by putting trust in the Lord.
I think - I’m first talking to myself - we should make more use of the opportunity in church to speak about and to listen to what the Lord performs in our daily life.

Remembering our past
Read Eph 2:11-13.
Although we have got new life in Jesus Christ and cannot perform anything that could contribute to our salvation, we should remember who we were in the past.
I’m pointing at the time that we were without Christ, without hope for eternal life, dead in sin and fulfilling the desires of our flesh (Eph 2:1-3). We find 13 times in the Old Testament where the Lord recalls His people not to forget that He brought them out from Egypt. He makes them realizing how great the delivery from slavery was and what miracles were needed to get them out from that terrible situation. In parallel when we think back to our situation, being slaves of sin, we will appreciate even more the delivery we got offered. As Eph 2:13 says: we were far off and are brought near by the blood of Christ.
With this I want to finalize with recalling a remembrance that we should never forget.

The milestone of Christ’s death
Read 1 Cor 11:23-26.
Here we read that Jesus in the last night before His suffering on the cross, asks us to remember His body and His blood. In other words: to remember His death. We do this every Sunday in church and now we understand why: because simply the Lord Jesus asks us to do so. As often as we can we should remember and proclaim His death, until He comes to take His church into heaven.
This should be the biggest milestone in our life. Without this fact there is no salvation and all the other milestones are worthless. Without the death of Jesus Christ on the cross no deliverance would be applicable for us, and any spiritual milestone would have no value. It is the base of our existence, here on earth as well in the eternal life in heaven.

A nice and special example of someone who remembers the death of her Saviour we find in Mt 26:6-13.
In verse 12 we read that the woman anointed Jesus already for His burial. She understood that His suffering was coming and what His death was all about. She worshipped Him completely with her deed.
And in verse 13 we read that what she did was so important that she created a milestone for herself. All the people reading this passage in the Bible will be remembered what she has been doing for the Lord Jesus. This is not a milestone of self-glorification, but her milestone points at the biggest milestone in history.
That we might act in a similar way, worshipping Him Who is so worthy by remembering His death.

Finally we will read again the last verse of Is 46: verse 13.
For Israel the salvation was still to come sometime in future. Their final deliverance was not yet a fact; the milestone of salvation was not yet placed in Zion.
We however look back to this milestone of salvation. It is already placed 2000 years ago and no one can remove it.
Let’s then take the opportunity to make that milestone as the base of our life and the first of all our milestones.