I am using the daily Bible reading schedule from “The Bible.net” for my daily Bible reading.

Today, I am reading and commenting on Psalms 78-81.

    The first psalm in today’s passage, Psalms 78, tells us the importance of teaching our stories, and the stories of our ancestors, to the next generation. We need to teach the young about the mighty deeds which God has performed in our lives and tell them the stories we were told by those who came before us. Each generation must set their hope in God anew and if they are going to do that they need to hear and understand what God has done in the past. There is a very human tendency to think and act as if history began with our own birth. The only remedy for that is for the elders to teach the young the stories of what went before. We must do more than just teach the next generation God’s commands and our understanding of them, we must teach them why it is important to follow those commands. I will go even further than that. While it is important to teach theology and godly doctrine, it is not possible to truly understand what it means to follow God without learning the stories about what God has done in the past. As a child, my parents and my congregation spent time teaching us the stories from “The Martyr’s Mirror”. In the last few years I have realized that those stories gave me an understanding of what it means to be a Christian which no one who was not so immersed in those stories will ever have.

    Once he made his point about the importance of telling our stories, the psalmist goes on to focus on the stories about how the Israelites had, time and again, failed to obey God and suffered the consequences. He first tells of how the Israelites did not trust God to supply their needs. While they were in the wilderness they craved meat and rather than ask God to provide it, they conspired to return to Egypt to get it. Despite the great miracles which God had already done on their behalf they believed Him unable to give them this thing. God both showed them that He was indeed able to supply their needs and the consequences of not trusting Him. The story reminds us of the danger of not trusting God to supply us with what is best for us. We must learn to ask God for what we want, but to know that perhaps He has not already given it to us because it is better for us not to have it. We must learn to persistently ask God for what we desire, but remain accepting of God’s judgment about what is best for us. If we have been asking God for something that He has not given us, we should re-evaluate our desire to see if perhaps we will not be happier without it. Perhaps the reason we do not have it is because God is teaching us patience and persistence, but perhaps it is because He knows our true needs and desires better than we do.