1230 - Psalm 78 (part-2)
Psalm 78 (part-2)
When the Lord heard the Israelites complaining in the wilderness, He was furious.
The fire of his wrath burned against Jacob.
Yes, his anger rose against Israel, for they did not believe God or trust him to care for them.
But he commanded the skies to open; he opened the doors of heaven.
He rained down manna for them to eat; he gave them bread from heaven.
They ate the food of angels!
God gave them all they could hold.
He released the east wind in the heavens, and guided the south wind by his mighty power.
He rained down meat as thick as dust—birds as plentiful as the sand on the seashore!
He caused the birds to fall within their camp, and all around their tents.
The people ate their fill.
He gave them what they craved.
But before they satisfied their craving, while the meat was yet in their mouths,the anger of God rose against them, and he killed their strongest men.
He struck down the finest of Israel’s young men.
But in spite of this, the people kept sinning.
Despite his wonders, they refused to trust him.
So he ended their lives in failure,
their years in terror.
When God began killing them,
they finally sought him.
They repented and took God seriously.
Then they remembered that God was their rock, that God Most High* was their redeemer.
But all they gave him was lip service; they lied to him with their tongues.
Their hearts were not loyal to him.
They did not keep his covenant.
Yet he was merciful and forgave their sins, and He did not destroy them all.
Many times he held back his anger, and did not unleash his fury!
For he remembered that they were merely mortal,… who are gone like a breath of wind that never returns.
Oh, how often they rebelled against him in the wilderness,
and how they grieved his heart, in that dry wasteland.
Again and again they tested God’s patience, and they provoked the Holy One of Israel.
They did not remember his power, and how he rescued them from their enemies.
They did not remember his miraculous signs in Egypt, and
his wonders, on the plain of Zoan.
They did not remember how He turned their rivers into blood, so no one could drink from the streams.
… or how He sent vast swarms of flies to consume them, and hordes of frogs to ruin them.
They did not remember how He gave their crops to caterpillars; and their harvest was consumed by locusts.
He destroyed their grapevines with hail, and shattered their sycamore-figs with sleet.
He abandoned their cattle to the hail, and their livestock to bolts of lightning.
He loosed, on them, his fierce anger—all his fury, rage, and hostility.
He dispatched, against them, a band of destroying angels.
He turned his anger against them; he did not spare the Egyptians’ lives… but instead ravaged them with the plague.
He killed the oldest son, in each Egyptian family, the flower of youth throughout the land of Egypt.*
Tyndale House Publishers.
Psalm 78:21-51
Praise be to God!
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