Heart of a Psalmist - Worshipping Christ Through The Psalms

They refused to believe in his miracles. So he ended their lives in failure and gave them years of terror.”

This story is from Numbers 11 where God responded to their complaints: “The Lord has heard your whining and complaints: ‘If only we had meat to eat! …You will eat it for a whole month until you gag and are sick of it.”(Num. 11:18,20) They had been given quail meat every night and manna each morn- ing but now they wanted more meat than God had provided for them. They were never satisfied and so they lived a ‘life devoted to death’, they were alive but had no future destiny but to die in unbelief in the desert.

IV MERELY MORTAL - Tenderness and Mercy of God- 34-39

“When God killed some of them, the rest finally sought him. They repented and turned to God. Then they remembered that God was their rock, that their redeemer was the Most High. But they followed him only with their words; 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 didn’t destroy them all. Many a time he held back his anger and did not unleash his fury! For he remembered that they were merely mortal, gone in a moment like a breath of wind, never to return.”(34-39) When God killed some of them for their sin it jolted them into a partial-repentance and a casual re- membrance of the ‘Most High.’ It was a forced repentance as the psalmist tells us they were lying and were not loyal in their hearts. The plan of salvation does not rest upon the sincerity of man but upon the mercy and faithfulness of God. Paul tells the Corinthian church to remember the events in the wilder- ness so they may avoid the same sins: “I don’t want you to forget…what happened to our ancestors in the wilderness long ago…All these events happened to them as examples for us. They were written down to warn us, who live at the time when this age is drawing to a close.” (1 Cor. 10:1,11) “Oh, how often they rebelled against him in the desert and grieved his heart in the wilderness. Again and again they tested God’s patience and frustrated the Holy One of Israel. They forgot about his power and how he rescued them from their enemies. They forgot his miraculous signs in Egypt, his wonders on the plain of Zoan.” (40-43) Now begins a retelling of the deliverance from Egypt only with more details. The previous miracles in Egypt were meant to sustain their trust in the wilderness but the disease of ‘forgetfulness’ devastated their faith and mission. Asaph tells us that God was both ‘grieved’ and ‘frustrated’ by his people. The ‘Holy One of Israel’ was first mentioned by Asaph as a title for the ‘Messiah’ and was later used abundantly by Isaiah. “For he tuned their rivers into blood, so no one could drink from the streams. He sent vast swarms of flies to consume them and hordes of frogs to ruin them. He gave their crops to caterpillars; their har- vest was consumed by locusts. He destroyed their grapevines with hail and shattered their sycamores with sleet. He abandoned their cattle to the hail, 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 Egyptian’s lives but handed them over to the plague. He killed the oldest son in each Egyptian family, the flower of youth throughout the land of Egypt. (44-51) Asaph recites 7 of the 10 plagues but they are not in the order of the historical account: 1st) the rivers turned to blood, 4th) the plague of flies, 2nd) the plague of frogs, 8th) the locusts, 7th) the hail, 5th) the pestilence, 10th the death of the firstborn in Egypt. The order or the exact number of the plagues was not most important to God. He wanted them to remember that they happened as a display of his power and love for them. Every little Jewish child was to use their ten fingers to remember the Ten Com- mandments and their ten toes to remember the ten plagues; they were not to forget his laws and power. V MIRACULOUS SIGNS - Terrible Plagues in Egypt- 40-53

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