TO CHEW ON: "How often they provoked Him in the wilderness and grieved Him in the desert! Yet again and again they tempted God, and limited the Holy One of Israel" - Psalm 78:40,41
The beginning of today's reading strikes me with its list of ways the Israelites demonstrated their unbelief: "provoked ... grieved ... tempted ... limited." The trouble is we find even more ways than this if we go through the psalm's 72 verses:
- Broke covenant and were lawbreakers (Psalm 78:10).
- Forgot His word and His power (Psalm 78:11, 42).
- Sinned and rebelled (Psalm 78:17).
- Spoke against God (Psalm 78:19).
- Disbelieved God and didn't trust Him (Psalm 78:22,32).
- Were insincere, i.e. flattered and lied to Him (Psalm 78:36).
- Were disloyal and unfaithful (Psalm 78:37).
- Provoked and grieved Him (Psalm 78:40, 56, 58).
- Tempted and limited Him (Psalm 78:41).
- Backslid and turned aside from Him (Psalm 78:57).
Unbelief has many guises. What a checklist for our own lives! Is there any chance we have some of these outfits hanging in the closets of our hearts?
PRAYER: Dear God, please help me to recognize unbelief in my heart, no matter what form it takes. Help me to know You better and experience You at every level, so that it becomes second-nature for me to exchange unbelief for faith. Amen.
MORE: Covenant
The hurt and outraged tone in God's voice—as rendered by Asaph—brings us to the question, what did/does God expect? This passage speaks of the expressions of God's expectation they had violated, calling them covenant and law (vs. 10), salvation (vs. 22), and testimonies (vs. 56).
Wayne Grudem in his Systematic Theology speaks of God's agreements with man in a section titled "The Covenants Between God and Man." This bit from his introduction to that section helps us understand what they were and meant—to the Israelites and to us:
"How does God relate to man? Since the creation of the world, God's relationship to man has been defined by specific requirements and promises. God tells people how he wants them to act and also makes promises about how he will act toward them in various circumstances. The Bible contains several summaries of the provisions that define the different relationships between God and man that occur in Scripture, and it often calls these summaries 'covenants.' With respect to covenants between God and man in Scripture, we may give the following definition: A covenant is an unchangeable divinely imposed legal agreement between God and man that stipulates the conditions of their relationship.*************
Although this definition includes the word agreement in order to show that there are two parties, God and man, who must enter into the provisions of the relationship, the phrase divinely imposed is also included to show that man can never negotiate with God or change the terms of the covenant obligations or reject them ....
This definition also notes that covenants are unchangeable. They may be superseded or replaced by a different covenant, but they may not be changed once they are established. .... the essential element at the heart of all of them is the promise, 'I will be their God, and they shall be my people' (Jeremiah 31:33; 2 Corinthians 6:16, et al.)" - Wayne Grudem, Systematic Theology, p. 515, 516 (emphasis added).
