24 Critical Lessons from Isaiah 17: Forgetting God, the Counted Remnant, and the Trouble Gone by Morning

Forgetting God is something a person can do while everything is going well. There is no decision involved. The prayers get shorter, then rarer, and one day you notice you have been running your life on your own strength for months.

That is the charge in this chapter. When God finally names what went wrong with Israel, He does not accuse them of a crime. He says, “Because thou hast forgotten the God of thy salvation.”

These lessons from Isaiah 17 are written for anyone who has read that verse and felt it land. The chapter runs only fourteen verses, it is addressed to an ancient city most readers have never once thought about, and it understands exactly how a believer drifts.

Brief Summary of Isaiah 17

Isaiah 17 is an oracle against Damascus, the capital of Syria. Syria and the northern kingdom of Israel, called Ephraim after its leading tribe, had made a military alliance, and because their politics were joined, God announces their downfall together. Assyria would take Damascus, and Israel would later be carried away. The chapter pictures that loss as a field being harvested, with a few olives left on the highest branches. It says that in that day a man will look to his Maker instead of to the altars his own hands made. It closes with the nations roaring like the sea and scattered by a single rebuke.

Lesson 1: The Warning You Assume Is About Someone Else (Isaiah 17:1, 3)

Isaiah 17:1, 3: “The burden of Damascus… The fortress also shall cease from Ephraim, and the kingdom from Damascus, and the remnant of Syria.”

You can read a warning with real interest and never once apply it to yourself. It happens in church most weeks. The message is about pride, and you find yourself thinking of a relative. The passage is about money, and you picture somebody wealthier than you.

Isaiah’s hearers had that same comfort, and it lasted about two verses. The oracle is headed for Damascus, a foreign capital, somebody else’s problem entirely. Then the third verse names Ephraim, and Ephraim was the northern kingdom, and the northern kingdom was them. What they had been following as news had their own name inside it.

Read also: Lessons from Romans 2

God’s warnings are not sorted by nationality, and familiarity with them offers no protection. Israel had received far more truth than Damascus ever had, and that is part of why the warning reached them too.

Knowing the Bible well can leave a person feeling exempt from it, which is a strange effect for a book to have on anybody. The seat furthest from the pulpit is never as safe as it feels.

Lesson 2: The Thing You Lean On Can Stop Existing Altogether (Isaiah 17:1)

Isaiah 17:1: “Behold, Damascus is taken away from being a city, and it shall be a ruinous heap.”

Damascus was no village. It sat on the trade roads running between Mesopotamia and Egypt, it was already ancient in Abraham’s day, and its water and gardens were known across the region. It was the sort of place everyone assumed would always be there.

God does not say it will be damaged. The promise is a Damascus removed from the category of city altogether and left as a heap of rubble, which is a stranger and heavier thing than defeat. Cities recover from defeat. This one was to stop being the kind of thing that recovers.

Most of us are leaning on something we have already filed as permanent, whether that is a salary, a body that works, or a name that opens doors in a particular room. Scripture never asks you to despise any of it, and having these things is no sin at all.

It asks you to notice what would still be holding you up if one of them were taken away from being what it is, because that part was always the part carrying the weight.

What have you assumed will always be there?

Lesson 3: You Will Share the Fate of Whatever You Tie Yourself To (Isaiah 17:3)

Isaiah 17:3: “The fortress also shall cease from Ephraim, and the kingdom from Damascus, and the remnant of Syria: they shall be as the glory of the children of Israel, saith the LORD of hosts.”

What does an alliance actually transfer to the people who make one? Israel joined itself to Syria for protection against Assyria, and on paper the arrangement was sensible, because two smaller kingdoms are harder to swallow than one.

Look at what each partner loses in this verse. Ephraim loses the fortress. Damascus loses the kingdom. Each is stripped of the precise thing the alliance existed to supply, so the partnership did more than fail to help them. It delivered them to the same judgment on the same day, and the verse signs off in the name of the LORD of hosts, who commands every army involved.

Nobody ties their life to something while expecting the worst of it. It is normal to see the benefit clearly and the exposure barely at all, whether the arrangement is a business partnership, a friendship that shapes how you think, or a debt that decides the next ten years on your behalf. The advantages get advertised. The exposure arrives unannounced.

Look hard at what you bind your life to, because you are agreeing to its outcome as well as its promises.

Lesson 4: Test Your Calm Before You Call It God’s Peace (Isaiah 17:2)

Isaiah 17:2: “The cities of Aroer are forsaken: they shall be for flocks, which shall lie down, and none shall make them afraid.”

The picture in this verse is peaceful. Sheep are lying down in the open, and nothing disturbs them. Read that line on its own and it sounds like a promise.

It very nearly is one. In Leviticus 26:6, God promised His obedient people that they would lie down with none to make them afraid. Isaiah uses those same words here, but the ones lying down are livestock, and the reason nothing frightens them is that the city is empty. There is nobody left to disturb anything.

Read also: Lessons from Leviticus 26

That should make us careful about how we read our own calm. A season with no conflict in it may well be the peace of God, and it may be the stillness of a place where something has already gone. The stillness by itself will not tell you which one you are standing in.

What tells you is whether you are near Him. A settled life with no prayer left in it and a settled life resting in God can look identical from the outside for a very long time, and only one of them is what Leviticus promised.

Lesson 5: Glory That Can Be Made Thin Was Never Your Real Glory (Isaiah 17:4)

Isaiah 17:4: “And in that day it shall come to pass, that the glory of Jacob shall be made thin, and the fatness of his flesh shall wax lean.”

Consider what you would name if someone asked you what your glory is. Then look at the picture God chooses for a nation’s. He passes over the tower that has to be pulled down and the treasury that has to be raided, and He reaches instead for body weight, which can waste away on its own.

That image is honest about what Israel’s glory actually was. It was the sort of thing that thins when the food runs short, and they had built their confidence on it as though it were stone.

Nearly everything we call our glory belongs in that same category. Reputation thins when a rumour travels faster than the truth, influence thins when the people who valued you move on, and health thins on a schedule nobody consults us about. God gives good gifts and means for them to be enjoyed, so none of this makes those things worthless. What it does mean is that they make a poor foundation.

If the thing you are proudest of were reduced by half this year, how much of your confidence before God would go with it?

Lesson 6: God’s Judgment Is Not a Rage, It Is a Harvest (Isaiah 17:5)

Isaiah 17:5: “And it shall be as when the harvestman gathereth the corn, and reapeth the ears with his arm; and it shall be as he that gathereth ears in the valley of Rephaim.”

God had every available image for judgment: fire, flood, an army, a storm. He chose a farmer at work, gathering the standing grain into one arm and cutting it with the other. There is nothing frantic in that picture, and nothing merciful in it either. A reaper feels no anger toward the field, and he does not walk away from it half finished.

Isaiah then adds a second image in the same verse, gleaning in the valley of Rephaim, a fertile plain outside Jerusalem known for heavy crops. Even the best ground in the picture is being cleared, and cleared with care, by someone unwilling to leave good grain behind.

That is the character of God’s judgment in this chapter. It is deliberate, unhurried and thorough, and those three words deserve more weight than any picture of fury.

Anger can sometimes be waited out, and a temper cools on its own if you give it long enough. Work gets finished. Israel had been counting on a God who might eventually calm down, and this verse describes one who intends to complete what He has started.

Lesson 7: God Stops the Harvest Before It Takes Everything (Isaiah 17:6)

Isaiah 17:6: “Yet gleaning grapes shall be left in it, as the shaking of an olive tree, two or three berries in the top of the uppermost bough.”

One word turns this whole passage, and it is the word “Yet.” The reaping of the previous verse was total. Then verse six says something is left.

The image is an olive harvest. Trees were beaten with a stick to bring the fruit down, and whatever stayed on the top branches stayed there. Under Israel’s own harvest law that was no accident of poor aim. Deuteronomy 24:20 forbade going back over the boughs a second time, because what remained belonged to the stranger, the fatherless and the widow.

Read also: Lessons from Genesis 19

So the mercy in this chapter has a shape, and the shape is a statute. God leaves something behind the way a harvester was commanded to leave something behind, and those leftovers always belonged to the people with the least claim on them.

Hold that beside verse five rather than choosing between the two. The same God who cleared the field is the reason anything at all is standing in it. If you are still holding on to Him after a season that took a great deal from you, that is worth thinking about, because the strength of your grip does not finally explain it.

Lesson 8: God Counts the Few Who Are Left (Isaiah 17:6)

Isaiah 17:6: “…two or three berries in the top of the uppermost bough, four or five in the outmost fruitful branches thereof, saith the LORD God of Israel.”

You may know what it is to be one of the few. Perhaps you are the only believer in your household, or one of a handful in a workplace, or part of a congregation that gets smaller every year. It can feel like being overlooked by everyone, God included.

Read what God actually does here. Rather than announcing that a remnant survives, He counts them: two or three berries on the top bough, four or five on the outer branches. Those are numbers small enough to say aloud, and He says them aloud.

Then He signs the sentence with His covenant name, the LORD God of Israel. The God who weighs nations by the size of their armies bends down in this verse to number olives on a branch, and He does it under the name that binds Him to a promise.

Being few has never meant being unnoticed. Whatever else your smallness means, it does not mean God has lost track of the count.

Lesson 9: Turning Back to God Starts With Where You Look (Isaiah 17:7)

Isaiah 17:7: “At that day shall a man look to his Maker, and his eyes shall have respect to the Holy One of Israel.”

The response this verse records is a look. Everything in the sentence reduces to that one action, a man turning his eyes toward the One who made him, with no campaign attached and no plan of recovery in sight.

Isaiah uses those same two verbs again five chapters later. In Isaiah 22:11 he charges Judah with the exact opposite failure, that they had not looked to the maker of what they were using and had shown no respect to the One who fashioned it long ago. Looking and having respect are the whole difference between the two passages.

That should relieve anyone who has been putting off returning to God until they can arrive with something to show for it. The verse sets no entry requirement and describes no preparation. It describes a direction of attention, which is available to a person in any condition, at any hour, including this one.

Walk back the way this verse describes it, with your eyes rather than with your résumé.

Lesson 10: Nobody Turns Back to God as a Crowd (Isaiah 17:7)

Isaiah 17:7: “At that day shall a man look to his Maker.”

Who is the subject of the sentence when repentance finally arrives in this chapter? Fourteen verses handle kingdoms, capitals, armies and alliances, and then the moment comes and the subject is one man.

That singular matters in two directions at once. It means nobody is carried into a right relationship with God by the momentum of a good church, a believing family, or a season when everyone around them seems alive. Those are real gifts, and they can surround a person for years without ever becoming that person’s own faith.

Read also: Lessons from Luke 15

It also means nobody is disqualified by being the only one. If you are the single person in your circle who still prays, this verse has already accounted for you, because the smallest unit God’s mercy works on here is one man looking up.

Whole nations are described in this chapter and none of them turns. One man does. That is the scale at which God is working even while He is dealing with kingdoms.

Lesson 11: You Cannot Be Saved by Something You Made (Isaiah 17:8)

Isaiah 17:8: “And he shall not look to the altars, the work of his hands, neither shall respect that which his fingers have made, either the groves, or the images.”

Isaiah settles the whole question of these idols by naming who built them, and he names it twice in one verse: the work of his hands, and that which his fingers have made. He offers no comparison with God and no catalogue of their failures. The manufacturer is the entire argument.

The objects are concrete as well, the groves and the images. This was furniture a person could touch, standing in a real place, and somebody had carried the wood in and set it upright.

Our own versions are rarely carved, and the test has not changed at all. Whatever you are trusting to hold your life together, ask where it came from. If you assembled it out of your own planning and your own capability, then it can only ever be as strong as you were on the day you built it, and there will be days you need something stronger than you have ever been.

Lesson 12: When the Props Come Down, the Eyes Have Somewhere Else to Go (Isaiah 17:7, 9)

Isaiah 17:7, 9: “At that day shall a man look to his Maker… In that day shall his strong cities be as a forsaken bough, and an uppermost branch… and there shall be desolation.”

You are given two events in this section, and they are dated to the same day. In that day a man looks to his Maker. In that day the strong cities stand empty and forsaken.

The chapter shows what happened without spelling out God’s inward reasons for it, so we should not press it further than He did. What can be said is that the things Israel had been looking at stopped being there to look at, and in that same day the looking changed.

Matthew Henry once wrote that we have reason to count those afflictions happy which part between us and our sins. That line deserves attention, and it is also easy to misuse. Scripture never invites you to explain another person’s suffering, and it never asks you to assume every loss in your own life was aimed at an idol. Some griefs carry no such explanation.

So ask it of yourself, and only of yourself. When something you were depending on gave way, where did your eyes go next?

Lesson 13: You Can Repeat the Sin of the People You Replaced (Isaiah 17:9)

Isaiah 17:9: “In that day shall his strong cities be as a forsaken bough, and an uppermost branch, which they left because of the children of Israel: and there shall be desolation.”

This is a difficult verse and the translations differ over it. As the King James translators render the line, these are cities once abandoned because of the children of Israel, left standing empty when Israel first came into the land.

If that is the sense, the warning is severe. Israel could walk through their own country and see the overgrown ruins of fortress towns whose owners had trusted them and lost them anyway.

Those walls had already failed one set of people, publicly, within the living memory of the nation’s own story. Israel looked straight at the evidence and trusted walls regardless.

Read also: Lessons from 1 Corinthians 10

It is easy to assume we are wiser than the generation we replaced. A church can watch a ministry come apart over money and then organise its own life around money. A family can name precisely what damaged the household before it and reproduce the same thing in a different accent. Being able to explain somebody else’s collapse can even leave a person feeling safer than they are.

Ask what you have already watched fail in another person’s life that you are still counting on in your own.

Lesson 14: The Sin That Ruined Them Was Something They Never Did (Isaiah 17:10)

Isaiah 17:10: “Because thou hast forgotten the God of thy salvation, and hast not been mindful of the rock of thy strength.”

Read this charge closely, because what is missing from it matters as much as what is in it. The sentence contains no verb of attack. Nobody blasphemed, nobody led a rebellion, nobody tore down an altar.

The two things named are forgetting and failing to be mindful. Both are omissions.

Both can also be committed by a person who never once made a decision against God, and who would have described himself, if asked in any given week, as a believer in good standing.

Matthew Henry put it as bluntly as it can be put, that our forgetfulness and unmindfulness of God lie at the bottom of all sin. Isaiah 17 reads like his evidence.

That is what makes this the most uncomfortable diagnosis in the chapter. A dramatic sin announces itself and can be repented of on the day it happens. Forgetting arrives without any announcement at all, and a person can be well into it before a single thing in their life looks wrong from the outside.

Lesson 15: Forgetting God Means Forgetting You Were Rescued (Isaiah 17:10)

Isaiah 17:10: “Because thou hast forgotten the God of thy salvation.”

Read the title God gives Himself inside this charge. He is the God of thy salvation here, rather than the God of the universe or the God of Israel’s fathers, and that is a smaller and far more personal word.

What Israel let go of was a rescue they had personally received, rather than a doctrine they had learned badly. There had been a sea that opened, a wilderness they survived, and bread they had not grown. They still possessed the history. They had stopped drawing anything from it.

The same thing happens to us in a smaller register. A person can remember perfectly well that God answered them in a particular year and still live as though it never occurred. The memory stays intact while the weight of it drains away, and the confidence it was meant to leave behind goes with it.

Where has an answered prayer of yours turned into a story you tell rather than a reason you trust Him?

Lesson 16: They Traded a Rock for Stone Walls (Isaiah 17:10)

Isaiah 17:10: “…hast not been mindful of the rock of thy strength…”

What did Israel actually put in the place of God? Follow the stonework through this chapter and the answer is already there.

Verse three says the fortress shall cease from Ephraim. Verse nine says the strong cities will stand forsaken. Then verse ten names the thing they had stopped being mindful of, and it is a rock.

They remained a people with a foundation under them. They had swapped one kind of stone for another, and the swap felt like prudence at every stage. God the rock was exchanged for walls that could be inspected, repaired, garrisoned and marked on a map.

Read also: Lessons from the Life of Elijah

Very few believers abandon God outright, which is what makes this worth watching for. The usual version is far less dramatic. A savings account begins carrying the weight that prayer used to carry, or a capable friend becomes the first call where God used to be, and nothing about the change ever gets decided.

Turn back to the Rock before the walls are tested, because testing is usually what reveals which one you were standing on.

Lesson 17: Forgetting God Does Not Make You Idle, It Makes You Busy (Isaiah 17:10)

Isaiah 17:10: “…therefore shalt thou plant pleasant plants, and shalt set it with strange slips…”

Forgetting God produced gardening. That is the surprise in this verse, and it is easy to read straight past. The work carried on after the memory went, and Israel kept planting.

What they planted were pleasant things and foreign cuttings, brought in from outside and set into their own ground by hand. The next verse adds that they fenced the plot and brought the seed to flower. All of this was effort, sustained and organised, from people who had forgotten the God of their salvation.

Commentators read the strange slips in more than one way, some as imported worship and some as the alliance itself, and the verse leaves that unsettled. What it does settle is the pattern. Losing God from your thinking frees energy up rather than draining it away, and that energy goes somewhere. A drifting believer can be one of the busiest people you know, and nobody watching Israel work in that garden would have seen a spiritual problem.

Lesson 18: Fast Growth Is Not Proof That God Is in It (Isaiah 17:11)

Isaiah 17:11: “In the day shalt thou make thy plant to grow, and in the morning shalt thou make thy seed to flourish: but the harvest shall be a heap in the day of grief and of desperate sorrow.”

Look at the timing God builds into this verse. The plant grows on the day it is set in the ground. The seed flourishes by the following morning.

That is remarkable growth, and the speed of it carries the whole point. Nothing in the early results held a warning. There was no wilting, no delay, no sign a careful gardener would have caught in time. Everything they planted behaved exactly as a healthy thing behaves, right up to the harvest, and the harvest was grief and desperate sorrow.

We are quick to read speed as approval. A door opens more easily than expected, numbers rise faster than they should, a decision produces immediate returns, and all of it gets filed as confirmation that God is behind the thing.

Early growth tells you the conditions were favourable. It will not tell you who planted it or what it becomes at harvest, and this chapter says those can be two entirely different answers.

What are you counting as God’s approval mainly because it worked quickly?

Lesson 19: The Loudest Thing in the Room Is Not the Strongest (Isaiah 17:12)

Isaiah 17:12: “Woe to the multitude of many people, which make a noise like the noise of the seas; and to the rushing of nations, that make a rushing like the rushing of mighty waters!”

Read this verse aloud and you will notice how much of it is sound. The words repeat: noise, noise, rushing, rushing, rushing.

Isaiah introduces the massed armies of the nations almost entirely by the racket they make, giving us no numbers, no weapons, no commanders, nothing at all to assess. Only volume, which is the first thing anyone meets and the least reliable thing anyone can measure.

Read also: Bible Verses About Anxiety

The comparison Isaiah reaches for is the sea, and it is a shrewd one. A rough sea is genuinely frightening and it fills your hearing completely, and it is also the one thing in that picture which has never made a single decision. It is water being moved.

Whatever is loud in your life this week has volume in common with these nations. Whether it has anything else in common with them is a separate question, and it is worth asking before the noise settles the matter on your behalf.

Lesson 20: God Does Not Have to Fight What He Can Rebuke (Isaiah 17:13)

Isaiah 17:13: “The nations shall rush like the rushing of many waters: but God shall rebuke them, and they shall flee far off, and shall be chased as the chaff of the mountains before the wind, and like a rolling thing before the whirlwind.”

After all that noise, look for the battle in this verse. There is none to find. God rebukes them, and the next thing they are doing is fleeing far off.

Then the pictures change entirely. A moment ago these nations were the sea itself. Now they are chaff blown off a mountain threshing floor and a rolling thing driven before a whirlwind, which is to say they are debris, going wherever the wind decides to send them.

That is the distance between what a threat sounds like and what a threat weighs. The sea and the chaff are the same nations, described one verse apart, and the only thing that changed between the two descriptions was that God spoke.

It is worth adding that this rebuke costs Him nothing He has to gather first. Remember that the next time something loud is filling your whole horizon, because the God who answers the sea with a single word has not been unsettled by any of it.

Lesson 21: Trouble That Fills the Evening Can Be Gone by Morning (Isaiah 17:14)

Isaiah 17:14: “And behold at eveningtide trouble; and before the morning he is not.”

Evening is when trouble weighs most on many of us. The day’s distractions are finished, the house goes still, and whatever you have been carrying since morning gets its clearest run at you.

This verse describes an evening exactly like that, filled with terror, and then it says that before morning the threat is gone. Read the whole sentence before taking it home, because the one who is gone by morning is the enemy who came against God’s people. The promise is made about him.

That matters for how the verse gets used. Treating it as a guarantee that every hardship you face will be over tonight sets a reader up to feel abandoned by a promise God never made here, and your own life has very likely taught you that already.

What it does say is that their power runs on a clock God set. Whatever is against you has a limit it did not choose and cannot extend. The night may run longer than you want it to, and it still ends where He decided it would end.

Lesson 22: What Looks Like Their Winnings Is Their Allotted Portion (Isaiah 17:14)

Isaiah 17:14: “This is the portion of them that spoil us, and the lot of them that rob us.”

The chapter closes on inheritance language. A portion and a lot are what a man receives as his share, the settled allocation that belongs to him and to nobody else.

Watch what those words get attached to here. They skip straight past the plunder these men carried off, which is what any observer would have called their portion. Their portion is what happened to them in the night.

Read also: Lessons from Genesis 39

If someone has taken something from you, that changes what you are looking at. What they gained was never the whole of what they were receiving, and it was never the end of the accounting either. God is the one described here as doing the allotting, and He had already measured out something they did not choose for themselves.

None of that is permission to enjoy the thought of anyone’s ruin, and Scripture gives no room for it. What it offers is permission to stop carrying the case yourself. Can you leave the settling of it in the hands of the God who does the allotting?

Lesson 23: The Man Who Delivered the Warning Stood Inside It (Isaiah 17:14)

Isaiah 17:14: “This is the portion of them that spoil us, and the lot of them that rob us.”

Where is the prophet standing by the time this chapter ends? Fourteen verses earlier he was pronouncing a burden over a foreign capital. Now he says “us.”

He had spent the chapter naming his own nation’s forgetfulness in the plainest words available to him. Rather than stepping back at the end to speak about them from a distance, he places himself among the people he has been warning and counts their enemies as his own. The warning loses none of its weight in the process, since nothing in the previous thirteen verses gets taken back.

Most of us find the opposite easier. It costs very little to name what is wrong with a family, a church or a country while exempting ourselves from the diagnosis, and the exemption usually goes unnoticed by everyone except the people being corrected.

There is a way of telling people the truth that puts the speaker above them, and this chapter closes by refusing it. Stand among the people you have to warn, and let them hear the “us” in your voice.

Lesson 24: A Chapter About Forgetting God Is Full of His Names (Isaiah 17:7, 10)

Isaiah 17:7, 10: “…his Maker… the Holy One of Israel… the God of thy salvation… the rock of thy strength…”

Go back through these fourteen verses counting only the names of God. He is the LORD of hosts, the LORD God of Israel, his Maker, the Holy One of Israel, the God of thy salvation, and the rock of thy strength.

Six titles in fourteen verses, and every one of them stands in a chapter whose central charge is that He was forgotten.

While Israel was misplacing Him, God was steadily saying who He is, and He was saying it in the same breath as the warning. Those titles do more than decorate the judgment. They name what the judgment was defending.

Notice which ones He chooses, too. Maker, so they would remember where they came from. The God of thy salvation, so they would remember what He had already done for them. The rock of thy strength, so they would remember what they had been standing on. Each name answers the amnesia directly.

That is worth carrying out of Isaiah 17 above everything else in it. If you have drifted, the road back begins with reading who He is until you remember, and He has never once hidden it from you.

Key Themes in Isaiah 17

• Forgetting God as the root sin. The chapter’s charge is an omission rather than an act, and it names forgetting as the thing that unravelled a nation.
• Misplaced trust. Fortresses, alliances and hand-made altars all promised security and all failed at the same moment.
• Mercy inside judgment. God stops the harvest short on purpose and counts what He leaves behind.
• The turn of the eyes. Repentance in this chapter is described as looking, and it begins with one person.
• God’s rule over the nations. Roaring armies are answered by a rebuke rather than a battle.

Frequently Asked Questions About Isaiah 17

Related Articles to Read Next

• Lessons from Genesis 10
• Lessons from Luke 3
• Lessons from Luke 16
• Bible Verses About Peace

Conclusion: What the Lessons from Isaiah 17 Leave With You

You came into this chapter through one sentence, that a nation was ruined by forgetting the God of its salvation. Fourteen verses later, the striking thing is how much of God is still on the page. He is the Maker, the Holy One of Israel, the God of your salvation, the rock of your strength, and He names Himself while He warns. Nothing in this chapter suggests He is hard to find. It suggests He is easy to stop noticing. So take the chapter’s own remedy, which is smaller than you expect and within reach today. Look at Him. Read back through those six names one at a time, and let the God who counted two or three olives on a high branch remind you that He has never lost count of you.