Good morning,
Praise the Lord!
Psalm 106 is the last in the section of praise Psalms that carries a very different message about praise that may be more important than we realize. The first verse reads, Praise the Lord! Give thanks to the Lord, for he is good! His faithful love endures forever. The psalm goes along as expected until verse six when the writer turns a sharp corner by saying, Like our ancestors, we have sinned. We have done wrong! We have acted wickedly. This begins a recitation of the history of Israel from the time of leaving Egypt until the few survivors that were still alive were scattered throughout the nations.(v.47) Even after he set them free from Egypt and took them through the Red Sea on dry ground, he writes, Yet how quickly they forgot what he had done! They wouldn’t wait for his counsel!(13) Instead of faith in their God and gratitude for what he had done, they demanded that God take care of them their way. Again the writer reminds us, So he gave them what they asked for, but he sent a plague along with it.(15) Within months of this challenge the people again decided that they needed a god they were used to and so, They traded their glorious God for a statue of a grass- eating bull.(20) They had such bad attitudes and actions that God finally said that, he would scatter their descendants among the nations, exiling them to distant lands.(27)
Once God’s people entered and conquered the land that he promised them, in only a few generations the people were living like their enemies and worshipping their idols.(36) In fact he tells us that They even sacrificed their sons and their daughters to the demons. They shed innocent blood, the blood of their sons and daughters.(37,38) For hundreds of years they went back and forth between obedience and rebellion. Again and again God rescued them, but they chose to rebel against him, and they were finally destroyed by their sin.(43) The writer reminds us that even when they were in exile he cared for them and, He even caused their captors
to treat them with kindness.(46) The writer pleads, Save us, O Lord our God!. .(47) After all that he had written about God’s dealing with his sinful people, the author ends the Psalm in an amazing way. He finishes like he started. Praise the Lord, the God of Israel, who lives from everlasting to everlasting! Let all the people say, “Amen!” Praise the Lord!(48) I think that this is such an important psalm for us because even in the middle of confusion, chaos, warfare and God’s judgement, we can be sure that our God has not forgotten even one of his eternal family. God still cares about the people of Israel and about the Church he has been building over these many thousands of years. Our God will never leave his own because of the hate and anger of his enemies. Even now we can praise our Lord and give him our heart felt thanks, because his faithful love really does endure forever.
Psalms 106:1 Praise the Lord! Give thanks to the Lord, for he is good! His faithful love endures forever.
Roy Wisner
