SPIRITUAL DIARY FOR
4/26/2012 10:04:44 AM
My Worship Time Focus: More on the Power of God
Bible Reading & Meditation Reference: Psalm 78:40-64
Message of the verses: This is the third SD on Psalm 78 as it is a very long psalm with 72 verses in it. Dr. Wiersbe in his ending commentary on the introduction for this psalm writes the following: “Since Israel is a covenant nation, she has the responsibility of obeying and honoring the Lord, and this psalm presents three responsibilities God expected his people to fulfill.” We looked at the first responsibility in the first SD on Psalm 78 and half of the second responsibility and will pick it up now trying to finish the second responsibility in this SD. The second responsibility is entitled “Understand the Past.”
The forgotten lessons of Egypt (vv. 40-53): “40 ¶ How often they rebelled against Him in the wilderness And grieved Him in the desert! 41 Again and again they tempted God, And pained the Holy One of Israel. 42 They did not remember His power, The day when He redeemed them from the adversary, 43 When He performed His signs in Egypt And His marvels in the field of Zoan, 44 And turned their rivers to blood, And their streams, they could not drink. 45 He sent among them swarms of flies which devoured them, And frogs which destroyed them. 46 He gave also their crops to the grasshopper And the product of their labor to the locust. 47 He destroyed their vines with hailstones And their sycamore trees with frost. 48 He gave over their cattle also to the hailstones And their herds to bolts of lightning. 49 He sent upon them His burning anger, Fury and indignation and trouble, A band of destroying angels. 50 He leveled a path for His anger; He did not spare their soul from death, But gave over their life to the plague, 51 And smote all the firstborn in Egypt, The first issue of their virility in the tents of Ham. 52 But He led forth His own people like sheep And guided them in the wilderness like a flock; 53 He led them safely, so that they did not fear; But the sea engulfed their enemies.”
I want to again quote Mark 6:52, a verse that I have been reading most every day as I make my way through the book of Mark studying one chapter a month. The background of this verse is Jesus feeding the 5000 with five loaves and two fish. His disciples did not understand the significance of that miracle, and the children of Israel, as reported in these verses did not understand the significance of the miracles that the Lord did in order to bring them out of Egypt. “For they had not gained any insight from the incident of the loaves, but their heart was hardened.” Having hard hearts is mentioned to the generation that came out of Egypt, and it was because of their unbelief and heard hearts that they all died in the wilderness with the exception of Joshua and Caleb.
I have highlighted a couple of portions of different verses in the text above that help me to understand this passage. “And pained the Holy One of Israel,” and this is something that the children of Israel did when they rebelled on many different occasions while in the wilderness. This is something that I do all too often, but it is something that when I do it, it pains my heart too because of all that the Lord has done for me in providing a great salvation for me. The second highlighted portion is “They did not remember His power,” and this is the reason that Israel did the terrible things that they did in the wilderness. The situation was that when Israel was camped at Kadesh Barnea, which is right across the Jordan River from the Promised Land the people wanted to send spies into the Promised Land to make sure that they could defeat the nations living there. Now when you read this account in Numbers you do not realize that it was the people who wanted to send out the spies, but in Deuteronomy you read that Moses says that it was the idea of the people. They spent twelve spies out to spy out the land and ten came back and convinced the people that they could not defeat the people in the Promised Land because there were giants in the land. When we read that Israel did not remember the power of the Lord, I believe that it means that they did not remember the ten miracles that the Lord did to bring Israel out of Egypt along with not remembering that God split open the Red Sea so Israel could cross on dry land and then the Egyptians were all drowned when God closed up the sea on them.
In the section above Asaph mentions six of the ten miracles that God did when He brought Israel out of Egypt, but did not mention the gnats, the boils, the killing of the livestock, and the three days of darkness, which happened right before the killing of the first born of Egypt.
The sins in Canaan (vv. 54-64): “54 So He brought them to His holy land, To this hill country which His right hand had gained. 55 He also drove out the nations before them And apportioned them for an inheritance by measurement, And made the tribes of Israel dwell in their tents. 56 Yet they tempted and rebelled against the Most High God And did not keep His testimonies, 57 But turned back and acted treacherously like their fathers; They turned aside like a treacherous bow. 58 For they provoked Him with their high places And aroused His jealousy with their graven images. 59 When God heard, He was filled with wrath And greatly abhorred Israel; 60 So that He abandoned the dwelling place at Shiloh, The tent which He had pitched among men, 61 And gave up His strength to captivity And His glory into the hand of the adversary. 62 He also delivered His people to the sword, And was filled with wrath at His inheritance. 63 Fire devoured His young men, And His virgins had no wedding songs. 64 His priests fell by the sword, And His widows could not weep.”
Asaph then picks up the story when after thirty-eight years God brings the nation of Israel into the Promised Land. Once again they find themselves at Kadesh Barnea (Deu. 1:1-2), and this time Joshua brings them into the Promised Land through the dried up Jordan River, that the Lord dried up so Israel could walk through on dry land.
Whenever you read through the book of Judges you get depressed because of the downward spiral of sin and it is not until you get to the reign of David that Israel begins again to have great revival in the land. Before this we read in 1Samuel about how the Philistines captured the Ark of the Covenant from Israel. The Ark was in a tent at Shiloh, in the territory of Ephraim and the children of Israel decided to take it with them into battle as kind of a good luck charm, but God allowed it to be captured by the Philistines who took it into the temple of Dagon who was their god, and the next morning Dagon had fallen down before the Ark so they set it up again, and the next day it fell and was broken. They then moved it to another city and the people got sick there and so they finally sent it back to Israel on a cart. What I can see here, but did not see before, is that God was bringing the Ark out of Ephraim and moving it into Judah because it was God’s plan to have His temple built in Jerusalem for God had chosen Judah as the kingly tribe way back in the 48th chapter of Genesis.
Asaph speaks of the children of Israel offering sacrifices on the “high places,” which is something that we see throughout the OT, something that angered the Lord.
We mentioned the “faulty bow” in an earlier SD because it was also mentioned earlier in this psalm and it is also mentioned in Hosea 7:16: “They turn, but not upward, They are like a deceitful bow; Their princes will fall by the sword Because of the insolence of their tongue. This will be their derision in the land of Egypt.” I looked up the two different words “deceitful” and “treacherous” and they both come from the same root word which means “1) laxness, slackness, slackening, deceit, treachery.” Asaph says that they turned aside like a treacherous bow, and it means that they turned aside like a bow that was not working correctly, like a bow that perhaps had the string loose on it and therefore would not shoot correctly because it was lazy. Charles H. Spurgeon says the following about this verse: “They were turned aside like a deceitful bow, which not only fails to send the arrow towards the mark in a direct line, but springs back to the archer’s hurt, and perhaps sends the shaft among his friends to their serious jeopardy. Israel boasted of the bow as the national weapon, they sang the song of the bow, and hence a deceitful bow is made to be the type and symbol of their own unsteadfastness; God can make men’s glory the very ensign of their shame, he draws a bar sinister across the escutcheon of traitors.” The dictionary says the word escutcheon means “a plate or shield fixed around something such as a light switch or keyhole, as an ornament or to protect the surrounding surface.”
Spiritual meaning for my life today: From this section of Scripture along with the section of from Mark six I see that I am to remember what the Lord has done for me. I can say that the Lord has provided a place for me to remember what He has done for me when it comes to my salvation, and that is the celebrating of the Lord’s Supper. I have to remember the power that He demonstrated through His death, burial, and resurrection. Paul writes in the book of Ephesians that believers have the same kind of power that God used to raise Jesus from the dead. I don’t avail myself to that power as much as I should.
My Steps of Faith for Today: I want to remember the power of God and how He used it to save me. I want to continue to learn contentment.
4/26/2012 11:56:49 AM
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