Psalms Of Faith And Doubt In Ancient Times
56 But they put God to the test and rebelled against the Most High;
they did not keep his statutes.
57 Like their fathers they were disloyal and faithless,
as unreliable as a faulty bow.
58 They angered him with their high places;
they aroused his jealousy with their idols. (NIV)
Here the Psalm turns briefly to the time of the Judges. What might have amounted to some grumbling along the road while they were still traveling with Moses and fighting with Joshua settled into outright idolatry in Canaan. Many of the people exchanged God’s statutes for pagan statues, and they started to bow down to blocks of wood. God had foreseen that this would happen. He warned them through Moses that if they were not faithful they would be overrun by a more powerful nation and would “worship man-made gods of wood and stone, which cannot see or hear or smell or eat” (Deuteronomy 4:28).
Throughout the time of the Judges (about 300 years, from Joshua to Samuel) Israel followed a sad but predictable pattern. A time of prosperity and peace would lead to people becoming lazy in their worship, and they would fall away (this is called apostasy). Then a foreign nation would be permitted by God to test them and oppress them, after which God would raise up a Judge from the people who would win a victory over the foreign nation. But then the cycle would begin again: prosperity, apostasy, oppression, and a Judge would bring victory and prosperity. The final verse of the book tells the story is the saddest spiritual terms: “In those days Israel had no king; everyone did as he saw fit” (Judges 21:25).
We have a lot of idols that surround us. That’s not to say that in our Christian freedom we can’t use money, power, our own human reason and the other blessings of our culture in a God-pleasing way. But when we let anything at all get a leg up over the will and the word of God, then we have permitted a thing “which cannot see or hear or smeel or eat” to become more important to us than the God who created us and who gave up his Son for our sins.
What will we set aside today to worship God more truly? The answer should be everything. He has brought each one of us through good times and bad times, through storms and hard winters, through death and sickness, and his angels keep watch over us. We are his dear children; and we worship him for his saving grace and his eternal goodness. The cross of Jesus Christ is the life raft we cling to: everything else is waterlogged flotsam on the raging sea.
Do not abandon your servants.
Come to us qickly and save us! Amen. (Joshua 10:6)
Pastor Smith serves St. Paul’s Lutheran Church in New Ulm, Minnesota. His wife, Kathryn, attended Chapel from 1987-1990 while studying Secondary Education (Theater and Math) at UW-Madison. Kathryn’s father, John Meyer, was also the first man to serve as a Vicar at Chapel.
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