Psalm Category: Historical psalm

Central Thought: God has been a faithful Shepherd of His people throughout history.

Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it,” George Santayana wrote. This thought was not original with him. The Bible, in general, shows history to be full of lessons we need to heed. Psalm 78 recalls God’s covenant dealings with His people in the past, reviews their repeated tendency to respond faithlessly and reiterates the loving purpose of God to be the Shepherd of His flock, the church. This is presented in three broad challenges.

God has given you a life(vv. 1-11). Whatever else is true about you, you’re alive and God is speaking to you. Are you listening to His law, words, parable and dark sayings (vv. 1-3)? He also wants this truth passed on to your children (v. 4). He calls for us to witness to His truth in family, state and church, so that many will “set their hope in God” (vv. 5-7). He warns us not to waste our lives, as many of our forebears have (v. 8).

The application is a reality check from past history (vv. 9-11). “Ephraim” (Israel) failed again and again. They “did not keep the covenant of God.” How about you? Are you fighting “the good fight of faith” (1 Tim. 6:12)? Or are you dying the slow death of unbelief and indifference?

God has also been good to you (vv. 12-64). The psalmist reviews five centuries of Israel’s history. Three periods are highlighted:

1. In Sinai, God sustained His church in their wilderness experience (vv. 12-39). He did “marvelous things,” but they “sinned even more.” He chastised them, but only after providing abundant food. Angry as the Lord was, His over-arching theme remains that “He being full of compassion, forgave their iniquity” (vv. 38-39).

2. In Egypt, God delivered His people from oppression (vv. 40-53). Even so, every crisis brought griping and backsliding. They “provoked…grieved…tempted…and limited the Holy One of Israel” (v. 41). Why? Two reasons are given for this. One is that they forgot the power of God in bringing them out of Egypt (v. 42). The other is that they also forgot how He had led them as their Shepherd and banished their fears (vv. 52-53). They forgot their own experience of God’s power to save!

3. In Canaan, God provided Israel with an inheritance in a promised land, according to His covenant (vv. 54-64; see Gen. 17:8). Were they any more thankful then? No! Again God chastised them—even to forsaking the tabernacle at Shiloh (see 1 Sam. 4:10-11). For all God’s blessings, we repeatedly backslide. Yet the Lord never writes His people off. Our “faithlessness does not cancel His steadfast love” (H.C. Leupold, Psalms, p. 571)

God is saving a people by His free grace (vv. 65-72). After all that happened, God “awoke as from sleep” and destroyed their enemies (vv. 65-66). He established His election of grace and the true temple worship (vv. 67-69). He raised up “David His servant…to shepherd Jacob His people…and Israel His inheritance” (vv. 70-72).

What does this mean for us and for the rest of human history?

1. Most obviously, this psalm charges us to learn from the past—from the dealings of God with His people and His world. Don’t be like those who “did not believe in God and did not trust His salvation” (Ps. 73:22). Behold God’s love, in history, and believe and follow Him!

2. Most profoundly, this psalm speaks of Christ. Matthew 13:34-35 explains Psalm 78:2 and makes clear that when Jesus spoke in parables, He was fulfilling what “the prophet” Asaph was given to write by the Holy Spirit (see Eph. 3:9). In other words, Christ is the one who is telling us about Himself here. Andrew Bonar comments, “Asaph here was directed to foreshadow Messiah, the Prophet, disclosing the mind and ways of God, where these were hidden from the common eye…just as Jesus, in speaking very obvious and plain things about the seed and the sower…meant all the while to lead the disciples to a ‘concealed background of instruction’—God’s ways toward man, and man’s toward God” (Christ and His Church in the Book of Psalms, p. 234). Jesus is pointing us, through Asaph, to Himself and the gospel way of salvation. He is the meaning and goal of Israel’s history, of your personal history and of the personal eternal destiny of all of us. He is the Shepherd of His sheep (v. 72; see Heb. 13:20).

3. Most personally, this psalm calls sinners to repentance toward God and saving faith in Jesus Christ (Acts 20:21). Today! Personally! With your whole heart!

   4. Most sweetly, this psalm invites the church to pray daily with rising anticipation, “Come quickly, Faithful and True Witness. Come quickly and be again among us, not King only, not Priest only, but Messiah the Prophet, showing that God’s ways are not our ways” (A. A. Bonar, p. 236). Will you say Amen to this?

—Gordon J. Keddie