God’s Goodness and Israel’s Waywardness.
For the choir director; [a]on the Gittith. A Psalm of Asaph.
81 Sing for joy to God our strength;
Shout joyfully to the God of Jacob.
2 Raise a song, strike the timbrel,
The sweet sounding lyre with the harp.
3 Blow the trumpet at the new moon,
At the full moon, on our feast day.
4 For it is a statute for Israel,
An ordinance of the God of Jacob.
5 He established it for a testimony in Joseph
When he [b]went throughout the land of Egypt.
I heard a language that I did not know:6 “I [c]relieved his shoulder of the burden,
His hands were freed from the [d]basket.
7 “You called in trouble and I rescued you;
I answered you in the hiding place of thunder;
I proved you at the waters of Meribah. [e]Selah.
8 “Hear, O My people, and I will [f]admonish you;
O Israel, if you would listen to Me!
9 “Let there be no strange god among you;
Nor shall you worship any foreign god.
10 “I, the Lord, am your God,
Who brought you up from the land of Egypt;
Open your mouth wide and I will fill it.11 “But My people did not listen to My voice,
And Israel did not [g]obey Me.
12 “So I gave [h]them over to the stubbornness of their heart,
To walk in their own devices.
13 “Oh that My people would listen to Me,
That Israel would walk in My ways!
14 “I would quickly subdue their enemies
And turn My hand against their adversaries.
15 “Those who hate the Lord would pretend obedience to Him,
And their time of punishment would be forever.
16 “[i]But I would feed you with the [j]finest of the wheat,
And with honey from the rock I would satisfy you.”
We see here another psalm that highlights the rebellion of Israel, in spite of God’s goodness to them. And in the middle of this, the psalmist points out one of their biggest downfalls in verse 9. Time and again, they were swayed by false gods, strange gods, and especially foreign gods. God told them specifically not to marry into the nations around them, but inevitably, they did.
And you’ve likely heard the phrase, “happy wife, happy life”. Imagine then, that your wife wants to bring her idols and “gods” with her, and you’re supposed to be serving only one God, and you begin to see the problem. Maybe that’s hard to imagine in our culture, yet the real problem is still to come in verse 12. The real issue was that they wanted to have their own way.
Marrying foreign wives wouldn’t have been a problem if they followed God’s ways, and idols would have been a mere annoyance. Worse than strange and foreign gods was putting themselves in the place of God. And that’s a trap we also fall into, and far too often. See, it wasn’t that these idols were so amazing and powerful. They couldn’t hold a candle to God. But following the law of a God they couldn’t see rather than doing life their own way? That was too much for them.
So it is in our lives, following God’s plan is difficult if you’re not intentional about it every single day. It only takes a day to let your guard down, and then another, and another. Pretty soon, you forget why you had your guard up at all, and you’ve nestled into a nice comfy rut on the road of complacency.
Instead, we need to “take up our cross” daily, because it isn’t really our cross, it’s His. The burden isn’t as heavy as we think, but it does require intentionality. As we’ve been learning in our FPU class, intentionality is key, and that applies to so many areas of our lives. Let’s not be content with mediocrity, but chase after the “prize that is set before us”. Running the race with all we’ve got, and all of Him on top of that, we are destined for “life to the full”. Don’t settle for anything less.