HelpFinder Bible - Flipbook - Page 891
PSAL M 79
page 521
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For he remembered that they were merely
mortal,
gone like a breath of wind that never
returns.
Oh, how often they rebelled against him in
the wilderness
and grieved his heart in that dry
wasteland.
Again and again they tested God’s patience
and provoked the Holy One of Israel.
They did not remember his power
and how he rescued them from their
enemies.
They did not remember his miraculous
signs in Egypt,
his wonders on the plain of Zoan.
For he turned their rivers into blood,
so no one could drink from the streams.
He sent vast swarms of flies to consume them
and hordes of frogs to ruin them.
He gave their crops to caterpillars;
their harvest was consumed by locusts.
He destroyed their grapevines with hail
and shattered their sycamore-figs
with sleet.
He abandoned their cattle to the hail,
their livestock to bolts of lightning.
He loosed on them his fierce anger—
all his fury, rage, and hostility.
He dispatched against them
a band of destroying angels.
He turned his anger against them;
he did not spare the Egyptians’ lives
but ravaged them with the plague.
He killed the oldest son in each Egyptian
family,
the flower of youth throughout the land
of Egypt.*
But he led his own people like a flock
of sheep,
guiding them safely through the
wilderness.
He kept them safe so they were not afraid;
but the sea covered their enemies.
He brought them to the border of his
holy land,
to this land of hills he had won for them.
He drove out the nations before them;
he gave them their inheritance by lot.
He settled the tribes of Israel into their
homes.
But they kept testing and rebelling against
God Most High.
They did not obey his laws.
They turned back and were as faithless as
their parents.
They were as undependable as a
crooked bow.
78:51 Hebrew in the tents of Ham.
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They angered God by building shrines
to other gods;
they made him jealous with their idols.
When God heard them, he was very angry,
and he completely rejected Israel.
Then he abandoned his dwelling at
Shiloh,
the Tabernacle where he had lived
among the people.
He allowed the Ark of his might to be
captured;
he surrendered his glory into enemy
hands.
He gave his people over to be butchered
by the sword,
because he was so angry with his own
people—his special possession.
Their young men were killed by fire;
their young women died before singing
their wedding songs.
Their priests were slaughtered,
and their widows could not mourn their
deaths.
Then the Lord rose up as though waking
from sleep,
like a warrior aroused from a drunken
stupor.
He routed his enemies
and sent them to eternal shame.
But he rejected Joseph’s descendants;
he did not choose the tribe of Ephraim.
He chose instead the tribe of Judah,
and Mount Zion, which he loved.
There he built his sanctuary as high as
the heavens,
as solid and enduring as the earth.
He chose his servant David,
calling him from the sheep pens.
He took David from tending the ewes
and lambs
and made him the shepherd of Jacob’s
descendants—
God’s own people, Israel.
He cared for them with a true heart
and led them with skillful hands.
79
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A psalm of Asaph.
O God, pagan nations have conquered
your land,
your special possession.
They have defiled your holy Temple
and made Jerusalem a heap of ruins.
They have left the bodies of your servants
as food for the birds of heaven.
The flesh of your godly ones
has become food for the wild animals.
Blood has flowed like water all around
Jerusalem;
no one is left to bury the dead.