Psalm 106 Summary - 5 Minute Bible Study

Psalm 106 Short Summary:

Psalm 106 is a record of God’s mighty works done for the people of Israel and Israel’s response to those works. Unfortunately, the people of Israel generally responded to God’s works with faithlessness. This chapter lists a number of Israel’s significant failings and shows how God was faithful to Israel even though Israel wasn’t faithful to Him.

Psalm 106 Summary

AUTHOR:

• No author is named for Psalm 106.

NEW TESTAMENT REFERENCES:

• Romans 1:23

THEMES:

• God’s faithfulness to Israel.

• Israel’s repetitive unfaithfulness to God.

DEFINITIONS:

• Baal of Peor (106:28) – Baal was an idol worshipped by the Canaanite people and the surrounding nations.

OUTLINE:

• THE FAITHFULNESS OF GOD IN THE MIDST OF ISRAEL’S UNFAITHFULNESS (106:1-48):

  • Psalm 106 appears to be a continuation of the history of Israel in Psalm 105. Psalm 105 discussed the faithfulness of God, while Psalm 106 discusses the unfaithfulness of the Israelite nation.

  • The psalmist begins by again calling on his countrymen to praise the Lord for His marvelous deeds.

  • Many of their ancestors had witnessed God’s work, but it hadn’t spurred them on to greater faithfulness.

  • They witnessed the 10 plagues in Egypt and the Red Sea crossing, but they still refused to trust God.

  • They complained against the Lord in the wilderness because they didn’t have the food they wanted.

  • Men like Dathan and Abiram rebelled against God’s chosen leaders and had to be punished by the Lord.

  • The Israelites made idols to replace the Lord, like the golden calf they fabricated at the base of Mount Horeb (Sinai).

  • “They exchanged the glory of God for the image of an ox that eats grass” (106:20).

  • God was half-tempted to destroy them, but Moses plead with the Lord to spare them.

  • When they got to the land of Canaan, they didn’t trust that God would give it to them.

  • They made forbidden friendships with the people who worshipped the Baal of Peor.

  • The Israelites made God angry at Meribah and caused Moses to sin.

  • They failed to follow God’s instructions to drive out all the idol worshipping inhabitants of the land of Canaan.

  • They mixed with the idolatrous nations, which God had forbidden them to do.

  • They participated in child sacrifice and all kinds of immoral idolatrous practices.

  • Good grew to abhor His people (106:40), and He allowed foreign nations to conquer them.

  • But through all their unfaithfulness, God was faithful and never broke His promises.

  • The psalmist’s prayer was for God to have pity on them, and to gather them from the nations to which they had been scattered so they could worship the Lord again.

APPLICATION:

• I believe God gave us the story of the history of the Israelites because we are meant to see ourselves in their story.

• It’s easy to sit back and think you’re nothing like the people of Israel, not as gullible, not as faithless, not as foolish, but rather than dismissing their history as not applicable to yourself by pointing out the obvious differences, I would encourage you to look for similarities between yourself and the Israelites.

• You may not sin in the exact same way as the Israelites, but I bet some of your sins are motivated by a similar heart to the ones the Israelites possessed.

• I think it is universally true that the closer you investigate the sins of the Israelites, the clearer you’ll see the faults of your own heart.

• Human nature isn’t that much different than it was a few thousand years ago. God didn’t give us an outdated history book that is useless to teach the modern man. The failings of the Israelites are revealed to be our own failures when we take the time to wipe away the surface level of wilderness sand and look below the surface.