Psalm 106:1-2 Hallelujah! Thank you, Lord! How good you are! Your love for us continues on forever. Who can ever list the glorious miracles of God? Who can ever praise him half enough?
3 Happiness comes to those who are fair to others and are always just and good.
4 Remember me too, O Lord, while you are blessing and saving your people. 5 Let me share in your chosen ones’ prosperity and rejoice in all their joys, and receive the glory you give to them.
When God does miracles, we should be willing to thank Him and trust in His goodness….but many of us forget. For a bunch of people who had strong oral traditions, the ancient Israelites were sure champion forgetters!
6 Both we and our fathers have sinned so much. 7 They weren’t impressed by the wonder of your miracles in Egypt and soon forgot your many acts of kindness to them. Instead they rebelled against you at the Red Sea. 8 Even so you saved them—to defend the honor of your name and demonstrate your power to all the world. 9 You commanded the Red Sea to divide, forming a dry road across its bottom. Yes, as dry as any desert! 10 Thus you rescued them from their enemies. 11 Then the water returned and covered the road and drowned their foes; not one survived. 12 Then at last his people believed him. Then they finally sang his praise.
Pharaoh’s army was defeated and the Israelites celebrated, but the euphoria only lasted a short time.
13 Yet how quickly they forgot again! They wouldn’t wait for him to act 14 but demanded better food, testing God’s patience to the breaking point. 15 So he gave them their demands but sent them leanness in their souls. 16 They were envious of Moses, yes, and Aaron too, the man anointed by God as his priest. 17 Because of this, the earth opened and swallowed Dathan, Abiram, and his friends; 18 and fire fell from heaven to consume these wicked men. 19-20 For they preferred a statue of an ox that eats grass to the glorious presence of God himself. 21-22 Thus they despised their Savior who had done such mighty miracles in Egypt and at the Red Sea. 23 So the Lord declared he would destroy them. But Moses, his chosen one, stepped into the breach between the people and their God and begged him to turn from his wrath and not destroy them.
24 They refused to enter the Promised Land, for they wouldn’t believe his solemn oath to care for them. 25 Instead, they pouted in their tents and mourned and despised his command. 26 Therefore he swore that he would kill them in the wilderness 27 and send their children away to distant lands as exiles. 28 Then our fathers joined the worshipers of Baal at Peor and even offered sacrifices to the dead![d] 29 With all these things they angered him—and so a plague broke out upon them 30 and continued until Phinehas executed those whose sins had caused the plague to start. 31 (For this good deed Phinehas will be remembered forever.)
32 At Meribah, too, Israel angered God, causing Moses serious trouble, 33 for he became angry and spoke foolishly.
34 Nor did Israel destroy the nations in the land as God had told them to, 35 but mingled in among the heathen and learned their evil ways, 36 sacrificing to their idols, and were led away from God. 37-38 They even sacrificed their little children to the demons—the idols of Canaan—shedding innocent blood and polluting the land with murder. 39 Their evil deeds defiled them, for their love of idols was adultery in the sight of God. 40 That is why Jehovah’s anger burned against his people, and he abhorred them. 41-42 That is why he let the heathen nations crush them. They were ruled by those who hated them and oppressed by their enemies.
43 Again and again he delivered them from their slavery, but they continued to rebel against him and were finally destroyed by their sin. 44 Yet, even so, he listened to their cries and heeded their distress; 45 he remembered his promises to them and relented because of his great love, 46 and caused even their enemies who captured them to pity them.
47 O Lord God, save us! Regather us from the nations so we can thank your holy name and rejoice and praise you.
48 Blessed be the Lord, the God of Israel, from everlasting to everlasting. Let all the people say, “Amen!” Hallelujah!
The saddest statement in this entire psalm is verse 13. “Yet how quickly they forgot again! They wouldn’t wait for him to act.” Coming out of idolatrous Egypt where people routinely tried to control events by manipulating deities, the Israelites tried to treat the One True Living God as just another pagan deity. Rather than honoring God by waiting on Him to act, they demanded God perform at their whims rather than allowing His timing to unfold. Even though the Israelites had just walked through the Red Sea on dry land and had then watched one of the most powerful armies in the world be wiped out, they still refused to honor God or to trust Him. And this pattern continued for centuries.
People have always been impatient, and today things are becoming worse. So many of us are used to satellite TV, phone apps, and instant sources of news and information that our attention spans have shortened to seconds rather than to minutes. Forty years ago, when we were leading Children’s Church, we found we needed to change activities about every ten minutes to keep the kids’ attention. These days, adults have equally short attention spans, a major problem when God asks us to wait on Him and His timing.
Anyone who has a farming or gardening background knows that crops and plants have their own time tables. One retired pastor in my home town used to plant his potatoes on Good Friday, no matter what the weather was like that day. Even if it was snowing, you could see Pastor Lundeen out there digging in the garden. And Pastor Lundeen always raised bumper crops of potatoes. Soil temperature, rainfall, and other meteorologic events all help influence crop development. Those raising livestock must time breeding, particularly in cold climates. I vividly remember having to deliver twin lambs in an unheated building in the middle of a bitter January winter night and then helping my brother carry the ewe and the lambs through snow drifts until we could settle them in our basement where they could stay warm. (That particular night, we had the sheep in the basement, along with a baby calf. There was a box of baby pigs sitting near a heat register in the kitchen, and a box of baby chicks I had brought home as part of a school biology project. My brother was sleeping on a sofa in the dining room and he reported that now he knew how Noah must have felt. Incidentally, my brother eventually became a veterinarian.)
Why should we wait on the Lord? Simple. Results. When we wait for God’s timing, things work. When we insist on pushing ahead, we only mess things up and then must play catch up. When I was little, I planted radishes; however, as soon as the radish tops appeared, I began pulling them up. It took time for me to realize that I had to wait for the rest of the radish to develop.
Wait on the Lord! His timing is perfect and He is never too early or too late. Even when we begin to panic, God is still working and we only have to trust Him.
PRAYER: Father God, thank You for loving us and caring for us. Lord, help us to remain patience, no matter how worried we might become. In the mighty and precious Name of King Jesus. Amen.
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