Ps. 78.22 (lack of appreciation; lack of trust)

Because they did not / trust in God
and did not / rely on his saving work. 

I have only just realized something rather important that has been missed. We have emphasized from the beginning that the ‘passing on’ of the stories of God’s wonders must involve an active appropriation of those stores; a perception of their reality more than a mere knowing that they happened. What I know realize is that this act of perception I was aiming at is contained in these lines: trust and reliance. When the works of God instill within his family a trusting reliance upon him, then they have found their true home in the heart of Israel. Verse 7 speaks of this: “That they in turn would put their confidence in God…”. Likewise verse 8, in negative fashion, speaks of those who “did not keep their heart steady”. Further, this is the failure of the “sons of Ephraim” in verse 9, when they ‘turn back’ on the day of battle. And, I think we might say, this is what the Israelite ‘testing of God’ (vs. 18) represented, when they became “against God” (vs. 17, 19). These verse here make clear that the cause of God’s wrath, while it includes certainly the mockery of him, is the Israelite’s failure to appropriate the ‘works of God’ into a trusting reliance upon him. This re-orients to some degree our previous reflections regarding their ‘domesticating of God’s wonders’. That certainly is the case. However, we now see another level to their sin and rebellion. The wonders are the ‘glue of the covenantal bond’. They are what cause one covenant partner to rely upon the power of the stronger covenant partner. This is why the failure of the sons of Ephraim can be called a failure to “keep the covenant of God” (vs. 10). In other words, the wonders of God were deployed in order (at least on one level) to convince Israel that they could rely upon Yhwh as their covenant partner, their divine Kinsman. When the Israelites however appropriate those wonders and use them as a basis for their own craving for more, they reveal a deeply flawed perception of the wonders themselves. The question is why is that a failure of trusting reliance rather than a lack of appreciation? I think the answer goes back to a previous reflection: the ‘wonders’ of God, his ‘saving work’, are indeed prodigal and overflowing; and, of course, they become the standard to which Israel will return again and again (and again) throughout its history and will indeed look forward to a future, perhaps greater, second exodus; indeed, they are the subterranean stream flowing beneath nearly every psalm of complaint (its echo lingers in every verse). However, what we find here is not a ‘remembering’. Rather, we see a using of the ‘saving works’, a deploying of them back at God, in a form of a test or a challenge. They become the basis for a greater ‘saving work’. And here I think is where the answer lies: Israel is the ‘womb’ of the saving works of God, but when they take God’s seed and use it as a basis for further blessing, they are revealing fundamental rejection and lack of trust in the power of the saving works provided. Israel must stand to God the way a woman stands to a man in the procreative act: receptive. To rebel against this fundamental position is to, Adam-and-Eve-like, attempt to ‘take for oneself’ what is rightfully God’s. In a way, what Israel does in this act is what Sarah commanded Abraham to do with Hagar: to appropriate for one’s self the blessing of being ‘fruitful’ and to deploy it according to one’s own design. Fruitfulness, like the saving works of God (the ‘wonders’), only become a blessing when they originate from God. When they are appropriated in a non-passive manner, they become a curse because they reveal the fundamental lack of trust that these activities of God are to display. They become a testing of God, a being ‘against’ God…an insult hurled at the establisher (the lord) of the covenant itself. Which is why ingratitude and lack of trust almost merge into one. When man’s position is primarily passive—the one blessed—the refusal to properly appreciate that blessing becomes an act of rebellion against the covenant itself.  Although creation and covenant lift man into a real freedom before God, man is, primarily, in both, passive. They dialogue between man and God is established by a prior monologue on God’s part; as John would say, we love God because he loved us first. This is a principle in the order of creation, covenant and salvation. And it is a principle violated by Adam, Abraham and Israel.