This psalm, one of the longer, starts with the injunction to Praise the Lord for his goodness.
The Psalmist then declares the mighty acts of the Lord, and ask God to show him favor when He blesses His people. Then in verse 6, he confesses that the people have sinned even as their ancestors did.
He catalogs some of these transgressions:
Ignoring the miracles done against Egypt
Forgetting His kindnesses
Rebelling against God at the edge of the Red Sea
The psalmist remembers that nonetheless God saved them there and removed their enemy.
Yet His people forgot that quickly and acted on their own.
They tested God and didn’t trust Him
They grumbled against Him and His provision
They worshiped idols
Had it not been for Moses, He would have put them to death.
In spite of this, they despised the promised land
They refused to trust God
They again turned to false gods
They mingled with the nations and adopted their gods
They sacrificed their children and defiled themselves
God gave them over to oppression, and yet still delivered them again.
The psalmist ends by noting that God is merciful, and asking Him to gather the people from the nations.
As I was reading this I was thinking what it would be like to write a song cataloging all my failures. I wouldn’t mind one detailing the highlights of my life… something that would make me look perhaps better than I am… but I’d certainly like to avoid the lowlights. I am not, in my thought-life, prone to ignoring those things. In fact, as part of my relationship with the Lord, I do try and recall and confess my sins. And I’m pretty good at remembering what I’ve done wrong. I have things in my life which I’m deeply ashamed of… deeply embarrassed about. Would I want those things remembered in song? Not at all. But as I had read Psalm 106 this morning and was praying afterward, thank God I don’t have to.
If the Lord were to catalog my life of sin, it would look like this now: Jesus.
Jesus took my sins and buried them. He did that to the past sins, the present sins, and the sins yet to be committed. That’s the record of my sins as He sees them.
I was just thinking of a Phil Wickham song: House of the Lord. One of the verses contains these lines:
He hung up on that cross
And He rose up from that grave
My God’s still rolling stones away
I am a recipient of God’s grace, and I know it. I frequently remember my failures and sins and yet…. Jesus. He is still rolling stones away. He moves the stone away from the opening of the grave so that we can walk out free from the wages of our sin- death. I would have had to pay with my life. I was under a death-sentence and had one foot in the grave already. It was only a matter of time before my condemnation- inexorable, irrevocable, inescapable. But Jesus rolled the stone away and I was able to step out of that grave.
So I read Psalm 106 this morning and am thankful that while the psalmist was crying out for God to remember him, my God HAS remembered me, and my catalog of sins, stuffed full, will not be read aloud anymore.