Commentary - Psalm 78:40-55

Bird's-eye view

This section of Psalm 78 is a masterful and painful recounting of Israel's persistent rebellion set against the backdrop of God's overwhelming power and faithfulness. The psalmist, Asaph, is not just giving a history lesson. He is driving home a central theological point: the astonishing hardness of the human heart and the even more astonishing long-suffering of God. The structure is a stark contrast. On one side, you have Israel in the wilderness, repeatedly provoking, grieving, and testing God. On the other side, you have the memory of God's mighty acts in Egypt, a display of cosmic power that should have permanently seared gratitude and awe into their hearts. But their memory was short. The psalmist piles up the plagues, one on top of the other, to emphasize the magnitude of the deliverance they so quickly forgot. The passage then pivots from God's wrath on His enemies to His tender care for His own people, leading them like a shepherd. It culminates in their establishment in the Promised Land, a direct result of God's mighty hand. The entire section serves as a covenant lawsuit, reminding the current generation of their fathers' failures and God's unwavering commitment to His redemptive plan, a plan that would ultimately find its fulfillment not in a geographical land, but in the person of Jesus Christ.

The central theme is the sin of forgetfulness. Israel's rebellion was not rooted in ignorance, but in a willful amnesia. They forgot God's power, His redemption, and His signs. This forgetfulness is the native tongue of unbelief. The application for us is direct. We are just as prone to forget the cross, to forget our deliverance from the Egypt of our sin, and to grumble in our own wildernesses. This psalm is a call to remember, to rehearse the mighty acts of God, and to let that remembrance fuel our faith and obedience.

Outline

Context In Psalm 78

Psalm 78 is one of the great historical psalms, a maskil, which means it is a psalm of instruction. Asaph begins by urging the people to listen to his teaching, which he will frame in parables and dark sayings from of old (vv. 1-2). The purpose is explicitly didactic: to tell the next generation the glorious deeds of the Lord, so that they might set their hope in God and not be like their stubborn and rebellious fathers (vv. 4-8). The psalm then unfolds as a selective history of Israel from the Exodus to the reign of David. It is a history that highlights two repeating patterns: God's miraculous grace and Israel's faithless apostasy. Our passage, verses 40-55, is the heart of this historical review, focusing on the wilderness generation's failure and contrasting it sharply with the power God displayed in the Exodus. It sets the stage for the subsequent sections which describe further rebellion in the land and God's ultimate choice of Judah, Zion, and David to carry His purposes forward.

Key Issues

Selective Memory and Stubborn Hearts

One of the key things to understand about sin is that it thrives on a bad memory. Not a faulty memory, like forgetting where you put your keys, but a culpably bad memory. A selective memory. The Israelites in the wilderness were not suffering from a cognitive deficit; they were suffering from a corrupt heart that refused to dwell on the right things. As Asaph lays out the case, he shows that their rebellion was not a one-off event. It was a pattern, a lifestyle. "How often," he says. "Again and again." This is what sin does. It establishes grooves in our souls, and it becomes easier and easier to roll down the same path of complaint, unbelief, and rebellion.

The antidote to this is a cultivated, disciplined, Spirit-filled memory. This is why the Scriptures constantly command us to "remember." Remember the Sabbath day. Remember that you were slaves in Egypt. Do this in remembrance of Me. The Christian life is a life of active remembrance. We are to rehearse the stories of God's faithfulness, both in Scripture and in our own lives. We are to preach the gospel to ourselves every day, reminding our fickle hearts of the Egypt we were saved from and the cross that saved us. The Israelites failed because they let the present discomfort of the wilderness erase the memory of the past deliverance from Egypt. We fall into the same trap whenever we let our current trials, big or small, eclipse the glory of our salvation in Christ.

Verse by Verse Commentary

40 How often they rebelled against Him in the wilderness And grieved Him in the wasteland!

The psalmist begins this section with an exclamation of exasperated sorrow. It is not just that they rebelled, but the frequency of it. How often! The wilderness, which should have been a place of grateful dependence, became the theater of their constant provocation. And notice the emotional language used of God. They grieved Him. This is anthropomorphic language, of course, but it is inspired anthropomorphism. It teaches us that our sin is not an abstract violation of a cosmic rulebook. It is a personal affront to our covenant Lord who loves us. Our rebellion causes Him grief, like the grief of a father over a prodigal son.

41 Again and again they tested God, And pained the Holy One of Israel.

This verse intensifies the charge. "Again and again" reinforces the relentless nature of their sin. They tested God. This is the sin of Massah and Meribah (Ex. 17:7), where they essentially demanded that God prove Himself to them on their terms. It is a profound arrogance, putting God in the dock and requiring Him to perform to our satisfaction. And in doing so, they pained the Holy One of Israel. The title used for God here is significant. He is the Holy One, utterly separate from sin, and yet He had bound Himself in covenant to this unclean people. Their sin was a constant, painful offense to His very nature.

42 They did not remember His power, The day when He redeemed them from the adversary,

Here is the root of the whole problem: they forgot. Specifically, they forgot two things. First, His power, His hand, the sheer omnipotence He had displayed. Second, they forgot the purpose of that power: their redemption. They forgot the day He bought them back from the adversary, Pharaoh. This is the essence of unbelief. It is not an intellectual problem, but a moral one. It is a refusal to hold in the forefront of your mind the most important facts of your existence. For a Christian, this is the sin of forgetting the cross, the day Christ redeemed us from our great adversary, Satan.

43-44 When He performed His signs in Egypt And His miracles in the field of Zoan, And turned their rivers to blood, And their streams, they could not drink.

The psalmist now begins to jog their memory, and ours. He starts a catalogue of the plagues, the very signs they had forgotten. He mentions the "field of Zoan," an ancient capital in the Nile delta, grounding these events in real history and geography. The first plague mentioned is the turning of the Nile to blood. This was not just an inconvenience; it was a direct assault on the gods of Egypt, for whom the Nile was a source of life and an object of worship. God demonstrated His sovereignty by turning their source of life into an instrument of death.

45 He sent among them swarms of flies which devoured them, And frogs which destroyed them.

The list continues. The plagues were a systematic de-creation of Egypt. God had brought order out of chaos in Genesis, and now He was returning Egypt to chaos. He sent swarms of flies and hordes of frogs. These were not just pests; they brought devastation. The flies devoured them, and the frogs destroyed them. God was showing that He has total command over the creaturely order, and He can turn the smallest of creatures into a ravenous army.

46 He gave also their crops to the grasshopper And the fruit of their labor to the locust.

The assault moves from the people to their livelihood. The entire agricultural foundation of Egypt's economy was wiped out. What the grasshopper left, the locust devoured. This was a direct strike against their prosperity and their future. It was a demonstration that every good gift, including the harvest, comes from God, and He can withdraw it at will.

47-48 He killed their vines with hailstones And their sycamore trees with frost. He gave over their cattle also to the hailstones And their herds to bolts of lightning.

The de-creation continues with a terrifying storm of hail and fire. This plague destroyed their luxury crops (vines) and their useful timber (sycamores). It also struck down their livestock. This was not a natural weather event. It was a targeted, supernatural judgment, demonstrating God's rule over the heavens as well as the earth.

49 He sent upon them His burning anger, Fury and indignation and distress, A band of destroying angels.

The psalmist now pulls back the curtain to show what was happening in the spiritual realm. Behind the physical plagues was the direct outpouring of God's holy wrath. He piles up the synonyms: burning anger, fury, indignation, distress. This was not a mild displeasure. This was the full force of a holy God's opposition to entrenched, idolatrous evil. And He employed a band of destroying angels as His instruments. This reminds us that the judgments of God are not impersonal forces, but are executed by personal agents carrying out His righteous decrees.

50-51 He leveled a path for His anger; He did not hold back their soul from death, But gave over their life to the plague, So He struck all the firstborn in Egypt, The first of their vigor in the tents of Ham.

God's anger was not chaotic; He leveled a path for it. It was precise and purposeful. The climax of this judgment was the final plague, the death of the firstborn. This was the ultimate strike against Egypt's strength, future, and pride. The "first of their vigor" refers to the firstborn son, who carried the family line and inheritance. By striking them down, God was demonstrating His ultimate authority over life and death. The reference to the "tents of Ham" connects the Egyptians to their ancestral line, showing this to be a judgment on a nation with a long history of opposition to the purposes of God.

52-53 But He led forth His own people like sheep And guided them in the wilderness like a flock; He led them safely, so that they did not fear; But the sea covered their enemies.

Now comes the glorious contrast. The same God who was a consuming fire to the Egyptians was a gentle shepherd to His own people. While Egypt was being de-created, Israel was being created as a nation. He led them out, guided them, and protected them. The language is tender and pastoral. The result of His leadership was that they "did not fear," a state they quickly abandoned through their unbelief. The final note of deliverance is the drowning of Pharaoh's army in the Red Sea. The very instrument of Egypt's judgment was the path of Israel's salvation.

54-55 So He brought them to His holy land, To this hill country which His right hand had acquired. He also drove out the nations before them And apportioned them for an inheritance by measurement, And made the tribes of Israel dwell in their tents.

The narrative arc of redemption comes to its Old Covenant climax. The goal of the Exodus was not aimless wandering; it was inheritance. God brought them to the land He had promised and prepared. He did the work. His right hand acquired it. He drove out the pagan nations, not because Israel was righteous, but because the Canaanites were wicked and God was fulfilling His promise to Abraham. He then settled His people in their inheritance, apportioning it tribe by tribe. He brought them home. This entire story is a type, a foreshadowing, of our greater redemption in Christ, who leads us out of the Egypt of sin, through the wilderness of this life, and brings us to the true promised land, the new heavens and the new earth.

Application

This passage is a bucket of cold water in the face of our casual, modern sensibilities. It forces us to reckon with two profound truths that we are constantly tempted to forget: the heinousness of our sin and the terrifying holiness of God's wrath against it. The Israelites' sin was not simply making a few bad choices. It was a deep-seated rebellion, a constant grieving and testing of the God who had saved them. And we, who have been saved by an infinitely greater redemption, are capable of the very same thing. Every time we grumble about our circumstances, every time we doubt God's goodness, every time we flirt with the idols of this world, we are walking in the footsteps of that wilderness generation. We are forgetting the cross.

The second truth is the reality of God's wrath. The plagues were not an overreaction. They were a just and measured response to centuries of arrogant idolatry and brutal oppression. God's anger is not like our petty, sinful anger. It is the pure, settled, righteous opposition of a holy being to all that is evil. And the plagues are a faint shadow of the ultimate outpouring of that wrath, which is an eternity in hell. The good news of the gospel is not that God overlooks our sin, but that He poured out the full measure of His wrath for our sin onto His own Son. Jesus is our Passover Lamb. He endured the ultimate plague, the curse of death and separation from the Father, so that the destroying angel might pass over us.

Therefore, our application is twofold. First, we must fight the sin of forgetfulness. We must be a people of the book, constantly rehearsing the story of our redemption. We must sing the psalms, preach the gospel, and come to the Table, all to remind our souls of what God has done. Second, we must live lives of grateful obedience. The proper response to such a great salvation is not to test God, but to trust Him. It is not to grieve Him, but to glorify Him. It is to follow our Shepherd, knowing that He who brought Israel to their inheritance will most certainly bring us safely home to ours.