Why God can never forget you

Commentary on Isaiah 49:15

Vincent J. Curtis

2 Apr 22

The first reading for Wednesday, March 30, 2022, was from Isaiah, and included the following passage:

Isaiah 49:15

"Can a woman forget her nursing child, that she should have no compassion on the son of her womb? Even these may forget, yet I will not forget you." (ESV)

Aristotle and St. Thomas Aquinas both hold that God is the efficient cause of the existence of the universe.  An efficient cause is the agent which creates the thing or does the deed.  Certainly in Aquinas, the creation of the universe is a continuous act, that God in in the act of continuously creating the universe.  If God ceased creating the universe it would cease to exist, instantly.

Hence, if God were to “forget you,” you would cease to exist, instantly.  But it would be more than your winking out of existence.  There wouldn’t even be a corpse.  It would be as if you had never existed at all; that you had never been born, and if you had children, they wouldn’t exist either, lacing a parent.  What God forgetting you would amount to would be a large change in history.

One of the properties of God is that he cannot contradict himself.  What’s happened has happened; there’s no changing history.  (It would also imply that God had potentiality, a potential for anther history; but God is all act and has no potential.)  To change history would be for God to contradict himself.  Aquinas holds that because God cannot contradict himself explains why truth is always in harmony with itself.  In reality, which is an embodiment of truth, a thing cannot both be and not be at the same time and in the same respect; this is the law of non-contradiction.  This law exists and is possible because the truth and reality are never self-contradictory.  God will never forget you, because he can’t.

Isaiah was a Jewish prophet who lived about 700 years before the birth of Christ.  Aristotle lived, in Greece, about 350 years after Isaiah.  Isaiah had not the benefit of Greek philosophy on which to base his statement that God would never forget you.  Isaiah’s affirmation could only have come from divine revelation.  That Isaiah was divinely inspired to think such a thing ought to give confidence in belief of his other revelations.

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