"When God is asked: "Remember your great mercy and love," he is being asked to act according to his character. When someone asks God to "remember not [my] sins," he or she is asking that God would not act on what he knows. Therefore, to say that the Israelites "forgot" God is to say that they no longer were controlled by what they knew. We could put it another way. Though they knew who God was and what he wanted, those things were not real to them."