God Has a Purpose for History -- and study of Psalm 105
- mww
- Jul 16
- 17 min read
God's people should know their history.
Bible Study Ideas and Commentary for Psalm 105
Combined with Psalms 104 and 106, 105 is a reminder of God's mighty works in creation, the exodus, and the exile, that the people were to remember in their times of worship. Likewise, Christian churches have important historical acts to commemorate and rehearse (like the Lord's Supper). But it must start with what God has done in our own lives in salvation.
Give thanks to the Lord, call on his name; proclaim his deeds among the peoples. (105:1)
Getting Started: Things to Think About
History Buff / Show-and-Tell time!
Are you a history buff? What's your emphasis? Do you have any artifacts you could bring in as part of "show-and-tell"?
[I'm a history buff. I'm just trying to decide what to bring that wouldn't bore my group to death.]
In this week's psalm, the psalmist talks about a very important moment in Israel's history, something he wants all Jews to remember for all time. This would open an important general discussion -- what's the value of remembering history?
What Does Your Family Celebrate?
I know I've suggested versions of this general topic during the Thanksgiving/Christmas/New Year holiday season, but it's July! The goal would be to focus on something other than holiday traditions.
What does your family celebrate? Do you go all-out for birthdays? Or graduations? Or certain anniversaries? Please note (and be sensitive about this) that these celebrations don't have to be "happy". Some families place a big emphasis on mournful remembrances. This week's psalm is a good example of a more melancholy remembrance -- the exodus out of Egypt. Many Jews died in slavery, and many Egyptians died trying to keep them in slavery.
But the topic comes back to this: what makes an event something you want your family to remember and/or celebrate? Part of understanding this psalm is understanding why the exodus was so important. And this will lead to a closing idea I'll offer -- what are things/events you think your church should remember and/or celebrate?
What Do Kids Think Is Historically Important?
I'm including this idea because I genuinely don't know the answer. I'm so far removed from "kid culture" that it's not funny. (Seriously. My birthday is closer to the Great Depression than to today.) Are kids still taught about Arbor Day? Flag Day? What do they know about the American war for independence?
I grew up near NASA, so in my elementary school, shuttle launches and landings were big deals that we would watch as a school. (I was in 5th grade for Challenger, and yes, we watched it live. I still remember it.) We would commemorate certain space program anniversaries (not every year, just occasionally).
I went to college at Texas A&M. "If it happens twice, it's a coincidence. If it happens three times, it's a tradition." We had traditions and commemorations for many, many things. Among the favorites to be retold were Sullivan Ross, a governor and early college president, defending the college's state funding by getting into fistfights on the senate floor (maybe apocryphal), and E. King Gill, a rando student, being asked to suit up for the football team when they ran out of players (the origin of the "Twelfth Man" tradition, and true).
All of that to say is that what I found to be historically important is what my community suggested was important. So, what do kids around here find historically important?
I guess I'm also asking the parallel question -- what do kids today appreciate, and what do they take for granted?
Our psalmist wanted all generations to appreciate what God did during the exodus.
This Week's Big Idea: What Makes History Important?
"Why do I have to know who the third president of the United States was?" It's a ... fair question for a high school student to ask.
I know this topic is a change from what I usually put in my "Big Idea" section (for a Bible study page), but I've heard plenty of parallel questions from adults in Bible studies, like "Why do I need to know who Jehoiakim was?" (the third-to-the-last king of Judah)
I think part of the reason history gets a bad rap is the incomprehensible number of names and dates, and "studying history" is reduced to memorizing lists. And that's not fun.
Rather, history tells us the story of "what happened on that date" and "what the person with that name did", and then through study we can learn what makes it important. Stuff on the page of that history book has real-life impact on the society you live in, and learning what it is helps you understand "why" and "how", and if you know "why" and "how", you know how to read the signs of the times.
You have probably heard the phrase "those who ignore history are doomed to repeat it". It's not wrong, but here's my quibble:
It grossly oversimplifies the world. Things change dramatically from one generation to the next; history never truly repeats itself. For example, if your church tried something that didn't work ten years ago, that doesn't mean it won't work this time.
Some things that happened in history are good. History can be as much of an encouragement as a warning. For example, your church might have records of ways God has been faithful to you in the past, helping you trust Him again.
This week, we are studying one of the Historical Psalms -- psalms that tell the story of Israel's history. And such stories aren't just found in the Psalms! In the Prophets, in the Gospels, in Acts, throughout the Old Testament and New Testament you can find stories of what God did in and around His people, from Abraham to the time that book was written. Why? Why does the Bible contain so many stories of Israel's history?
This "Big Idea" doubles as your "Big Question", and I want you to really think about it. One of my degrees is in Church History, so I have a biased buy-in to the topic. I want you to think about this without my very strong opinion.
But I will give you a classic "why study history?" essay from a generation ago. This guy is secular, which is an interesting alternate perspective --
Here are two of his main points:
History Helps Us Understand People and Societies
History Helps Us Understand Change and How the Society We Live in Came to Be
I wholeheartedly agree with both of those. The entire essay is pretty short. (That website is trying to steer students into history degrees; just fyi.)
The psalmist wants God's people to be very knowledgeable about their history. Why?
Bonus Big Idea: The Christian Perspective of History
I'm not going far down this road because it's way into the weeds. But if you are interested in history, you should be interested in the process of recording and interpreting history. Christians should have a view of history that is different from the rest of the world. We believe that history is "linear" (not cyclical) and that God has a purpose for history (history is not random). Those things being true should have a great effect on how we understand and appreciate history.
Here are two wonderful (and relatively short) books that I highly recommend:
Bebbington briefly explains the different schools of thought when it comes to writing history and why the Christian view is superior (because God is real and works in history).
This wonderful little book explains how even the most "impartial" of historians can impose their opinions on history by assuming "where history is going".
[I just realized I have to include Butterfield's Christianity and History! I don't think either of those two books above exist without this book. It starts with "The God of History" and takes off from there. Intrigued?]
Where We Are in Psalms -- The Historical Psalms
A number of psalms focus on historical events; psalms "classified" as "Historical Psalms" often include 78, 105, 106, 135, and 136. You'll see below that I include Psalm 104 as a historical psalm, but not everyone agrees with me. And frankly, that's okay. The psalmists didn't write psalms to be classified. They wrote them to be an aid to prayer and worship. And as I mentioned in the "Big Idea" above, for some of the psalmists, they prioritized the people reciting events in Israel's history as part of their worship.
(Note: this is why a number of resources call Psalm 105 a "hymn" -- it was clearly intended to be used as part of corporate worship. "Corporate" meaning "the whole group".)
For this week's psalm, I'm focusing on Psalms 104, 105, and 106. The three psalms together tell the story of creation, exodus, and exile. To get the most out of them, you ought to read all three together. You'll notice repeated elements (like "praise the Lord") that turn it into a coherent group.
Psalm 104: Creation
This psalm teaches the story of creation as a historical event. But something that's very cool about the psalm is its use of present tense -- God's act of creation continues to this very day, and in both the original creation and the ongoing creation, we can clearly see God's providential care and creativity. The psalmist's point? Without creation, there is no God's people. So, we should rejoice and praise God for creation at all times.
Psalm 105: Exodus
This psalm tells the story of the covenant God made with Abraham. BUT the psalmist immediately acknowledges the slavery of Abraham's descendants in Egypt. But lest anyone think that God abandoned His covenant with Abraham, the psalmist quickly retells how God miraculously delivered His people from slavery by the great plagues. The psalmist's point? God is faithful to the covenant He made with His people, and so we should rejoice.
Psalm 106: Exile
This psalm acknowledges the miserable truth of the repeated rebellion of God's people over the generations -- starting with the generation God miraculously saved from Egypt and how quickly they began grumbling against Him! Eventually, God allowed His people to be conquered and exiled as punishment for their rebellion. BUT, in mercy and love God did orchestrate their eventual release and return, remembering His covenant with Abraham.
Book IV
Psalm 106 is the last psalm in "Book IV", so it's important to note that Book V (the final group of psalms) follows the hopeful ending of Psalm 106 -- a renewal of covenantal hopefulness, that God has not forgotten His covenant with the people (particularly an emphasis on David, who is portrayed as a type of messiah in those psalms, pointing us all to the true Messiah Jesus).
This suggests that Psalm 106 was written after the return from exile. Whether Psalms 104-105 were written at the same time is not important; they were seen as telling the first part of the story that Psalm 106 finished --
God created the world
God created the people of Israel
God redeemed the people of Israel
This Week's Focal Passage Is Insufficient
All of that to say ... If you just read this week's lesson in the lesson guide, you won't see any of that. The focal passage completely skips the part of the psalm about the exodus. And yet the exodus is the whole point of the psalm! The psalmist(s) is using history to teach the people important lessons:
God faithfully preserves the world
God faithfully observes the covenant
God holds His people accountable when they break the covenant
How did you answer the earlier question of why history is important? Read Psalm 105 (or 104-106) and then answer how the psalmist thinks history is important.
Salvation History for Christians
We studied Exodus within the past year. If you want to review anything, skim:
For our purposes today, the point would be that the Passover (as part of the exodus) became the defining event for Judaism, something they were told to commemorate every year forever.
The parallel event for Christians is not Easter. We celebrate the resurrection of Jesus every Sunday. Instead, our event is the Lord's Supper, which is the fulfillment of Passover. (Note: this is why some church share the Lord's Supper once a year. Biblical evidence suggests that the early churches shared it much more frequently.)
Just as the entire Passover celebration is one giant historical lesson about what happened during the exodus, the Lord's Supper is a kind of symbolic sermon, teaching everyone the basics of atonement and salvation.
(Note: God included multiple festivals throughout the year teaching different parts of Israel's covenant relationship with God; Passover/exodus wasn't the only one! God's people had plenty of opportunities to learn about the covenant and why they should obey it.)
Application for Christians
The psalmist wrote these hymns so the people would have access to important truth about God and their relationship with Him. The people were supposed to rehearse/sing these truths regularly in their worship. How does this help us in worship today?
It makes me think about something we talked about with Psalm 96:
Our songs in worship (and we should sing in worship) should include
songs to God
songs about God
songs about what God has done in our lives
All of those things are important. Psalm 104-106 are about some mighty acts of God -- and those acts include judgment against sin and rebellion. Do our worship services tell the story of God? Or are they primarily just about us?
Part 1: Call to Worship (Psalm 105:1-6)
1 Give thanks to the Lord, call on his name; proclaim his deeds among the peoples. 2 Sing to him, sing praise to him; tell about all his wondrous works! 3 Boast in his holy name; let the hearts of those who seek the Lord rejoice. 4 Seek the Lord and his strength; seek his face always. 5 Remember the wondrous works he has done, his wonders, and the judgments he has pronounced, 6 you offspring of Abraham his servant, Jacob’s descendants—his chosen ones.
If you are familiar with the background I shared above, this psalm should be pretty engaging. I really don't have a lot to add.
You should have noted the repeated structure in Psalm 104-106:
Praise the Lord! ... for His amazing work of creation.
Praise the Lord! ... for remembering His covenant and rescuing His people from slavery in Egypt.
Praise the Lord! ... for being faithful to His covenant, even if that meant punishing His people for their covenant-breaking.
In other words, this is about big-picture acts of God. There is nothing wrong with celebrating the little blessings of God -- like making the green light or finding a parking spot. In fact, we should acknowledge and be thankful for such things! But we need to be aware that God is at work in the world at a cosmic level. Jesus conquered death and hell! God has sent the church to the whole earth with the message of salvation! People of every generation have worked in the power of God to push back the darkness of lies and sin!
We celebrate God in the little things, and we celebrate God in the big things.
Why?
Why should we remember the acts of the Lord? This answer should directly connect to anything you have said already about the importance of learning history.
Some quick observations --
Verse 1 calls on us to take the content of our worship to the entire world. In other words, our worship and our gospel presentations should cover the same territory.
Verse 2 clarifies something that some Christians find strange: our worship should be telling God things that He already knows. We're not trying to come up with nice things to say about God; we are declaring that we acknowledge Him as the Author and Actor of those great deeds.
Verse 3 reminds us that we can boast in the Lord (and nothing else).
Verses 4 and 5 answer that question of "why?": the God who performed these incredible deeds is the same God who has claimed you as His own. (Today, we sing that "the same power that raised Jesus from the dead lives in us".)
Verse 6 puts all of this into real historical context -- the nonfictional men Abraham and Jacob who made a covenant with God in real time and place, and their descendants (for whom the psalm was written).
So with all of that, we can make some application for ourselves as Christian. Our worship can and should be intensely personal -- God saved me (I am a child of Abraham). But our worship should also be declarative and absolute -- God sent Jesus to provide salvation for all who believe.
That second statement is absolutely true, and anybody in the world could declare it in a worship service. Even when we "feel far from God", we can know these absolute truths about what God has done in history.
Aside: Psalm 106
The psalmist really leans into the "absolute truth of history" in Psalm 106. After all, when the people return from exile, they might be feeling some whiplash. "Does God still love us?" "Why did God let these terrible things happen to us?" And so the psalmist has them rehearse these statements of absolute truth --
God created the world
God entered into a covenant with Abraham
Abraham's descendants violated the covenant and were punished
Regardless of how the people "feel", those statements are true. The psalmist wanted the people to build their personal "feelings about God" on those truths.
Likewise, even when our "feelings" are unpleasant, there are truths about God we can depend on.
Part 2: Observe the Covenant (Psalm 105:7-11)
7 He is the Lord our God; his judgments govern the whole earth. 8 He remembers his covenant forever, the promise he ordained for a thousand generations— 9 the covenant he made with Abraham, swore to Isaac, 10 and confirmed to Jacob as a decree and to Israel as a permanent covenant: 11 “I will give the land of Canaan to you as your inherited portion.”
Now, the psalmist roots his call to worship in that covenant God made with Abraham. If you need a refresher, we studied it a little more than a year ago --
That page includes a summary of all of the covenants of the Bible, including links to some great resources by The Bible Project.
Now -- the key question for today: why is it important that we know that God is faithful to His covenants (that He keeps His promises)?
I really don't know anything more important to us about God.
Think about it -- our salvation is essentially a covenant between God and Jesus. Jesus fulfilled the covenant on our behalf, and God agreed to accept Jesus as our substitute in the covenant. What if God decided to change His mind?
!
That's the psalmist's point. God made this covenant with Abraham to be "permanent". And it was -- it was fulfilled in Jesus, and now Jesus offers a New Covenant in His blood to us who are not physical descendants of Abraham. (All of that was hinted at in the covenant with Abraham -- his descendants were to bless the entire world, and they failed to do so, both pointing to the need for Jesus and also clarifying how Jesus would transcend blood relationships.) But on the psalmist's side of Jesus, declaring God's faithfulness to His covenant with Abraham was paramount. "Don't doubt that God will fulfill His promises to Abraham through us."
The most important application for us is the promise of salvation.
But it's also a reminder that our worship is rooted in God and God's actions, not our feelings about God (or our feelings in general). Do you see why that is important?
What We Skip: Psalm 105:12-41
This is a fascinating summary of the journey to and from Egypt. The emphasis is on the plagues, but the psalmist goes all the way back to Abraham the sojourner and all the way ahead to the manna and quail in the wilderness. The psalmist's point is that God was faithful to His covenant with Abraham.
This is why we have to include Psalm 106 in our reading. Psalm 106 picks up at the exodus from Egypt, but the psalmist here emphasizes how the people grumbled and doubted and rebelled. Even after the miraculous plagues, the people still doubted!
That doubt and rebellion characterized God's people through the wilderness. (By the way, there's an amazing Phineas reference in 106:30. History tells us who Phineas was and what he did.) Accordingly, the destruction of Israel and Judah were in keeping with the covenant through Moses. And yet God remembered His covenant with Abraham and brought His people out of exile and back to the Promised Land.
Part 3: Because God Observed the Covenant (Psalm 105:42-45)
42 For he remembered his holy promise to Abraham his servant. 43 He brought his people out with rejoicing, his chosen ones with shouts of joy. 44 He gave them the lands of the nations, and they inherited what other peoples had worked for.
45 All this happened so that they might keep his statutes and obey his instructions. Hallelujah!
And here you go. A simple conclusion and application.
Psalm 104: Let us praise and obey the God who created the world.
Psalm 105: Let us praise and obey the God who rescued our people from slavery.
Psalm 106: Let us praise and obey the God who brought our people from exile.
Verse 44 is a bit controversial. Essentially, God brought the people into "the Promised Land" -- a land where the cities were already built, the roads already carved, and the fields already prepared. It is a picture of grace.
["But wait," you say, "that's not fair or gracious to the people who built those cities and planted those fields!" And then we get into an argument about Columbus Day vs. Indigenous Peoples Day. So. The Canaanites were enemies of God, which they proved repeatedly, and God had already sent His people into slavery for 400 years to give them full opportunity to repent. They were not innocent bystanders in all of this. But, what God told the Jews to do in the Promised Land 3,500 years ago has nothing to do with the activities of settlers in other parts of the world. Don't draw parallels.]
The end result of God's gracious activity should have been the faithful obedience of the people to the covenant.
And that brings me back to something I talked about last week from Romans 6. What should be our reaction to our salvation? Is it "sin with impunity because God has to forgive us"? Definitely not! That was one of the grave errors of those early Jews. Instead, it must be "thank You God for saving me and giving me a new heart and a new spirit; help me live for You all the days of my life".
It's the same thing the psalmist said should have been true of the Jews. "You weren't there, but remember the joy of the people when they were released from slavery to Egypt."
And this is one of the great differences between the religion the psalmist spoke of and Christianity -- we don't base our religion on what happened to somebody else; our religion is based on what God has done in our own lives. (The way I'm using that word here, Christianity is the only true "religion".)
Let's wrap this up. Our salvation is something that has "happened" to us, not to somebody else. If you don't have a personal experience of salvation, you need to talk to somebody in your church about that. Salvation is the most important thing.
But the history of God's actions for somebody else is still helpful to us. We celebrate what God has done for others because (1) it helps us see how God is still at work in the world, and (2) it gives us a picture of the kind of thing He might do in our life. We celebrate what God has done in the past because (1) it reminds us of God's mighty works, and (2) it gives us a picture of something God might do again. (I use the word "might" because God alone knows the future.)
And that takes me to one last topic for discussion.
Closing Thoughts
What Should Your Church Remember and/or Celebrate?
This is a tricky one because not everybody is going to agree about this. And there might be some "sacred cows" in your church.
The psalmist told the people to remember the exodus and the plagues. And rightly so! It's basically the foundational event of the Jewish identity!
Consequently, I hope and assume your church celebrates the Lord's Supper and baptism with everything you have!
But assuming your church rightly covers the basics (and I know that's a dangerous assumption), what else should your church celebrate?
Based on the "vibes" of Psalm 105, I believe you should celebrate God's continued faithfulness to your church family. When people are saved, when people join your church, even when there's a strong offering -- you should celebrate that as a reminder of God's mercy and love. When church members have a victory over sin, when someone surrenders to a call to ministry or missions -- you should celebrate that as an encouragement to God's people that God is at work among them. Even big scary things, like rebuilding after a fire or tornado -- you should celebrate that as a reminder that God was with you even in the hardest of times.
The controversies arise when a church member doesn't think the church as a whole is emphasizing a particular celebration enough, or that the church doesn't do something often enough. That's something for your church to work through; I can give you no hard and fast rules. If something is important to you and your family, you should celebrate it (or commemorate it, depending on the context). Don't worry if it's just you doing it.
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