Deuteronomy 7:18 Thou shalt not be afraid of them: but shalt well remember what the LORD thy God did unto Pharaoh, and unto all Egypt.
When I was a kid, my dad used to have a horse named Music. Music was a paint stallion. In fact, he was the 1973 world champion paint cutting horse. He was not a mean or bad horse, but he was very much a stallion. He was very powerful and extremely quick.
When I was about seven years old, my dad once put me atop the saddle on Music. Music unintentionally but very quickly tossed me off and knocked me out cold. For the next year, I was actually afraid of horses. Perhaps you find yourself in a similar situation today. A lot of the things you do now are probably based on what you have experienced in the past. Perhaps you had something go wrong in your past, so you do things a certain way in order to protect yourself from repeating a bad experience.
As a nation. Israel was in a similar situation. What they were going to do was largely a matter of their past and how they remember it. You see, we remember our way into the future. While you cannot technically remember the future, the way you approach the future is often a matter of memory. It is a matter of the way you remember the past.
Deuteronomy 7:1 says, “When the LORD thy God shall bring thee into the land whither thou goest to possess it.” “When” was a word of certainty. It was not an “if” question. No, God is in charge and Israel was going to possess the land of Canaan.
Later on Moses makes it clear that God was not dealing with the children of Israel the way He was because they were a great nation numerically. He was dealing with the nation the way He was because of a promise He had made to Abraham many years before. That injected certainty into the future which otherwise was completely uncertain.
Friend, realize today that whether you are Jew or Gentile, if you have trusted the Lord Jesus as your Savior, you belong to God. That puts a certain responsibility on God Himself. God owns you. That injects certainty into your life. I don’t know what tomorrow holds, but God does and God holds me. “When” speaks of certainty.
All that to say that courage equals memory. Again, we remember our way into the future. Israel was given a choice with an uncertain future. They could either remember Who God is, how God had taken care of them before, and therefore have courage going into the future or they could choose to forget all that God had been and done and worry needlessly about the future.
In Deuteronomy 7:18 Moses says, “Thou shalt not be afraid of them: but shalt well remember what the LORD thy God did unto Pharaoh.” Likewise in the previous chapter it basically says, “When your kids ask you what is the meaning or all these testimonies that God has given us, you remind them that we were bondmen and God freed us from captivity. In Deuteronomy 7:19-20 it says, “So shall the LORD thy God do unto all the people of whom thou art afraid. Moreover the LORD thy God will send the hornet among them.” “Will” and “shall” speak to certainty. Again, later on in chapter 7 Moses reminds them, “Thou shalt not be affrighted at them: for the LORD thy God is among you.”
Are you living by faith or fear? Memory is not subjective. We don’t merely remember the facts of things that happened as they actually are. We remember our feelings about them. So much of what I remember is my take on events that actually happened. Reality is prone to your interpretation of it, but God is the surest reality that there is. What that means is that my courage going into tomorrow hinges on my memory of Who God is and what He has done for me in the past.