The word “remember” occurs four times in the Sacrament prayers. It is as if the Lord is trying hard to teach a child to remember what he has promised. Like every good parent, who is only emulating him, God is using repetition to help his children remember. Here even the word “remember” is repeated four times. The number 4 is significant in Hebrew. It represents the four quarters of the earth, the four seasons, and the four winds, just to name a few. The word remember is associated in the Book of Mormon with the 4 quarters of the earth:
16 Yea, then will he remember the isles of the sea; yea, and all the people who are of the house of Israel, will I gather in, saith the Lord, according to the words of the prophet Zenos, from the four quarters of the earth.[1]
Helaman also uses the word remember 4 times in the first verse of one of his famous passages exhorting his sons to remember their Redeemer:
9 O remember, remember, my sons, the words which king Benjamin spake unto his people; yea, remember that there is no other way nor means whereby man can be saved, only through the atoning blood of Jesus Christ, who shall come; yea, remember that he cometh to redeem the world.
10 And remember also the words which Amulek spake unto Zeezrom, in the city of Ammonihah; for he said unto him that the Lord surely should come to redeem his people, but that he should not come to redeem them in their sins, but to redeem them from their sins.
12 And now, my sons, remember, remember that it is upon the rock of our Redeemer, who is Christ, the Son of God, that ye must build your foundation; that when the devil shall send forth his mighty winds, yea, his shafts in the whirlwind, yea, when all his hail and his mighty storm shall beat upon you, it shall have no power over you to drag you down to the gulf of misery and endless wo, because of the rock upon which ye are built, which is a sure foundation, a foundation whereon if men build they cannot fall.[2]
The double remember is repeated twice. There are seven remembers in the entire sermon to his sons, another sacred number. This is the same pattern as the sacrament prayers and on the same subject of remembering the Savior. Mosiah uses the double remember pattern in his exhortations about the Savior but never the fourfold. Alma uses a fourfold repetition like the Sacrament prayers. Each Book of Mormon prophet who uses the word “remember”, uses it a specific number of times to emphasize it according to Hebrew number theory. Mosiah uses it twice in one exhortation for emphasis. In Hebrew literature many phrases are doubled. Isaiah, Psalms and Proverbs have many memorable doublings. Alma uses the word remember four times like in our Sacrament Prayer, doubling the double and bringing the earthly dimension into the picture. Helaman uses the word remember 14 times in his exhortations to his sons, which is double the Hebrew perfect number seven. The number seven has many Hebrew meanings.
In this life on earth we have to remember who we are, what our promises and responsibilities are, and who God and Christ are and what it is that they are trying to accomplish through us. Before this life all things past present and future were continually before us as we dwelt with God. We didn’t have to remember or couldn’t experience it at all. After the resurrection, if we return to the presence of God, we will again have all things past present and future before us continually. When we first die and go to the spirit world which is on this earth, we will have a bright recollection of all our guilt and a remembrance of all our righteous works depending on how much we remembered our covenants here. So in the spirit world, we can still remember like we do here on earth because it is a part of the earth. So this life on earth including the Spirit world is the only place where we remember in the sense of recalling bringing to mind something in the past. Before and after this mortal probation we see all things past, present and future continually and there is no remembering or forgetting like there is here.
So the repetition of remember 4 times and the number four representing the earth reminds us that remembering is an earthly requirement because we can only think of one thing at a time and are easily distracted by the world and tend to forget things that are not repeated daily, weekly, monthly, yearly, etc. All sacred covenants are meant to be repeated. The repetition is part of the remembering and keeps the fire of memory alive. Journals are a way of remembering past blessings. We remember Pearl Harbor by defeating the enemies who attacked us and then helping them rebuild countries that actually help their own people and aid others. We remember birthdays by giving gifts.
What is the gift that we bring to the Sacrament? The Savior commanded the Nephites and Lamanites to stop the animal sacrifices and the shedding of blood when he visited them after his resurrection. He also told them that his sacrifice of his own life was the last sacrifice to shed blood. So what is the sacrifice or gift we bring to remember the Savior’s sacrifice? He told us it is a contrite spirit and a broken heart. Another definition of remember is mindful. What is our mind full of? When we are partaking of the Sacrament, are we filling our mind with thoughts of the Savior, what he did for us and what we can do for him? When we leave the Sacrament meeting, are we as the Zoramites who never thought of God the rest of the week? Or do we follow the counsel of Alma and pray all the day long over every thing in our lives, remembering that God is the source of all our blessings and the fulfillment of all our righteous desires?[3]
The Encarta Dictionary has a concise summary of definitions of the word remember:
recall something forgotten
keep something in memory
keep somebody in mind
give somebody a gift
send somebody’s greetings
commemorate somebody or something
14th century. Via Old French remembrer from late Latin rememorari , from Latin memor “mindful” (source of English memory).[4]
From the dictionary above we see that to remember is to recall something forgotten. When we sin we forget our covenants. We forget that God is watching us. We forget who we are even without sinning. We forget who the people are that we sin against. We forget that we are all brothers and sisters, children of a Heavenly Father. We forget what the Savior did for us and how difficult and painful it was for him.
Because of the Fall, forgetting is easy and remembering is hard. Before the Fall, both Adam and Eve were tempted by Satan. Both remembered what they had been taught by God and responded to Satan by recalling what God had told them. After the Fall, they remembered their covenants, but had to be taught all over again about the meaning of the sacrifices that they were doing. They were baptized and received the Holy Ghost which helped them to remember. When their children forgot God, they taught them the gospel of repentance. Repentance is a remembering of who we are and who God is. Through repentance, we remember our covenants and renew them. This is one of the meanings of remember in the Sacrament Prayers. To remember is to repent or turn away from our sins and turn toward God.
The word “remember” has a special meaning elucidated in Ancient Pictographic Hebrew. The first letter derives from a picture of a plow. The second letter is a cupped palm of the hand. The third letter is a head. The word story from the sum of the individual letters is that of an ancient farmer who has plowed the land, harvested it by hand, and gathered the heads of wheat into the threshing floor to be winnowed out from the chaff.
After all this is done in ancient Israel, there is the Feast of Ingathering called Sukkot or Feast of the Tabernacles. This holiday is still celebrated by the Jews and is similar to Thanksgiving Day in the United States. Booths made of sticks to sit in are made. They represent tabernacles and remind the Jews of the 40 years sojourn in the wilderness of Sinai. At this joyous time of year, the Jews remember to thank God for their blessings in a bounteous harvest. They remember how He saved them in the wilderness and delivered them from Egypt. This is all symbolic of the Savior’s deliverance of the captives from sin, death and hell. Being thankful is another way to remember how loving, caring, merciful, gracious and kind God is in blessing us with enough to eat and shelter over our heads. So even the letters of the Hebrew word “remember” teach us to remember God as the source of our earthly and heavenly blessings.[5]
A survey of the scriptures reveals the many usages of the word remember. It is first used in the Flood. Noah was the only one who remembered his covenants to do all that the Lord God commanded him. Because of his faithful remembering, the God “remembered Noah”.[6] After the flood, God said, “I will remember my covenant, which [is] between me and you”[7] The next time we see remembering associated with covenants, the children of Israel are crying to God because of their bondage in Egypt. “And God heard their groaning, and God remembered his covenant with Abraham, with Isaac, and with Jacob.”[8] This connection between remembering God and then He covenants or remembers covenants with us is further explained in Moses’ time:
But thou shalt remember the LORD thy God: for [it is] he that giveth thee power to get wealth, that he may establish his covenant which he sware unto thy fathers, as [it is] this day.[9]
But the sad history of Israel is that the Israelites forgot the Lord their God continually generation after generation except for a few brief years. Isaiah powerfully reminds a wayward generation:
Can a woman forget her sucking child, that she should not have compassion on the son of her womb? yea, they may forget, yet will I not forget thee. Behold, I have graven thee upon the palms of [my] hands; thy walls [are] continually before me.[10]
Like a patient loving father, God never gives up, never forgets, never tires in his efforts to recover his forgetful children. Clearly something was lacking, something more was needed to help the children of men remember that which they could never remember. This came after the resurrection of Jesus Christ. He told his disciples:
But the Comforter, [which is] the Holy Ghost, whom the Father will send in my name, he shall teach you all things, and bring all things to your remembrance, whatsoever I have said unto you.[11]
With the gift of the Holy Ghost received after baptism by immersion for the remission of sins comes the sacred ability to remember God at all times and in all circumstances. To keep this gift and this special ability to remember, we have to pray always, repent of all our sins, and come to the Lord with a contrite spirit and a broken heart. When we return to the Sacrament table after remembering God all week, we symbolically remember him by partaking of the emblems of the Lord’s flesh and blood. He remembers us by giving us His Spirit and renewing the covenants he made to Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. He will be our God and we will be his people.
The Book of Mormon gives special insight into this covenant relationship of God and his people. Not only will the Lord remember them and their posterity for 4 generations, but even after they forget and depart from righteous for 1500 years, he will remember their latter-day posterity. Three times the Savior himself says that he will remember the descendants of the Nephites in the latter-days.[12] These promises are so important that Mormon and Moroni repeat them seven times after that.[13] One of these times is in the Book of Ether and it is particularly pertinent here in our discussion:
Behold, when ye shall rend that veil of unbelief which doth cause you to remain in your awful state of wickedness, and hardness of heart, and blindness of mind, then shall the great and marvelous things which have been hid up from the foundation of the world from you–yea, when ye shall call upon the Father in my name, with a broken heart and a contrite spirit, then shall ye know that the Father hath remembered the covenant which he made unto your fathers, O house of Israel.[14]
This exhortation and prophesy by Ether describes the attitude, feelings and thoughts of a saint during a Sacrament service. Certainly we come with a broken heart and a contrite spirit. We are leaving hardness of heart and wickedness behind us as we repent and “rend the veil of unbelief”. When we do so we gain new knowledge, i.e. knowledge that the Father has renewed upon us the covenant made with our righteous fathers.
The Doctrine and Covenants repeats the charge to remember our covenants.[15] We also learn therein to “remember the poor”[16] and “remember the new covenant, even the Book of Mormon” and to do the will of the Lord and not just say it.[17]
Perhaps the most poignant remembering in all of scripture is found in the coma-like hell of Alma the younger. He said:
17 And it came to pass that as I was thus racked with torment, while I was harrowed up by the memory of my many sins, behold, I remembered also to have heard my father prophesy unto the people concerning the coming of one Jesus Christ, a Son of God, to atone for the sins of the world.
18 Now, as my mind caught hold upon this thought, I cried within my heart: O Jesus, thou Son of God, have mercy on me, who am in the gall of bitterness, and am encircled about by the everlasting chains of death.
19 And now, behold, when I thought this, I could remember my pains no more; yea, I was harrowed up by the memory of my sins no more.
20 And oh, what joy, and what marvelous light I did behold; yea, my soul was filled with joy as exceeding as was my pain![18]
Here God remembers his father and high priests who are praying for him to come to his senses. He remembers his father’s teachings about the Savior’s atonement. After he is saved and brought into the “marvelous light”, he can no longer remember his pains. This is the remembering required of us during the Sacrament service. This is the light of Christ that awaits our sincere repentance completed there. This is the peace and joy of the saints who remember their covenants.
[1] 1 Nephi 19:16,18
[2] Helaman 5:9-10,12
[3] Alma 34:18-27
[4]Encarta® World English Dictionary [North American Edition] © & (P)2004 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved. Developed for Microsoft by Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. http://encarta.msn.com/dictionary_/remember.html 01-15-2005
[5] Jeff A. Benner. The Ancient Hebrew Language and Alphabet: Understanding the Ancient Hebrew Language of the Bible Based on the Ancient Hebrew Culture and Thought. College Station, TX: Virtualbookworm.com Publishing, Inc., 2004
[6] Genesis 8:1
[7] Genesis 9:15
[8] Exodus 2:24
[9] Deuteronomy 8:18
[10] Isaiah 49:15-16
[11] John 14:26
[12] 3 Nephi 16:11,12 and 20:29
[13] 3 Nephi 29:3,8 Mormon 5:20; 8:21,23; 9:37
[14] Ether 4:15
[15] D&C 33:14
[16] D&C 42:30
[17] D&C 84:57
[18] Alma 36:17-20