Forty Years of Stubbornness

Psalm 95 is the psalm for this week’s lectionary readings, and will be read in churches all over the place as we gather to worship. Many scholars think it was used by ancient Jews at festival times as a way of both praising God and reminding themselves that worship and obedience are inseparable issues. During the season of Lent, such praise and reminder might be helpful to us as well.

The final verse of the first stanza includes powerful words to get us focused on why praise of Him is so important in our lives. “For he is our God, and we are the people of his pasture, and the sheep of his hand.” (95:7) In other words, God provides! Some attempts to paraphrase verse seven say “We are his people whom he cares for as a shepherd cares for his sheep.”

The verses that lead up to verse seven are filled with language that points to God’s greatness and power – ultimately to his capacity – to care for us as a shepherd cares for his sheep. The “depths of the earth” and the “heights of the mountains” are his. The sea is his and it was God who formed the dry land. Our only reasonable response is to worship him, to bow down before him, to kneel “before the Lord our Maker.” (95:6)

All of that language stands in the starkest of contrasts to the second and last stanza of the psalm. How could we fail to listen to Him? Why would we harden our hearts against Him? Even though we have seen His power and might – why do we continue to test Him?

Stubbornness perhaps? The “forty years” of 95:10 remind us quickly of the Exodus, and the forty years of wandering in the wilderness of Sinai – while the Promised Land was “just around the corner.” In Numbers 14:33-34, the Hebrew Bible points out that those “forty years” reflected God’s response to their unfaithfulness. In words that can be a bit disturbing, God declares to the wanderers “you will know what it is like to have me against you.”

What makes all of this so amazing is that these very people, who stubbornly refused to obey God, were daily surrounded by evidence of His “caring for them as a shepherd cares for his sheep.” There’s the daily manna, the water from the rock, the quail, the pillar of fire, the cloud, the bronze serpent lifted up, and, of course, all of the rather spectacular events that God used to begin the journey in the first place. “They do not regard my ways” (95:10) is God’s view of the whole mess.

Forty years of stubbornness got them nowhere. Numbers 14 describes it with this rather haunting phrase, “the last of your bodies lies in the desert.” (14:33)

These 40 days of Lent can be times of reflection, repentance, commitment, and transformation. We have this beyond-description God who is great. He is mighty! He is our Maker. He desires to be our shepherd. Yet sometimes our own stubbornness gets in the way and our own spiritual lives appear to contain little more than a time of roaming around in the desert of our own failure and disobedience.

What could happen if – on those occasions when we meet to worship and we read Scripture that reminds us of God’s greatness and we sing songs that proclaim His greatness and we hear sermons and Bible studies that focus on His greatness – we determine in the deepest places of our own hearts that we will obey Him?

Unlike the children of the Exodus who are described as “a people who err in heart, and they do not regard my ways,” (95:10) we are called to be men and women who seek after the heart of God and in that seeking, demonstrate the love of God to all of creation.

For me, during this season of Lent, that means a regular reminder of the “we” of my spiritual journey. Like the first readers of Psalm 95, our fellowship together in Christ can be both a time to praise the greatness of our God and remind ourselves (not the “me” but the “us”) that this great God has called us to obedience