Psalm 78: Yet (Part 1)

God’s presence makes two things very clear, His character and our condition. I Corinthians 13:12 says “we see in a mirror dimly”. John 1:18 tells us “No one has ever seen God”. Our conclusions and our assumptions about God are all a bit tainted, all a bit veiled unless and until He makes Himself known. That’s what Jesus did, He is “the image of the invisible God” and the One who made God known. As much as we can only see the truth of God’s character through the person of Jesus, we also can only see the reality of our condition through Jesus. If Jesus is, as Colossians 1:15 says, “the image of the invisible God”, and we were made in the image of God as Genesis 1:27 testifies, then Jesus didn’t just come to reveal who God truly is, but also who we, as humanity, were meant to be. In God’s presence we discover that He is greater than we ever realized, and we have the potential and the purpose to be more than we have allowed for. Jesus is both our Savior and our example, He became sin that we might become the righteousness of God, He paid for us so that we could become like Him. To be very blunt and make this very simple, it’s not enough to be forgiven, we have been forgiven so that we could be changed. When we see God through Jesus, we see how the holy One has come to us so that we might become holy, He came to us so that we could then go with Him.

Psalm 78 beautifully and sharply leads us on this journey by using the generations of Israel as our example. There is a word that is used to describe both the actions of God and the actions of God’s people, a word that we need to be moved by until it can be removed from us, the word is “yet”. It’s used four times in this long psalm, twice it refers to the actions of God and twice to the actions of Israel. I’m afraid that it could be used to the actions of my life far more than twice.

The psalmist described God’s leadership of Israel from Egypt to the Promised Land. God “performed wonders, He divided the sea . . . In the daytime he led them with a cloud, and all the night with a fiery light. He split rocks in the wilderness and gave them drink . . . He made streams come out of the rock and caused waters to flow like rivers.” God met every need, He did more than meet needs, He produced abundance, He showed love, He proudly and cheerfully cared for Israel the way a father cares for his son. The picture being painted of God in these verses reminds me of what Jesus said in Luke 12:32, “it is your Father’s good pleasure to give you the kingdom.” God doesn’t just do what we need, He doesn’t begrudgingly answer our prayers, He joyfully orders our steps, He happily causes us to hunger so that He can feed us with things we nor our fathers have ever eaten before (Deuteronomy 8:3), He goes out of His way to put us the way with Him.

But then there is that word, “Yet”. “Yet they sinned still more against him, rebelling against the Most High in the desert.” How did they rebel against God? Is this where they set up idols, where they joined with sinful nations, where they rejected Him and chose others for themselves? They did all those things, but the psalmist is very specific about Israel’s rebellion in this instance, “They tested God in their heart by demanding the food they craved. They spoke against God, saying, ‘Can God spread a table in the wilderness? He struck the rock so that water gushed out and streams overflowed. Can he also give bread or provide meat for his people?” Their rebellion was that they gave more attention to what they craved than what He had provided, they questioned God’s ability because what they had was no longer what they wanted. Rather than endure with Him in trust, they rebelled against Him, testing Him, almost trying to see if they could bait God into giving them the next thing because they had grown tired and dissatisfied with the current thing.

How often is where we are not where we want to be? We like to think of ourselves as forward thinking, but often all we really are is presently discontented, the psalmist called that rebellion. One of our greatest signs of rebellion is the presence of cycles, those things that we get free of and then go back to, the habits that we change for a season but then fall back into when the newness of the season changes or our desire for the comfortable and familiar takes hold. Dissatisfaction is not a sign that a season is over nearly as much as it can be a call to choose faithfulness and endurance. Israel got tired of eating bread from heaven. They jumped back into their cycle of despising what they had because they wished for something else, they stopped giving thanks and started offering complaints. God fed them, yet they complained about what they were being fed.

I don’t fully know how to explain it, but we are a people of cycles and if our cycles are not broken, we keep going around in the same circles. Our rebellion is rarely found in great actions against God where we curse His name, build an idol or run headlong into sin. Our rebellion is usually found when we resist discomfort, when we get tired of being consistent, when we give room to our craving. God is good, yet we forget and when we forget we willingly and willfully jump back into our cycles.

Tomorrow I will write about the “yet” of God’s character, the great hope we have because His character does not change in or because of our calamity. But to rightly see God we must willingly see ourselves. I would encourage you to join me in searching our hearts and our lives today and see if we have made room for rebellion by giving in to our cycles. Maybe you are a person that starts well, that gets excited in the beginning, that can see the value of change, but once the excitement wears off, the calling of comfort seems to take over and the changes that had been productive but costly start to slowly get traded for what we are used to. Forgive me if this sounds harsh, but if there are things that we have committed to but then walked away from, we are living in rebellion. That’s our “yet”. We want change to be sudden and lasting, but true change is not when the water rushes out of the rock to quench our thirst, but when we remember that water the next time we are thirsty, and choose not to give in to our craving to complain, to fear, to lash out or to find our own way, and we wait for the next provision from the One who promised that He would always provide. Cycles are broken when change is embraced and when our actions become consistent. The “yet” of our rebellion is only overcome by a commitment to consistently remember what God has done and to live differently than we have lived before,  doing new things that may feel difficult, but even more, to not do the old things that come so easily.