Psalms 106

The psalm opens the way it will close, with praise - Praise ye the LORD. O give thanks unto the LORD; for he is good: for his mercy endureth for ever (v. 1) - and then makes a move that takes the breath away. Having declared God good, it turns at once and declares the people the opposite: We have sinned with our fathers, we have committed iniquity, we have done wickedly (v. 6).

Notice three things in that confession. First, it is honest to the point of bluntness - three verbs piled up, sinned, committed iniquity, done wickedly, with no softening. Second, it is owned in the first person: not they sinned, but we have sinned. The one praying does not stand at a safe distance from the failures of the past; he climbs down into them and counts himself among the guilty. And third, it is communal and stretches across the generations - with our fathers.

This is a people confessing a pattern older than themselves, a rebellion woven into the family line. To pray verse 6 is to give up every claim of being the exception, the better generation, the one who would have done differently. It is to take your place in a long line of the forgiven.

Verse 12 had ended on a high note - Then believed they his words; they sang his praise. Verse 13 shatters it in a single phrase: They soon forgat his works. The word soon is devastating. The song of the sea was barely cold; the water had hardly dried on the far bank. And already the memory was gone, and with it the trust: they waited not for his counsel.

Forgetting, in this psalm, is not innocent forgetfulness. It is the engine of every rebellion that follows. Because they forgot what God had done, they lusted in the wilderness (v. 14), envied His chosen leaders (v. 16), and made an idol (v. 19). Memory and faith are bound together here, and so are forgetting and sin.

The remarkable detail in verse 15 deserves a pause: he gave them their request; but sent leanness into their soul. Sometimes the judgment is not that God withholds what we demand, but that He grants it - and we discover, too late, that getting exactly what we craved has left us emptier than before. A wanting that has outrun God's counsel can be answered and still starve the soul.

At the center of this section stands the worst of the failures: They made a calf in Horeb, and worshipped the molten image. Thus they changed their glory into the similitude of an ox that eateth grass (vv. 19-20). The horror of it is captured in that word changed. They had been given the glory of the living God - the God who split the sea, who spoke from the fire of the mountain - and they traded Him for a metal animal, an ox that eateth grass.

It is the oldest and stupidest exchange in the world: swapping the Creator for something far smaller, and then bowing to it. The psalm does not even argue against the idol; it simply describes it, and the description is the whole argument. What kind of creature trades the glory of God for the image of a grazing beast?

And yet the apostle Paul, describing the human heart in general, reaches for this exact language - people who changed the glory of the uncorruptible God into an image made like to corruptible man, and to birds, and fourfooted beasts (Rom. 1:23). The golden calf was not a one-time ancient blunder. It is the pattern of every idol since: trading the immeasurable for the manageable, the Glory for the grass-eater.

The failures keep coming, and verse 24 names one that is easy to pass over but cuts deep: Yea, they despised the pleasant land, they believed not his word. The pleasant land was the very thing God had promised, the goal of the whole exodus - and they despised it. Why? The verse tells us in the next breath: they believed not his word. Their contempt for the gift was, at root, unbelief toward the Giver.

When the spies came back from Canaan with a report of giants, the people decided God could not be trusted to do what He had said, and so the good land looked to them like a death-trap rather than a gift (Num. 14). Unbelief always distorts the size of things - it shrinks God and magnifies the obstacle until the promise itself seems foolish to want.

And the consequence is exactly fitted to the sin: because they would not enter the land, he lifted up his hand against them, to overthrow them in the wilderness (v. 26), and warned of a scattering among the nations (v. 27) - a line that will return with terrible force at the end of the psalm, when the scattering has actually come and the people cry to be gathered home.

Verse 31 is worth lingering over, because it lifts a single moment into something permanent: Phinehas's deed was counted unto him for righteousness unto all generations for evermore. To be counted righteous is the language of a ledger - something credited, reckoned, set down on the right side of the account. The Hebrew Scriptures already knew of a righteousness that is reckoned to a person, a right standing with God that is granted and credited.

The psalm sets this counted righteousness against everything around it: a whole catalogue of sin, a people who could point to nothing in themselves, and yet a God who counts and credits and sets things on the right side of the account. It is a quiet shaft of light in a dark chapter - in a psalm whose whole burden is that the people had no righteousness of their own to plead, the word counted hints at the only kind of righteousness a sinner ever has, one received from God and reckoned to the account by His mercy.

The catalogue presses on to the waters of strife - Meribah - where the people's grumbling drew even Moses into sin: They angered him also at the waters of strife, so that it went ill with Moses for their sakes: because they provoked his spirit, so that he spake unadvisedly with his lips (vv. 32-33). This is a sobering note in the psalm. Moses, the great intercessor who had stood in the breach (v. 23), here falls himself - and the psalm is careful to trace why.

It was not that Moses was wicked at heart; it was that the people's relentless provoking wore him down until he spake unadvisedly.

The phrase for their sakes does not excuse Moses, but it does locate the corrosive pressure: a constant atmosphere of complaint and rebellion can pull even a faithful servant out of step. There is a quiet warning here about the company we keep and the climate we live in. We are more shaped by the steady provoking around us than we like to think, and even the strongest can be worn into a sin that, in a clearer moment, they would never have chosen. The intercessor needed an Intercessor too.

Once in the land, the failure changes shape. Earlier the people had rebelled against God directly; now they simply blur into the world around them: They did not destroy the nations, concerning whom the LORD commanded them: but were mingled among the heathen, and learned their works (vv. 34-35). The progression in those two verses is the anatomy of every slow drift. First, an incomplete obedience - they did not do fully what God had said. Then, mingling - an easy, unremarkable blending in. Then, learned their works - the practices of the surrounding culture quietly became their own.

And the end of the road is horrifying: they served their idols (v. 36), and eventually sacrificed their sons and their daughters unto devils (v. 37), until the land was polluted with blood (v. 38). No one in verse 34 intended to arrive at verse 38. That is precisely the point. The catastrophe did not come by a single dramatic choice but by a thousand small accommodations - a failure to draw a line, then a mingling, then a learning, then a serving. What begins as merely fitting in can end somewhere a person would once have found unthinkable.

Now the psalm names the consequence it has been building toward. Because of the long history of sin, the wrath of the LORD was kindled against his people (v. 40), and He gave them into the hand of the heathen (v. 41) - the scattering threatened back in verse 27 has come.

And then, in verses 43 to 45, the entire rhythm of the psalm is compressed into three verses. Verse 43 states the cycle outright: Many times did he deliver them; but they provoked him with their counsel, and were brought low for their iniquity. Read that slowly - many times. Not once, not twice; a wearying, repeating loop of deliverance and relapse. By every human measure the relationship should have collapsed long before; we forgive a few times and then we are done.

But the cycle in this psalm does not end where human patience ends, because it is not held up by human patience at all. The hinge is the next word, the same word that anchored the Red Sea: Nevertheless (v. 44). The people's side of the story is exhausted relapse. God's side is an inexhaustible nevertheless.

The psalm ends in two movements, and both are perfectly placed. First the petition: Save us, O LORD our God, and gather us from among the heathen, to give thanks unto thy holy name, and to triumph in thy praise (v. 47). After forty-six verses of confessed failure, the prayer is not reward us or even forgive us but simply save us - and notice the goal of the rescue. They do not ask to be gathered home merely for comfort or safety, but to give thanks unto thy holy name. The end of salvation is praise; they want to be rescued so that they can worship.

Then comes the doxology: Blessed be the LORD God of Israel from everlasting to everlasting: and let all the people say, Amen. Praise ye the LORD (v. 48). This verse is not really part of the psalm alone; it is the great seal that closes the entire fourth book of the Psalter, lifting the eyes from one nation's failure to God's praise from everlasting to everlasting. And it ends with a summons: let all the people say, Amen. The honest confession of a whole history of sin does not finally collapse into despair.

It rises into a congregation's Amen and one more Praise ye the LORD - the same call the psalm opened with, sung now by people who have looked their failure full in the face and found God's mercy larger than all of it.