AP

Psalm 106:10-14  He saved them from the hand of the foe; from the hand of the enemy he redeemed them.  The waters covered their adversaries; not one of them survived.  Then they believed his promises and sang his praise.  But they soon forgot what he had done and did not wait for his plan to unfold.  In the desert they gave in to their craving; in the wilderness they put God to the test.

 It is important for all of us to ‘inwardly digest’ the basic message of this Psalm which is encapsulated for us in the words: “Then they believed his promises and sang his praise.  But they soon forgot what he had done and did not wait for his plan to unfold.”

In the light of the Apostle Paui’s point in 1 Corinthians 10:6: “These things happened to them as examples and were written down as warnings for us, on whom the culmination of the ages has come”, we ought to give no less attention to the divinely inspired Scriptures of The Old Testament than we give to the New!  Sadly, I find myself subconsciously ‘judging’ God’s ancient Covenant People for their failure to respond obediently and consistently to the outworking of their omnipotent, compassionate, saving, Sovereign, God’s Providence in their history, and this in spite of the undeniable evidence of their first-hand experience of it in the exodus from Egypt, and the fact that their response at the time was that “they believed his promises and sang his praise”!

I think Jesus might have labelled my ‘judging’ of them for this, as ‘hypocrisy’, warning me in his ‘Sermon on the Mount’: “Do not judge, or will be judged.  For in the same way you judge others, you will be judged, and with the measure you use, it will be measured to you” (Matthew 7:1).  I also think it might have been because of this ingrained sinfulness of my fallen nature, that Jesus came to die on a cruel cross – to bear all the punishment due to me for my besetting sin!

Dear Lord Jesus, please help me, in the power of your indwelling Holy Spirit, to remember what I learned many years ago from Question 28 of the Heidelberg Catechism, “How does the knowledge of God’s creation and providence help us?  Answer: We can be patient when things go against us, thankful when things go well, and for the future we can have good confidence in our faithful God and Father that nothing will separate us from his love.  All creatures are so completely in his hand that without his will they can neither move nor be moved.”, and not complain and grumble when his Providence doesn’t quite match up with my plans, nor to seek fulfilment and satisfaction in worldly pursuits inconsistent with his revealed truth, as the Israelites did in the wilderness.

– Bruce Christian