Psalms 106

The Text

A voice begins with praise, the way a liturgy should, and then does something startling: it confesses. "We have sinned with our fathers," the singer says, and proceeds to walk the whole history of Israel from the shore of the Red Sea to the idols of Canaan, naming each failure without softening one of them: forgetting, craving, envy, the golden calf, the refusal to enter the land, Baal Peor, child sacrifice. Yet threaded through the indictment runs a stubborner refrain, God saving for his name's sake, God hearing the cry, God remembering the covenant. It ends where the singer actually stands: scattered among the nations, praying to be gathered.

The Core

Watch verses twelve and thirteen sit side by side. "Then they believed his words. They sang his praise. They soon forgot his works." Between the singing and the forgetting there is no interval at all in the Hebrew, no explanation, nothing but the terrible speed of it. That is the psalm's theology of the human heart: we are not primarily rebels who hate God, we are creatures with catastrophically short memories. And against that runs God's memory. "He remembered for them his covenant." Salvation here rests on nothing in Israel, not on their improvement, not even on their repentance, but on the fact that God will not let his own name become a lie. Grace is not God overlooking history. It is God outlasting it.

The Common Thread

Twice in this psalm one man stands between God and a people who deserve destruction. Moses "stood before him in the breach, to turn away his wrath," and Phinehas "stood up and executed judgment, so the plague was stopped." The image is military: a wall has been broken and someone puts his body in the gap. The psalm does not idealize either man; Moses himself later "spoke rashly with his lips." But the pattern is unmistakable, and the church has always read it forward. Israel's survival depends on an intercessor who stands where the wrath falls. When the New Testament calls Christ our mediator it is not inventing a category; it is filling one that this psalm has already hollowed out and shown to be inadequately filled.

The Mirror

You have believed his words and sung his praise. Perhaps last Sunday, perhaps at a hospital bedside when the news came back better than feared. And then you soon forgot his works. The mortgage came due, the diagnosis returned, the child stopped calling, and you found yourself calculating as though nothing had ever been delivered. Notice what verse fifteen does to our praying: "He gave them their request, but sent leanness into their soul." Sometimes the most frightening answer is yes. You get the promotion, the house, the relationship you demanded, and something inside thins out. This psalm asks whether your prayers are requests for God or requisitions from him, and it does not flatter you while it asks.

The Profile

The last verse gives it away: "gather us from among the nations." These singers are not in Jerusalem. They are exiles, or the children of exiles, in Babylon or scattered further, singing a hymn in a country whose gods appear to have won. And here is what is astonishing: they do not blame Nebuchadnezzar. They do not construct a story in which Israel is the innocent victim of imperial cruelty. They stand in a foreign city and say, we did this, and our fathers did this, and it was just. That takes a spiritual nerve most of us lack. Confession here is not self-loathing; it is the only honest ground on which a defeated people can still call God good.

The Question

Verses thirty-seven and thirty-eight are almost unbearable. "They sacrificed their sons and their daughters to demons." The people God carried through the sea burned their own children. And the psalm's answer is verse forty: "Yahweh burned with anger against his people. He abhorred his inheritance." Abhorred. That word will not be tamed by talk of God's unconditional acceptance. Yet six verses later he is pitying them again. How do abhorrence and loving kindness live in the same God? The psalm does not resolve it. It refuses both the sentimental god who never recoils and the tyrant god who never relents. What we are given instead is a pattern in time: wrath that lasts a while, kindness that "endures forever." Not an explanation. A direction.

The Main Character

The psalm is a portrait of God, painted almost entirely with the word "nevertheless." "Nevertheless he saved them for his name's sake." "Nevertheless he regarded their distress, when he heard their cry." Fourteen verses of Israel's treachery and then a single adverb that overturns them. This God is not patient because he has failed to notice; the psalm has just spent forty verses proving that he notices everything. He is not indulgent, either. Bodies fell in that wilderness. What he is, is a God whose reasons for saving lie inside himself, in his name and his covenant and the sheer multitude of his loving kindnesses. Israel gives him nothing to work with except a cry. That, remarkably, is enough.

Reflection

Where in the last month have you sung his praise and then, within days, lived as though nothing had been given? What specifically made you forget?

Is there a prayer you are pressing hard that God might answer with a yes that leaves your soul lean? What would it mean to hold it more loosely?

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