Sin is a reality we must deal with in some way. It is a given in our experience. Before we came to Christ, sin was our master. Those of us who are in Christ no longer serve sin as a master, yet we still battle against the flesh as long as we live in this present evil age. How do we come to terms with the reality of sin in our lives? It seems to me that we have three options. First, we can see sin in all of its horror as cosmic treason, as an attempt to de-God God (in the words of D.A. Carson), and lose all hope. I remember what may have been the most alarming prayer request I have ever heard in my life back in the fall of 2006. I was sitting in a doctoral seminar at Southern Seminary, and before class began the professor was taking prayer requests. One of the students mentioned someone he knew who was convinced that he could never be saved from his sins, and as a result he was contemplating suicide because he thought it would be better for him to go to Hell now than to go to Hell years down the road, after having accumulated a record of more sin and therefore bringing greater wrath on his head. This man saw the horror of sin, and, unless the Lord has since intervened as we prayed that day, the horror of it drove him to despair.
The second option we have is to try to maintain hope by denying or minimizing our sin. It was a handful of years ago that contemporary Christian artist Ray Boltz publicly announced that he was a homosexual. His way of coping with what he thought was a sinful desire in his heart was to affirm openly that it is not sinful after all. He now lives with a male partner, having divorced his wife of over 30 years, and one of his recent music videos features footage from a gay pride parade in Long Beach, California. While many of us may not openly celebrate sin in that way, I think we do seek to cope with the problem of sin in similar ways by minimizing its horror. “Sure, I have a problem with anger, or lust, or pride, but at least I’m not as bad as that person over there.” And by this strategy we assure ourselves that we are okay because our sins are not the serious ones.
The third option—and the biblical one—for dealing with the reality of sin in our lives is to see sin in all of its horror and, nevertheless, to maintain hope. You see, the way to maintain hope is not to minimize our sin. It is to look at our sin squarely in the face, and then to look Jesus squarely in the face, and rejoice that his mercy, his grace, his atoning death, is more than sufficient to cover every last ounce of guilt that lies upon our heads. Martin Luther once communicated this wonderful truth to his colleague Philip Melanchthon in the year 1521 in a letter in which Luther used the now famous phrase, “sin boldly.” What in the world could that mean? Does Luther believe that we should run headlong into sin so that grace may abound to us? No, not at all! Here is the wider context of that famous saying: “If you are a preacher of mercy, do not preach an imaginary but the true mercy. If the mercy is true, you must therefore bear the true, not an imaginary sin. God does not save those who are only imaginary sinners. Be a sinner, and sin boldly, but let your faith in Christ be more bold, and rejoice in Christ who is the victor over sin, death, and the world.” We have nothing to gain from our paltry attempts to justify ourselves by minimizing our sins. Let us be open and honest before God and with one another about who we are, but let us do so without fear, knowing that Christ did not die for imaginary sinners but for real ones like you and me.
Psalm 106 will help us in this. This is a psalm that puts the sins of Israel—and by implication the sins of humanity—right out there, front and sinner. And why? So that we can point the finger at Israel with an air of superiority? So that we can recognize the common sinful nature we share with Israel and weep in despair? No! It is so that we can glorify God for his steadfast love! This is what I mean when I say don’t waste your sins. As you openly and honestly acknowledge them, let them become an occasion to give praise to God.
This psalm forms a chiasm. What that means is that the first section corresponds to the last section, the second section corresponds to the second-to-last section, and so on, all the way down to a middle point, which forms the heart of the psalm. In this case, the first and last are sections of praise, verses 1-3 and verse 48. The second section corresponds to the second-to-last section, and these units contain prayers in verses 4-5 and 47. The middle section of the psalm is a lengthy account of Israel’s sins in verses 6-46, and we will label this a confession. So, altogether, the psalm follows this pattern: praise-prayer-confession-prayer-praise. For our purpose today, we will work from the inside out, beginning with the confession in the middle, and then moving on to the two fitting responses to God’s mercy: supplication and praise. Altogether, the psalm shows us that open acknowledgement of our sin is an essential part of our worship, for it provides us the occasion to glorify God because of his mercy.
We begin with the middle section, the heart of this psalm:
The first thing to note about Psalm 106 is that is connected to Psalm 105. In 1 Chronicles 17, portions of both of these psalms are recorded together on the occasion when David brought the ark of God to Jerusalem. Psalm 105 reflects on the history of Israel with a particular focus on God’s mighty acts of deliverance. Psalm 106 looks back on the same time period with a particular focus on the unfaithfulness of the people. If you look back at the last two verses of Psalm 105, you read, “And he gave them the lands of the nations, and they took possession of the fruit of the peoples’ toil, that they might keep his statutes and observe his laws.” Psalm 106 makes it abundantly clear that they did not.
Verse 6 begins this lengthy section of national confession with a summary statement: “Both we and our fathers have sinned; we have committed iniquity; we have done wickedness.” The Hebrew may be better translated, “We have sinned with our fathers,” indicating that the psalmist’s generation has participated in the rebellions of previous generations by mirroring their behavior: like father, like son. The confession mentions eight different acts of rebellion, and these may be divided up into three different time periods in Israel’s history: the exodus, the wilderness wanderings, and the occupation of Canaan.
The first time period that comes into view is the exodus event in verses 7-10. The psalmist is recounting what happened at the Red Sea in Exodus 14-15. There is an emphasis on forgetting throughout this psalm that begins here in verse 7: “Our fathers, when they were in Egypt, did not consider your wondrous works; they did not remember the abundance of your steadfast love.” You see this theme again in verse 13: “But they soon forgot his works” and in verse 21: “They forgot God, their Savior.” Studying this passage prompted me to ask, why are we so prone to forget God and his past mercies? At root, I believe it is one way that we express our desire to be God in his place. When confronted with the sufferings and trials of this present age, we have a tendency to allow reality to be determined for us, not by what God has said about who we are in Christ and what we stand to inherit with him forever, but rather by what our eyes see. We fancy that we can interpret reality through own senses better than God can interpret it for us through his word. In other words, we think we are wiser than God, and so we are quick to forget him.
This is what Israel did. Seeing the army of the Egyptians in hot pursuit against them, Israel was quick to forget the clear supremacy of God’s power demonstrated through the ten plagues and his faithfulness to Abraham demonstrated through his deliverance of them. So they complained to Moses, accusing him of leading them out into the wilderness to be slaughtered. Yet in spite of Israel’s rebellion, God acted to deliver them. He parted the sea and led them through on dry land and then covered their enemies with water. And he did this, according to verse 8, “for his name’s sake.” It was not because they deserved it, but so that he might demonstrate his power to them and to the nations.
After this event, verse 12 reads, “Then they believed his words; they sang his praise.” Charles Spurgeon commented: “This is mentioned, not to their credit, but to their shame. Those who do not believe the Lord’s word till they see it performed are not believers at all.” Beware the sin of unbelief! Beware the tendency to forget God in the fog of this present age and to think that you are wiser than him. We must walk by faith in every word that God has spoken. Let us be a congregation who praises God for what he has promised before we receive it.
The psalmist then moves into the next period of Israel’s history: the wilderness wanderings. Here he recounts six events of rebellion and the divine response to each of them.
The first is the craving in the wilderness, recounted in verses 13-15. This is a reflection on an episode in Numbers 11 when the people grumbled against Moses because they wanted something more to eat than just manna all the time. So God gave them what they asked by bringing quail into the camp, but, as verse 15 notes, he also punished them for their sense of entitlement by sending “a wasting disease among them.”
The next event recounted is in verses 16-18, which reflects on Korah’s rebellion from Numbers 16. Although Korah is not mentioned by name here, two of his co-conspirators are: Dathan and Abiram. These men, along with 250 other leaders, denied that Moses and Aaron had any right to lead the people and serve as mediators between them and God. The psalmist specifically refers to Aaron in verse 16 as “the holy one of the LORD.” This title picks up on the words of Korah in Numbers 16:3: “For all in the congregation are holy, every one of them, and the LORD is among them. Why then do you exalt yourselves above the assembly of the LORD?” Korah’s point is that the whole nation is made up of priests, holy ones who can draw near the Lord. Moses and Aaron have no business pretending to be in a higher position than everyone else. Moses’ response comes in Numbers 16:5: “In the morning the LORD will show who is his, and who is holy, and will bring him near to him.” And that is exactly what God did, as the psalmist recounts. Verse 17 speaks of the earth opening up to swallow the leadership of the rebellion. Then verse 18 speaks of fire breaking out in their company. This flame burned up the 250 who had joined in Korah’s rebellion. What the psalmist does not mention, but likely intends us to recall when we read this, is that the whole nation almost perished on this occasion. God originally expressed an intention to burn up the whole congregation, but because of the intercession of Moses and Aaron, he only consumed the 250. However, the next day the congregation of Israel grumbled against Moses and Aaron because of what had happened to Korah and the others. In response, God sent a plague among them that killed 14,700 people before Aaron was able to stop it by making atonement with his incense. And so, the wrath of God nearly consumed the whole camp had it not been for the intercession of a mediator.
The next event recounted is the golden calf incident in verses 19-23, a reflection on Exodus 32. While Moses was away from the camp on top of Mount Sinai for forty days, the people became restless and gave into our natural human tendency to want to domesticate God by representing him, not as he has revealed himself, but as we want him to be. So the people made a golden calf, an image they had picked up from the Egyptians, as a representation of God, and they worshiped this calf with sexual revelry that they had learned in Egypt. As the psalmist says in verse 20: “They exchanged the glory of God for the image of an ox that eats grass.” Significantly, when commenting on the rebellion of humanity against God in Romans 1:23, Paul alludes to this verse. Meanwhile, on the top of the mountain, God told Moses what was going on and threatened to obliterate them. Verse 23 reads, “Therefore he said he would destroy them—had not Moses, his chosen one, stood in the breach before him, to turn away his wrath from destroying them.” Moses prayed to the Lord, appealing to his promise to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, and the Lord relented from disaster. Once again, Israel was delivered from annihilation by the intercession of a mediator.
The next event recounted is Israel’s rejection of the promised land in verses 24-27, a reflection on Numbers 14. After having sent twelve spies into the land, the Israelites learned that the people who occupied Canaan were a mighty people, and they, once again, trusted their own interpretation of reality more than they trusted God’s word. They determined that it would be better to go back to Egypt than to die before the Canaanites, and so they decided to choose a new leader instead of Moses and return to their captivity. The psalmist doesn’t mention it, but this was another occasion when God threatened to destroy the whole nation. Once again, Moses interceded for them, and the Lord relented. Nevertheless, as verse 26 reads, “Therefore he raised his hand and swore to them that he would make them fall in the wilderness.” God condemned the entire generation to wandering in the desert for forty years until they had all died. Verse 27 adds, “and would make their offspring fall among the nations, scattering them among the lands.” God did not actually say this in Numbers 14, but he did say in the book of Deuteronomy, particularly in the curses of chapter 28, that if Israel disobeyed his law, they would be sent into exile among the nations. The psalmist is apparently linking Numbers 14 and Deuteronomy 28 together to show how the behavior of the generations that possessed the land of Canaan is no different from that of the wilderness generation, and to emphasize that both will receive the same punishment: banishment from the land.
But we’re not finished yet. The psalmist goes on to recount another event of rebellion, when Israel, for the first time since their deliverance from Egypt, crossed the line into full-blown idolatry, the worship of false gods (the worship of the golden calf had been an attempt to worship the true God in an unauthorized way). Verses 28-31 recount an incident in Numbers 25 when Israel participated in the worship of the Baal of Peor. One man in particular by the name of Zimri brought a Midianite woman into the camp right in front of everybody, and, in a blatant act of defiance against God, engaged in sexual revelry that was associated with this idolatrous worship. Because of the rebellion of Israel, God acted again, sending a plague among his people. But as the psalmist notes in verses 30-31: “Then Phinehas stood up and intervened, and the plague was stayed. And that was counted to him as righteousness from generation to generation forever.” Phinehas, the grandson of Aaron, took up a spear and rammed it through Zimri and the Midianite woman, and this act made atonement for the whole nation. Once again, Israel had been delivered from the wrath of God by the work of a mediator. This act on Phinehas’s part was “counted to him as righteousness,” that is, counted as an act that was right, and the evidence of God’s approval on this act was that he made a covenant with Phinehas to give a perpetual priesthood to his line, and that is what the psalmist means when he says, “from generation to generation forever.”
And so we have seen a definite pattern emerge over the last four incidents recorded in this psalm. Israel rebels, God threatens to annihilate the nation as a result, and then Israel is delivered by the intercession of a mediator, whether Aaron, Moses, or Phinehas.
One final act of rebellion that is mentioned with reference to the wilderness wanderings is the quarreling at Meribah that occurred in Numbers 20, recounted in verses 32-33. This was the occasion when Israel complained again to Moses about having no water, and Moses became so angry that he spoke rashly with his lips and sought to take credit for himself rather than give glory to God in the provision of water that was to come. In Numbers 20:10 Moses said, “Hear now, you rebels: shall we bring water for you out of this rock?” And then Moses struck the rock, apparently in anger, and water flowed out. As a result, God took the promised land away from Moses on that occasion. But the way the psalmist recounts the story, the focus is more on what the people did to provoke Moses to anger: “They angered him at the waters of Meribah, and it went ill with Moses on their account, for they made his spirit bitter.” Israel’s rebellion resulted in the failure of the mediator who had so many times delivered them from annihilation under the wrath of God. Perhaps the psalmist placed this incident last in line in the section on the wilderness wanderings (even though it occurred chronologically before the event at Baal Peor) in order to end this account by showing that the mediators of the old covenant are limited. What Israel needs, and what we need, is a mediator who will not fail us, who will not fall under the judgment of God for his own sins, and who will be there to intercede for us forever, so that the wrath of God may never come over us.
But the confession continues on into the next period in Israel’s history: the occupation of the land of Canaan (verses 34-46). Notice how these verses progress from bad to worse. It begins in verse 34 with a failure to destroy the Canaanites. That resulted in mixing together with them and learning their ways in verse 35, which then led to worshiping their gods in verse 36, which then led to the worst kind of atrocity in pagan worship imaginable, the sacrifice of their own sons and daughters to demons and the pollution of the land with blood in verses 37-38. Verse 39 then gives a summary of Israel’s experience in the land: “Thus they became unclean by their acts and played the whore in their deeds.” Israel, bound to God as a bride through the covenant at Sinai, had become a harlot, giving herself away to the gods of the nations and falling into unthinkable moral degeneration.
So the divine response is recounted in verses 40-43: God gave Israel into the hands of the nations, and this is something that happened over and over again. The verses sound like a description of the period of the judges, a time in which Israel cycled from rebellion to oppression to lament to deliverance to rebellion all over again, except that each time they came back around to rebellion, they seemed not only to cycle, but to spiral downward into greater acts of ungodliness. Verse 43 summarizes it well: “Many times he delivered them, but they were rebellious in their purposes and were brought low through their iniquity.”
Now, the question we must ask here is, “So what?” What does this have to do with us? I think Paul answers that question in Romans 3:19. After quoting a litany of verses that speak of the depravity of man, Paul writes, “Now we know that whatever the law says it speaks to those who are under the law, so that every mouth may be stopped, and the whole world may be held accountable to God.” I take it that “those who are under the law” refers to Israel. So it may seem puzzling that Paul would say that the law condemns Israel specifically “so that every mouth may be stopped, and the whole world may be held accountable to God.” How does that follow? How do the manifest sins of Israel silence the whole world before God? It is because Israel is a mirror to the nations of the effects of Adam’s sin on us all. After Adam failed, God judged the world and gave us a new start through Noah. But soon the world rebelled against God again at the Tower of Babel, and so God judged the world again and made a new start with Abraham and the nation that came from him. And so Israel, representing now the third time the human race has been given a new start, becomes an example to us all of how powerful is the mastery of sin over us. If any nation would have been expected to get things right, it would have been Israel with her abundance of privileges and her clear revelation of God’s law. But the law can do nothing to change a sinful heart, and thus the failure of Israel exposes for us all our own failure and the hopelessness of our condition before the law that condemns us. The failure of Israel should not be for us an occasion to point the finger, but rather an occasion for us all to shut our mouths before God and recognize that we share the same rebellious spirit that we have inherited from Adam. We have all forgotten God. We have all thought that we are wiser than he is, and we have all exchanged his glory for that of the creature.
And yet, after all of this, we have verses 44-47: “Nevertheless, he looked upon their distress, when he heard their cry. For their sake he remembered his covenant, and relented according to the abundance of his steadfast love. He caused them to be pitied by all those who held them captive.” Note three observations about these verses that give us a window into the heart of God. First, “he remembered his covenant.” Which covenant is this? Was it the covenant God made with Israel at Sinai? That is almost certainly not correct. For it was the Sinai Covenant that spelled out the consequences of Israel’s rebellion. For God to “remember” that covenant would mean that he would act to fulfill its stipulations of judgment against his disobedient people. No, we must go farther back than Sinai to the covenant that God made with Abraham in which he obligated himself to bless Abraham with land and descendants, and through Abraham bring blessing to the world. It is this covenant, rooted in the promise of God, not in the law, that stands as Israel’s hope on the other side of failure. Second, notice that it is said that God “relented” in verse 45. This reminds me of the book of Jonah, when the prophet Jonah is so upset that the Assyrians have repented at his preaching, and God has had mercy on them. In Jonah 4:2 he says to God, “O LORD, is not this what I said when I was yet in my country? That is why I made haste to flee to Tarshish; for I knew that you are a gracious God and merciful, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love, and relenting from disaster.” Jonah speaks of God relenting in a context where he is calling to mind the name of God as it was originally revealed to Moses in Exodus 34. In other words, God is a God who relents. This is one way of summarizing his character. He does not hold us under his wrath forever but turns it away from us out of his own mercy. And that leads to the third observation here, also from verse 45, which speaks of God relenting “according to the abundance of his steadfast love.” There’s that key word, hesed. It is the word that sets the tone for the whole psalm, explicating God’s goodness in verse 1. Over the summer, when I preached on psalm 136, I explained hesed as God’s covenant loyalty. Since that time I have learned more about what this term signifies, and I have been persuaded that hesed includes covenant loyalty but is actually bigger than that. As it turns out, it would be more accurate to say that God’s covenant proceeds from his hesed, and not the other way around. That is, God is not in any way obligated to make a commitment to us, but because he is a God of hesed he condescends to promise us blessings out of the freedom of his grace. His favor to us, then, in no way depends on us, but on him alone. For we know from 1 John 4:16 that God is love. And the reason he loves us is not because we are so lovable, but because he is love. It is his very nature to go outside of himself to bless us. He is a God of steadfast love.
So what is the point of this lengthy confession of sins? What is the point of calling to mind the failures of Israel as a reminder of your own failures? I think of a letter that Martin Luther wrote to Jerome Weller in 1530, in which he said this: “When the devil throws our sins up to us and declares that we deserve death and hell, we ought to speak thus: ‘I admit that I deserve death and hell. What of it? Does this mean that I shall be sentenced to eternal damnation? By no means. For I know One who suffered and made satisfaction in my behalf. His name is Jesus Christ, the Son of God. Where he is, there I shall be also.
Don’t waste your sins. Let them be an occasion to strengthen your faith. God’s wrath has been turned away from us! God has provided for us a mediator who is better than Moses, better than Aaron, better than Phinehas! As Hebrews 7:25 declares, “Consequently, he is able to save to the uttermost those who draw near to God through him, since he always lives to make intercession for them.”
So let us turn from confession to two words of application from the remainder of the psalm. Proper confession should lead us to supplication and praise. So, in light of our sins’ inability to overcome the steadfast love of the Lord, let us pray in faith and praise with joy.
First, let us pray in faith. Verses 4-5 and 47 represent two prayers on either side of the lengthy confession. The first prayer in verses 4-5 is an individual prayer: “Remember me, O LORD, when you show favor to your people; help me when you save them.” The psalmist expects God to fulfill his word and save his people. He asks for the blessing of participating in it. Why? So that he may consciously give glory to God, as outlined in verse 5: “that I may look upon the prosperity of your chosen ones, that I may rejoice in the gladness of your nation, that I may glory with your inheritance.” Verse 47 has a similar structure, only now focused on the nation as a whole: “Save us, O LORD our God, and gather us from among the nations, that we may give thanks to your holy name and glory in your praise.” This prayer could indicate a time after the exile, when the people were scattered throughout the nations. However, in light of the fact that it is associated with the bringing up of the ark to Jerusalem in 1 Chronicles 16, I am inclined to say that this gathering may refer to Israelites who had been scattered under enemy oppression during the judges period and during the early period of the monarchy in Israel. Whatever the case, the psalmist expresses a desire for God to gather the fullness of Israel to the promised land and fulfill his grand promise to Abraham.
And this idea of the gathering of Israel is picked up in other places in Scripture, and it is expanded to encompass the elect from all nations. When we shift from old covenant to new, we find that the true Israel, the true seed of Abraham, is Christ, and all those who are joined to him by faith. And the true promised land is a new creation over which we will reign with Christ forever. When God first created the world, he created a domain and then placed his people, Adam and Eve, in it. In the new creation he is doing things in reverse. First he is creating a people, a new humanity in Christ, and once he has them he will create a new heaven and a new earth for them to inhabit. Our prayers must be oriented to this world to come. In fact, that is what Jesus taught us to pray: “Your kingdom come, your will be done on earth as it is in heaven.” If we are in Christ, our sins cannot keep us from the inheritance that is ours. Let us pray daily that God will grant it to us and keep us in the faith until we reach it.
And then a second word of application is let us praise with joy. Verses 1-3 and verse 48 are words of praise. Verse 1 commands us to praise because of the Lord’s goodness, because of his steadfast love, and verse 2 speaks of his “mighty deeds.” Verse 3 might at first seem out of place. Why pronounce a blessing on those who do righteousness here? This too is a word of praise. It is a declaration of God’s goodness and a summons to his people to honor him by imitating his character and believing his word that he blesses those who are upright. Nevertheless, it forms a contrast with what follows as the litany of sins is recounted, showing us that, while obedience leads to blessing, those who have been disobedient are not without hope because of the Lord’s steadfast love. And then the psalm closes, as does Book IV of the Psalter, in verse 48 in a fitting summons to praise: “Blessed be the LORD, the God of Israel, from everlasting to everlasting! And let all the people say, ‘Amen!’ Praise the LORD!”
The psalm begins and ends with this command: Hallelujah! Praise the Lord! Repeatedly the Scripture commands us to praise. Why? Is it because God is insecure and needs reassurance from us? No. It is because praise is the language of delight. The world is full of people praising what they delight in: grandparents praising their grandchildren to anyone who will listen, car fanatics praising their cars, sports fans praising the skills and abilities of athletes and teams, love-smitten young men writing songs about the girls who have stolen their hearts. We praise the things that delight us because praise is part of the delight. And we are commanded, above all, to love the Lord our God with all of our heart, with all of our soul, with all of our mind, with all of our strength. In order to keep that command, we must praise him. Let his praise be continually on our lips in song, in prayer, and in ordinary conversation. Psalm 106 has just given us plenty of reason to do so.
If you are an unbeliever here this morning, you, like Israel, are standing under the threat of God’s wrath. But there is a way of escape. There is a mediator who is better than Moses who has died for the sins of all who will believe, who has been raised from the dead, and who has ascended into heaven, where he now sits at the right hand of God to intercede for all who are his. Will you become his today? Will you seek deliverance from the wrath to come by turning to Christ? Your sins are many, and they are horrific. And Christ’s atonement is sufficient for them all. Come to him in faith, and declare your faith publicly through baptism.
If you are a believer here today in good standing with a local church, we invite you to come to the Lord’s table to celebrate the death that has delivered us from the wrath of God that our sins deserve. As you come, remember that Christ did not die for imaginary sins. Be a sinner, and sin boldly, but let your faith in Christ be more bold. Amen.