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 becuse 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
once more, 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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