What Does It Take?
In spite of all this they still sinned and did not believe in His wonderful works. Psalm 78:32 NASB
Did not believe – This is quite an amazing statement by Asaph. In spite of all this! Those words are very hard to believe. What more could God have done? He demonstrates His power over all the Egyptian deities. He rescues the people from slavery, and sends them away loaded with treasure. He defeats the Egyptian army and brings His people across the Sea of Reeds without harm. He gives them food and water in the wilderness. And He exhibits decisively what it means to incite rebellion. You would think that no one would doubt Him anymore. But Aspah uses those horribly familiar words, velōʾ heʾĕmeinû. A Hif’il perfect, that is, a caused action completed in the past. They did not believe.
There’s something very important here. You’ll remember that “believe” (ʾāman) is not about cognitive agreement. It’s not propositional faith. To believe in Hebrew means to stake your life on it, to act in ways that make God the absolutely most important person in your life. As Heschel reminds us, if God is not of supreme importance, then He is of no importance. Believing (a continuous action) is doing. That’s why Asaph can say that they still did not believe. They still did not act according to God’s purposes. What this tells us is that believing has very little to do with the facts. They had all the facts. They witnessed God’s miraculous interventions. They could not, and did not, deny that He existed and that He was active in their lives. But this didn’t matter. The problem wasn’t the evidence. The problem was the attitude.
We tend to define attitude as a mental state of mind, but this isn’t the entire truth. Attitude is also feelings, emotional resistance, bodily posture, self-consciousness. The Israelites didn’t have any issues with remembering the facts. They had issues with desiring God. Maybe we would have felt the same way after generations of slavery. Maybe we would have wanted what we wanted when we wanted it as recompense for all those years, but God doesn’t work like that. He uses everything for His purposes, even if some of those things were pretty bad in and of themselves. When we complain that we deserve better, we exhibit the one element that will destroy all divine intervention—ungratefulness. That’s what really kept Israel in the wilderness. They never learned to be grateful. They may have had a right to be upset about their captivity, but they weren’t captives anymore. God redeemed them from captivity—but they didn’t appreciate His effort. Why? I think we all know why, because we are all subject to the same disease. We were treated unfairly, perhaps even worse, and now we want to be rewarded for all we suffered. Maybe we can’t get revenge, but we’ll settle for replacement. We’d like to take the position of our past captors. We’d like to call the shots, to be the ones in control, to dish out what we had to take. In other words, we want to be our own little gods. To get what’s owed us. To go back to that Garden and take what we were denied.
No, believing is not about what God’s already done. It’s about trusting that He knows what He is doing. As soon as we decide we can run the show better than He can, we line up with Asaph’s indictment even if we don’t see what’s really happening.
Topical Index: not believe, facts, attitude, Psalm 78:32
