The Bible Study Hour

Guest (Male): The time of the dispersion was a dark period for Israel. Because of their unfaithfulness, the blessings of God slipped through their hands. They had perpetrated a litany of sins against their God, and the time for judgment was at hand.

Welcome to The Bible Study Hour, a radio and internet broadcast with Dr. James Boice, preparing you to think and act biblically. Only a merciful God could be called on to forgive a people who had turned their backs on him. Let's join Dr. Boice as he examines Psalm 106 and shows us that our unfaithfulness does not nullify God's faithfulness and that we, like the Israelites, can say, "Amen" to his forgiveness and his mercy.

Dr. James Boice: Whenever I end a sermon, I like to end on a strong note, with a bang rather than a whimper. I like to do the same thing with anything else I do, whether it's a lecture, a talk, a book, a chapter, whatever it may be. With that kind of orientation, I would expect when I come to this last Psalm in the fourth book of the Psalter to find something of the same, a strong note, but it's not what we find.

It's true, it's not exactly a whimper, but it's hardly a bang either. For the most part, what we have here is a long litany of the sins of Israel during the many long years in which God was working with them, from the time of the Exodus, through all those years of their wandering in the wilderness until they finally came into the Promised Land.

And there's even more to it than that. There may be a clue to when this Psalm is written in verse 47. "Save us, O Lord our God, and gather us from the nations." That probably is an indication that this is written during the time of the captivity. The northern kingdom was scattered as a result of the Assyrian invasion in 721 BC, and then the southern kingdom was carried into captivity as a result of the Babylonian invasion in 586 BC.

That's probably what's reflected here. So, if that's the case, now they have also been judged for their sin. God has chastised them, and you come to the very end of the Psalm and it says that all the people say, "Amen." What that amen means, at least in part, is a recognition that God was right in having judged them. So, it's a serious Psalm that deals with sin and chastisement and the rightness of God in doing all those things.

I pointed out when we were looking at Psalm 105 last time that 105 and 106 go together. They're tied together in a number of ways. Some of them we saw last time, some we'll see today, but the theme itself is what's most obvious. In Psalm 105, we have a review of the faithfulness of God to Israel during Israel's history. It goes the whole way back to God's covenant with Abraham, and the theme is God's faithfulness to his covenant.

Now we come to Psalm 106, and what we find is a rehearsal of the unfaithfulness of Israel to God during the same time period. And yet, in spite of all I've said here about the Psalm being a reiteration of Israel's sin and an acknowledgment that God is right in having judged them for this sin, this is nevertheless not entirely a downbeat Psalm.

Because it begins with praise to God, it praises him for his goodness, and at the very end, there's an anticipation that he's going to gather them from the nations and that once again for that deliverance, as well as for their many others, they'll be able to give thanks to him and glory in his name. Derek Kidner is one of the great commentators on the Psalms. He writes for InterVarsity, and I sometimes refer to what he says.

I think he's got it just right. He calls this Psalm the dark counterpart of its predecessor. A shadow cast by human self-will in the long struggle against the light. Yet, he also adds, for all its exposure of man's ingratitude, this is nevertheless a song of praise, for it's God's extraordinary long-suffering that emerges as the real theme.

We can hardly miss the fact that the Psalm begins with Hallelujah, translated Praise the Lord, and it ends with Hallelujah too. So although in between we have this lengthy recital of Israel's sin, this is nevertheless a Psalm on the basis of which we are to praise God. Now, if Israel's sin is the main part of the Psalm and if this is what is being talked about, we ask the question, why should Israel or anyone else praise God?

And the answer is given right away. We don't have long to wait. It comes in in verse one. It is because God is good, because his love endures forever. Sometimes when ministers preach and they get preaching about sin, they elaborate the talk about sin so much that everybody goes out feeling depressed. And I suppose there are times for that, when that's needed.

Generally, today people are so insensitive to sin you have to talk about it a bit and we ought to talk about it more in order that we might be sensitive to our wrongdoing and God's grace in saving us. But you can't ever end on that note, you ought not to begin on that note either. Because the Psalm begins by reminding us that God is really good.

It's true that sin brings chastisement and God judged Israel during these long centuries of their history, but nevertheless, God was a good God and he's a good God even in the judgments. What it tells us as you get to the end is that he remembered his covenant and restored them. So it's against the dark background of their sin that the long-suffering and the goodness of God is most illuminating.

Now isn't that our story too? Isn't it the essential content of our testimony when we talk about our God and witness about his grace to others? We don't praise God because he's wonderful and we're wonderful too. We praise God because he's a gracious God and he's loved us and saved us in spite of our sin. And so we don't put forward ourselves, we're just the dark foil against which the goodness and grace of God is seen.

What we talk about is God's goodness. So verse one says it, "Give thanks to the Lord for he is good and his love endures forever." It's very interesting, while we're still looking at that opening section, that one part of it contains the writer's own address to God on his behalf. He is praising God because he has been good, good to the nation, persevering with them, forgiving their sin.

He's expecting that God is going to bless them again. He gets to the end and he talks about God delivering them from the nations. That's the content of his prayer. But what he says here is that he wants to be part of that blessing when it comes. Blessed are they who maintain justice, who do what is right. "Remember me, O Lord, when you show favor to your people."

Now shouldn't that be our desire as well? Don't you want to be part of God's blessing on his people when it comes? Well then we ought to do what the psalmist does here. We should confess our sin, that's what's called for in the heart of the Psalm. We should praise God's past goodness to us, and then we should anticipate his future blessing.

Now, if verse one is the keynote of the Psalm so far as God is concerned, reminding us that God is good and his love endures forever, verse six is the keynote of the Psalm so far as man is concerned. Because what verse six says is this, "We have sinned even as our fathers did, we have done and acted wickedly."

Now what follows from this point on, as I was intimating earlier, is this rehearsal of Israel's sins. You can look at that in a number of different ways and different outlines are given to this portion of the Psalm, but perhaps the most helpful way of looking at it is to recognize that there are eight different sins of Israel that are encapsulated here in the various stanzas and that they fall into the three different periods of Israel's history that are most prominent: the time of the Exodus, and then those years of wandering in the wilderness, and then finally their settling in the land.

So this is what the psalmist runs through. And he talks about a sin that was prominent at the time of the Exodus, and then a lot of them, six of them, during the years in the desert, and then finally when he talks about their entrance into the Promised Land, there's another sin they haven't learned even yet. So this is kind of the outline that you have here. Now let me just look at them.

As far as the sin of the Exodus is concerned, it was really rebellion because that's the word that is used for it there in verse seven. They did not remember your many kindnesses and they rebelled by the sea, the Red Sea. Now if you're talking about the many kindnesses of God, obviously that would include the fact that he remembered his covenant to Abraham, what was talked about in the last Psalm.

The fact that he sent Moses and Aaron to the Pharaoh of Egypt with the demand that the people be let go. That God did many miracles in order that they might be delivered and that he finally led them out with a strong hand and brought them to the very border of the Red Sea. So all those many kindnesses were showed to them.

And yet we find that when they're standing at the Red Sea, before they are even out of Egypt, they already begin to complain. And so they rebel. They say, "Was it because there were no graves in Egypt that you brought us to the desert to die? What have you done to us by bringing us out of Egypt? Didn't you say in Egypt, 'Leave us alone, let us serve the Egyptians?' It would have been better for us to serve the Egyptians than to die in the desert."

That was their complaint. And yet in spite of that kind of rebellion and ingratitude, God delivered them. He caused the waters of the Red Sea to part, the people went over on dry ground, they were safe from their enemies, the waters came back and drowned the pursuing armies of the Pharaoh. The Psalm says, verse 12, "Then they believed his promises and sang his praise."

Well, that's true enough, but it wasn't much credit to them to have done it then. It would have been far better if they had sang his praises when they were on the other side of the Red Sea, trusting him somehow to deliver them or lead them across. Spurgeon is always very sharp on verses like this and he says, "Those who do not believe the Lord's word till they see it performed are not believers at all."

And then he refers to the song they sang, the song of Moses once they got across the sea. He said their song was very excellent, but sweet as it was, it was quite short and when it was ended they fell again to murmuring. Well, we stop at each stage of the story and we say, "Is that the way it is with us?" Is that the way it is with you? You get into some great trouble and out of the trouble you pray to God.

You haven't been praying too much before that, but you do because of the problem and God intervenes graciously and saves you and then you forget about it and pretty soon you're complaining again? I don't think we want to defend ourselves on that and say we're not like that, because that's the way we are. That's human nature. We are just like Israel in this.

And so when we read about this, we have to say yes, they are an example of us. Shouldn't we say, as they're saying in this Psalm, "We have sinned even as our fathers did, we have done wrong and we have acted wickedly." Well, we come in the next stanza to the sins that are identified with their times in the desert and there's a whole series of these. They just go stanza by stanza.

Let's just run through them. Verses 13 through 15, what you have here is the sin of discontent. It's describing what happened several times in the desert, and the references, if you care, in the Old Testament are Exodus 16 and Numbers 11. In Exodus 16, the people are grumbling because they don't have anything to eat and they're remembering the food that they had in Egypt which they thought was wonderful.

They said, "We sat around pots of meat and we ate all the food we wanted, and here we don't have anything." And so God answered their prayer by giving them the manna from heaven, a miraculous and very gracious provision. Then you come to Numbers 11, they've been eating manna now for a number of years and they're getting tired of it. And they say, "If only we had meat to eat.

We remember the fish that we ate in Egypt at no cost, also the cucumbers, the melons, the leeks, the onions, and the garlic." It's always seemed to me that you've got to be very dissatisfied if you remember cucumbers, melons, leeks, onions, and garlic as if that's something wonderful. But they did, and they were ready to get rid of Moses and go back to Egypt so they could have more garlic. But at any rate, God was gracious to them in spite of that.

Isn't that true, that we also are often sinfully and foolishly discontented? Matthew Arnold had some writing, a poem called Youth's Agitations, in which he wrote that "One thing only has been lent to youth and age in common: discontent." And it's true, it's true of the human race. Next stanza, 16 to 18, here the psalmist was writing about the sin of jealousy.

This is the incident that concerns Korah and the 250 men that rebelled with him. It's told in Numbers 16. They didn't like the leadership of Moses. They wanted to take over themselves. They said, "The whole community is holy, every one of them and the Lord is with them, why then do you set yourselves above the Lord's assembly?" And God took that very seriously because he had appointed Moses to that position.

And what happened is that the ground open up and swallowed the households of Korah and those who had rebelled with him and then fire went out from the tent of the testimony, the ark of the covenant, and destroyed them. Even then the people were rebellious and they were saved only when Aaron made intercession for them, made atonement for their sin and a plague that God had sent into the camp was stopped.

The third sin of this wilderness period was idolatry, verses 19 to 23, and it's probably the sin that's best known. It's told in Exodus 32. Moses was on the mountain at that time receiving the law from God and he was gone a long time, 40 days. And while he was gone, the people in the valley grew restless. They said, "We don't know what's happened to Moses, maybe he's never coming back."

They approached his brother Aaron and they said, "What we really need is a god that we can see, a tangible god that can lead us up out of here to a better land." And so Aaron asked for all their gold earrings and when he had them, he put them in a crucible, melted them down, and formed them into a little golden calf, I suppose. Others have suggested that what he was trying to do is make a model of the bull god Apis that they had known in Egypt, a symbol of strength because he would have associated Jehovah with strength and he would have said this would represent God in his strength, something like that.

But of course, all it suggested to the people was the sexual license that was associated with the worship of Apis, who was a sort of god of fertility, and so their worship degenerated into a romp, which is the way it's described there in the 32nd chapter. God up on the mountain said he was going to destroy the people and Moses interceded for them and finally went down into the valley and he dealt with the sin as best he could and the next day went back up the mountain and he offered himself in place of the people.

He said to God, "You said you were going to destroy them," God had said at the same time he would start again, make a new nation beginning with Moses, and Moses said, "No, they're my people, I love them, why don't you destroy me instead, take me as a substitute and save them." Well, what he was offering to do he couldn't do, of course. He couldn't be a substitute for others because he was a sinner himself.

It requires Jesus Christ to do that, but he had the right idea, the idea of atonement. And God did spare them and he did it on the basis of the forgiveness that Jesus Christ was one day going to make possible by his cross. It's a very interesting reference here in the middle of this story and that is where it says that they exchanged their glory for an image of a bull. You see it there in verse 20.

That's the line that the apostle Paul picks up and uses in the first chapter of Romans verse 23 where he's speaking of the heathen or of mankind in general. You see, here it says they exchanged their glory for a bull. In Romans, Paul writes, "Although they claimed to be wise, they became fools and exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images made to look like mortal man and birds and animals and reptiles."

In other words, what Paul is saying is that it's not the sin of Israel alone that's the problem, it's the sin of humanity in general. This is what we all do. We all put other gods in the true God's place. And you and I are also guilty of this sin of idolatry if we allow anything but God to take God's place in our lives, and we obviously do. How about the fourth sin? Verses 24 to 27, it's the sin of unbelief.

This is when they stood at the border of the Promised Land, the story's told in Numbers 13 and 14. The spies went in. Joshua and Caleb came back with the good report, but the other ten said, "Oh no, it's a land filled with giants, we're too weak, we can't possibly take the land. It doesn't make any difference that God has promised it to us and promised to go with us, we can't do it."

Very great sin, and that's the sin for which they were judged by having to wander in the wilderness for the 40 years. You see, we are guilty of that whenever we fail to take God's word at face value and believe it and actually act upon it. Somebody once said to a Bible teacher, they were having a discussion and the person was upset. He says, "What in the world does God want from me?"

And the Bible teacher replied, "What God wants most of all is to be believed." And that's right, you see. It's not what you and I can do for God, God can do without us, did perfectly well before we were around. He can of the stones raise up children unto Abraham, that's what Jesus said. What he wants to be is believed and if we believe him and operate on the basis of what he's told us, then he does use us and he brings blessing to other people and ourselves as well.

The fifth sin is the sin of apostasy, it's a very grim period and you find it in Numbers 25. Here it's reflected in verses 28 through 31. This is when they got close to the Moabites and they began to worship the Baal gods of the Moabites and again, this was a fertility religion and they practiced that by immorality. Phinehas intervened by killing two of the most blatant offenders, but it was a very great sin.

The sixth sin was the sin of insurrection, talked about in verses 32 and 33. This is talked about in the 20th chapter of Numbers, and it's a sad period because on this occasion it also involved Moses in the sin. Earlier, when the people didn't have water, God had told Moses to smite a rock and it would produce water for the people and it did.

This is later in their history, they're complaining again, God tells them to speak to the rock and it'll bring forth water, but Moses is frustrated with their unbelief and rebellion and he doesn't do it quite right. He smites the rock, I think the text indicates he did it in anger, and he takes some of the glory of God to himself because he said to the people, "Must we," either meaning himself and God or he means Moses and Aaron, "must we bring forth water out of this rock, you rebels?"

And God judged even Moses for that. He was unable to enter the Promised Land. But the people were guilty too, guilty of insurrection, rebellion, just as we are constantly, day by day, week by week, in our Christian lives. Next section of this talks about Israel's sin in the Promised Land. You might think that once they got into the land, having passed through all that wilderness wandering, that everything would be all right.

Sometimes we even use the imagery that way. We talk about the wilderness as our earthly pilgrimage and entering into Canaan as going into heaven. Well, it wasn't that. It may have been an earthly paradise, but they carried their old sinful natures in and so pretty soon you find them accommodating to the ways of Canaan, which means the ways of the world. Now they had been warned against doing that as far back as Exodus 34.

They'd been told there to destroy the inhabitants of the land or, it says verse 12, Exodus 34, they will be a snare to you. But they didn't do it. Instead, as the Psalm tells us, verses 35, 36, and 37, they mingled with the nations and adopted their customs. They even worshipped their idols, and they participated in their sin even to the point of sacrificing their sons and daughters to the demons.

The sacrifice of one's children to demons is a sin and vice so terrible we can hardly contemplate it, but they did it. But before we dismiss it too easily, we have to ask ourselves whether that might not also be a sin of which we are guilty ourselves, though in different ways. Are we sure we never practice the sacrifice of our children to the world?

We do if we desire worldly success for them more than godliness. If we thrust them into positions where they're encouraged to compromise in order to get ahead rather than to live for Jesus Christ. If you worship any of the gods of this world yourself, whether wealth or fame or sex or power, all of the main gods of our contemporary civilization, then those gods will certainly lead you astray. They will harm you and they'll harm your children too.

And so when we run down this list of the sins of the people, we've looked at eight of them now, we have to say, yes, those are our sins too. We've done exactly the same thing. Now we come to the last section after this historical review of Israel's unfaithfulness to God and we're told of God's response to the people's sin. It's verses 40 and following. There are two main responses here.

The first is judgment, and that's exactly what we would expect. We're told that God was angry with the people and therefore handed them over to the nations so that their foes ruled over them and their enemies oppressed them. That was the actual history of the people once they entered the Promised Land. The whole pattern that's spelled out in the Book of Judges where the people fall away from God and begin to live like the people of the land, God punishes them by allowing a nation from the borders of their territory to rise up and oppress them, and in their oppression they repent of their sin, they call out to God for help, and God delivers, usually through the hand of one of the judges.

But then as soon as they are delivered, they begin to fall away again and the whole cycle repeats itself. In the Book of Judges, it's just that going over and over and over again. That was the history. God judged them for their sin and eventually, as I said a moment ago, he did it by allowing the Assyrians to overthrow the northern kingdom and finally the Babylonians to overthrow the kingdom of the south.

Judgment, you see, it's just what we would expect. And yet there's a second reaction of God and this is not what we would expect. It's compassion and deliverance. Compassion is unexpected and unmerited. We're told in verse 45 that the people had sinned often and greatly, but although they had done that, God remembered his covenant and out of his great love he relented. What a great reality, the compassionate God.

It's interesting that this is the first time the covenant has been mentioned in the Psalm, but it does take us back to Psalm 105. I pointed out there's a number of things that tie these Psalms together, that's one of them. Psalm 105 begins with a covenant, God's covenant with Abraham, and then it shows how God was faithful to his covenant all down through that history. Here in this Psalm, we're seeing it from the other side, we're seeing the people sin all down through that history, but when we get to the end, it's the same thing: God remembered his covenant.

That's a way of saying we praise God because in spite of our sin, he's a good God and a gracious God and a compassionate God and he has saved us again and again. I suppose, to give a New Testament equivalent, that the lesson here is what we find in Romans chapter three verses three and four. Paul's asking a question there, he's saying, "What if some did not have faith?" He means, what if some were unfaithful to God?

"Will their lack of faith nullify God's faithfulness?" And then he answers, "No, not at all. Let God be true and every man a liar." We are unfaithful, that's our character. But God is faithful and that's his character, and we'd better be glad he is. End with a question which is suggested by the very end of the Psalm and that is, can you and I say amen to that teaching?

Amen means verily, verily, or truly, truly, or it's true. It's a characteristic of the Scriptures that whenever God speaks, the amen comes first. Jesus did it a lot. He said, "Amen, amen, I say to you," and then he would say something. And whenever the amen is found on our lips, it comes afterwards because after we hear what God has said, we say, "Yes, that's true." God says, "This is true," and he tells us what it is. We hear it and we say, "Yes, that's true."

So I ask the question, that's the way it ends here. It's talking about the amen. Can we say amen to the teaching of the Psalm? The Psalm's had two great messages. First message is the message of verse six. "We have sinned even as our fathers did, we have done wrong and acted wickedly." We hear that and we hang our head and agree sadly. We say, "Amen." And then we hear God saying, "Nevertheless, I remember my covenant."

Verse 46, the second great message of the Psalm. We hear that and we lift up our heads and we say in quite a different tone of voice, "Amen! Amen! He's a gracious and compassionate and faithful God." You see, if you've understood that, you understand what it's about. There are all kinds of details and it works itself out in different ways, but we have sinned and God has been gracious to us and he has saved us in Jesus Christ.

And the question is, do we really put our amen to that teaching? The Psalm says that all the people of God say, "Amen." Amen. Praise the Lord. Let's pray. Our Father, we're thankful for this Psalm that it's been our privilege to study here this morning. There are hard parts to it as there are to all your word, parts that speak pointedly and painfully of our sin.

And yet never apart from your grace, the message of the Gospel is always there in its Old Testament form and its New Testament form. And we see it above all in Jesus Christ who died for those very sins that you and I, we have committed. So our Father, we ask you to bless this Psalm to us and give grace on the parts of many people to set their amen to the Gospel teaching, and so in faith, commit themselves to Jesus Christ and to following after him. For we pray in Jesus' name. Amen.

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