Tell the Coming Generation

Read Psalm 78 before proceeding. It is a long psalm of seventy-two verses; read it in one sitting if you can, to feel its sweep. Notice its stated purpose of teaching the next generation, and the rhythm of God’s faithfulness against His people’s repeated faithlessness. Keep your Bible open throughout this session.

Then they will place their confidence in God. They will not forget the works of God, and they will obey his commands.
Psalm 78:7

Having reached the summit of praise in Psalm 150, we turn now to a very different kind of psalm. Psalm 78 is one of the great historical psalms, the second-longest in the Psalter, seventy-two verses of remembering, and it does something none of the psalms we have studied so far has done at length: it tells the story. It walks back through Israel’s history, from the Exodus through the wilderness to the choice of David, and it does so for a stated and urgent purpose, announced at the very start: We will tell the next generation about the LORD’s praiseworthy acts, about his strength and the amazing things he has done (v. 4; older translations, tell to the coming generation).

That is the key to the whole psalm. It is history told for the sake of the children: the deeds of God rehearsed so that they will not be forgotten, handed down from one generation to the next like a treasure that must not be lost. And the goal of the telling is named plainly: that they will place their confidence in God. They will not forget the works of God, and they will obey his commands (v. 7), and that they will not be like their ancestors, who were a stubborn and rebellious generation (v. 8). The remembering is meant to break a deadly cycle, the cycle of forgetting and rebellion that has dogged God’s people in every age.

It is worth seeing, at the outset, why a psalm like this exists at all, why the faith of the Bible should care so much about remembering history. It is because the God of the Bible is not a timeless idea to be contemplated but a living God who has acted in time. The faith is not a set of abstract principles that could have been discovered by anyone in any century; it is the report of things God has actually done. He divided a real sea, fed a real people in a real wilderness, chose a real king. To know this God is to know His deeds, and to forget His deeds is to lose Him. That is why the Scriptures are so largely a story, and why the church’s confession is a recital of events: born, suffered, crucified, died, rose. Our faith stands or falls on what God has done in history, and supremely on the most decisive deed of all: the death and resurrection of His Son, which happened, like the Exodus, in a particular place at a particular time. So to tell the next generation the deeds of the LORD is not to hand down a philosophy; it is to bear witness to what God has really done, and to call the children to stake their lives on it.

For that is the burden of the long recital that follows: the relentless faithlessness of God’s people set against the relentless faithfulness of God. Again and again the psalm tells the same heartbreaking story. God works a wonder, and the people forget it; God provides, and the people grumble; God rescues, and the people rebel. They continued to sin against him (v. 17). They did not have faith in God (v. 22). They again challenged God (v. 41). It is a brutally honest history, and it refuses to pretend that the fathers were better than they were. But running through it, like a thread of gold through dark cloth, is the patience of God, who, the psalm says at its turning point, being compassionate, atoned for their iniquity and did not destroy them (v. 38 ESV).

And the whole story points beyond itself. The cycle of faithlessness the psalm records is one that no generation ever managed to break: not the fathers, not the children taught not to repeat it, not us. It cried out for One who would come from outside the cycle and keep the covenant that everyone else had broken: the one faithful Son, the true Israel, the Lord Jesus, who in the wilderness refused the very testing Israel had given itself to, and who kept the covenant from our side. The compassion that atoned and did not destroy points to His cross. And the psalm’s surprising ending, not the people’s reform but God’s choice of David the shepherd-king, points to the great Son of David, the Good Shepherd, the faithful King that an unfaithful people could never produce but desperately needed.

So we will listen to this long remembering: the charge to tell the next generation, the honest record of a stubborn and rebellious people, the stunning compassion of God who atoned and did not destroy, the one faithful Son who broke the cycle, and the shepherd-king in whom the whole story comes to rest. And we will learn why telling the next generation the deeds of the LORD is among the most important things the people of God ever do.

Pay attention, my people, to my instruction! … I will sing a song that imparts wisdom; I will make insightful observations about the past. What we have heard and learned, that which our ancestors have told us (vv. 1–3). The psalm begins as a teacher begins, calling for attention and then reaching back to what was handed down. The faith is not invented fresh in each generation; it is received, heard and learned, passed from the fathers who told it. And the resolve follows at once: we will not hide from their descendants (v. 4). What we have received, we will pass on. This is the chain that keeps the knowledge of God alive in the world: each generation telling the next, the treasure handed forward, never buried.

And the psalm is explicit about why this matters, tracing the chain across four generations in a single breath. God set up His law in Israel, and he commanded our ancestors to make his deeds known to their descendants, so that the next generation, children yet to be born, might know about them. They will grow up and tell their descendants about them (vv. 5–6). Fathers teach children, who will teach their children, who are not even born yet. The horizon stretches far beyond ourselves. We teach the faith not only to the children in front of us but, through them, to the great-grandchildren we will never meet. And the goal, named in our epigraph, is that they will place their confidence in God. They will not forget the works of God, and they will obey his commands (v. 7). The whole point of remembering is confidence in God: that the next generation would build its life on the God who has proved Himself faithful, rather than forgetting Him and drifting into the old rebellion.

There is a sober warning in the alternative the psalm names: Then they will not be like their ancestors, who were a stubborn and rebellious generation, a generation that was not committed and faithful to God (v. 8). Forgetting is not neutral; the generation that forgets God’s works does not stay still but slides into rebellion. This is why the handing-on of faith is not an optional enrichment but a matter of life and death for the soul of a people. And it lays a charge on us. The deeds we are to tell now include the greatest deed of all, the death and resurrection of the Lord Jesus; and the church that fails to tell them, the parents who leave the faith untaught in the hope that the children will somehow find it themselves, are not granting freedom but courting the old forgetting. It is no accident that Luther wrote his catechism for the household, to be taught by the head of the family to the children. The faith is always one untaught generation from being forgotten, and one faithful generation from being passed on.

And the handing-on happens through ordinary means, none of them flashy, all of them faithful. It happens at the family table, where parents tell children the old stories and pray with them and answer their questions. It happens in the gathered worship of the church, where the deeds of God are read and preached and sung Sunday after Sunday until they sink into the bones. It happens through the patient work of catechesis, the slow teaching of the faith, line by line, that the children may know not only the stories but their meaning. And the faith is commended, powerfully, when children see it lived: when they watch their parents pray in trouble, give thanks in plenty, repent when they sin, and hope in God when things are hard. None of this can manufacture faith, which is the gift of God’s Spirit through His word; but His Word, taught at the table and preached in the church, is the means God has appointed, the channel through which He has promised to work. The generation that neglects these things should not be surprised when the next generation does not know the God it was never told about.

A Stubborn and Rebellious Generation

Then the long recital begins, and it is a hard one to read, because it is so relentlessly honest. The psalm recounts wonder after wonder: how God divided the sea and led them across it, led them with a cloud by day and fire by night, broke open rocks in the wilderness, and gave them enough water to fill the depths of the sea, and rained down manna, the grain of heaven, so that man ate the food of the mighty ones (older translations, the bread of the angels), and then meat like dust, birds as numerous as the sand on the seashores. And after each wonder, the same dark refrain: they forgot, they doubted, they grumbled, they rebelled. Yet they continued to sin against him (v. 17). They did not have faith in God, and did not trust his ability to deliver them (v. 22). Despite all this, they continued to sin, and did not trust him to do amazing things (v. 32). They again challenged God (v. 41). The wonders did not cure the unbelief; the people who had seen the sea split still doubted whether God could give them food in the wilderness.

We are tempted, reading this, to shake our heads at Israel: how could they, after seeing so much, forget so fast? But the psalm does not let us off that easily, for it holds up a mirror, not a portrait of strangers. The hard truth is that this is the human heart, and it is our heart. We too have seen God’s faithfulness a thousand times and still panic at the next trouble as though we had never seen anything; we too are given mercy upon mercy and still grumble; we too forget, by Wednesday, the God who carried us on Sunday. The faithlessness of Israel is not a peculiar ancient failing but the universal condition of fallen people, ourselves included. The psalm is honest about the fathers precisely so that we will be honest about ourselves, and so that we will stop imagining that what God’s people need is simply better effort or stronger resolve.

For that is the quiet lesson buried in all this honesty: the problem is deeper than effort can reach. Generation after generation was taught, warned, shown wonders, given the law, and generation after generation forgot and rebelled anyway. The children taught not to be like their rebellious fathers grew up to be exactly like them. Something in the human heart is bent away from God and cannot straighten itself, however much it is instructed. The whole weary cycle of Psalm 78 is a seventy-two-verse argument that we cannot fix ourselves, that teaching alone, real and vital as it is, cannot finally cure a heart that is not committed and faithful to God. The honest history drives us, in the end, to look for help that comes from outside ourselves.

And we should notice what kind of sin this was, because it is the kind most likely to be ours. Israel’s rebellion was not the sin of people who had never heard of God; it was the sin of people who had seen everything. They had watched the sea split and walked through on dry ground; they had eaten bread from heaven and drunk water from a rock; they had been led by a pillar of fire. Theirs was the unbelief not of the ignorant but of the over-familiar: the dulled heart of those who have seen so much that they no longer marvel, who take the mercies of God for granted because the mercies have become routine. This is a particular danger for the long-churched, the lifelong believer, the pastor’s child, the one who has heard the gospel ten thousand times. Familiarity can breed a quiet contempt; the wonders stop being wonderful; the daily bread is received without a thought of the hand that gives it. Psalm 78 warns that having seen much is no protection against forgetting much, and that the heart most in danger of the old rebellion may be the one that assumes it is safe.

Yet He, Being Compassionate

And right in the middle of the long catalogue of failure, the psalm turns, and gives us one of the most beautiful sentences in the Old Testament: Yet he, being compassionate, atoned for their iniquity and did not destroy them; he restrained his anger often and did not stir up all his wrath (v. 38 ESV; the NET reads He forgives sin, but the Hebrew verb is the Old Testament’s word for making atonement). Stop and feel the weight of that little word yet. After all their sinning, all their forgetting, all their testing and grumbling and rebellion: yet. Yet He was compassionate. Yet He atoned. Yet He did not destroy them. The story that by every right should have ended in judgment did not, because the God against whom they sinned is compassionate, slow to anger, and more ready to forgive than to destroy.

And the psalm tells us why He dealt so gently: He remembered that they were made of flesh, and were like a wind that blows past and does not return (v. 39). We have heard this note before, in Psalm 103: God knows our frame and remembers that we are dust (Psalm 103:14 ESV). Here it is again, set against the darkest backdrop of human rebellion. God restrains His wrath because He remembers what we are: frail, fleeting, a breath of wind soon gone. His compassion is not blind to our sin; the psalm has just spent thirty verses on it. But His compassion reckons with our weakness, and chooses mercy. This is the gospel breaking through the history: that God’s faithfulness is not the reward of our faithfulness but its very opposite, mercy shown to people who have earned only judgment.

Here is comfort for everyone who has felt the weight of having failed God again and again, who looks back not on a single fall but on a wearying pattern of the same sins, the same forgetting, the same rebellions, and wonders whether God’s patience must surely have run out. Psalm 78 answers: His patience is longer than your sinning. The God of this psalm absorbed a whole national history of betrayal and yet was compassionate, yet atoned, yet did not destroy. The apostle puts the same truth in its sharpest form: If we are unfaithful, he remains faithful, since he cannot deny himself. His faithfulness does not hang on ours. It rests on His own unchanging character, and on the atonement to which this verse quietly points: the day when God would deal with the iniquity of His people not by overlooking it but by bearing it Himself, in His Son.

That little word yet is one of the great words of the gospel, and it appears all through the Scriptures at exactly such moments, after the worst has been said and before the judgment that ought to follow. Yet he, being compassionate. The apostle Paul writes the same hinge in three of the most loved words in the New Testament: But God, being rich in mercy. It is the divine but, the holy nevertheless, that interrupts the story of our sin before it can reach its deserved end. For the believer crushed by the weight of his own repeated failure, everything hangs on that word. You may have a true and terrible list of your sins, your forgettings, your rebellions, and the gospel does not deny the list. It adds a word the list cannot survive: yet. Yet God was compassionate. Yet He atoned. Yet He did not destroy you. The whole of your hope is not that the list is short, but that the yet is His, and that it is anchored not in your improvement but in His unchanging character and the cross of His Son.

The One Faithful Son

For the deepest answer to Psalm 78 is not found within Psalm 78 at all. The psalm leaves us with a problem it cannot solve: a people who cannot keep the covenant, a cycle of faithlessness that no amount of teaching or wonder or warning ever broke. If the story is ever to have a different ending, it will need someone who does what Israel never did, who remembers when they forgot, who trusts when they doubted, who obeys when they rebelled, who keeps the covenant from the human side at last. And that is precisely who the Lord Jesus is. He is the true Israel, the faithful Son, who walked back through the whole story and got it right.

See it most clearly in the wilderness. Israel’s defining sin in this psalm was to challenge God again and again in the desert (the Hebrew word is the ordinary word for putting someone to the test), demanding proof, refusing to trust. And when the Lord Jesus was led into the wilderness and tempted to throw Himself down and force God’s hand, He answered with the very lesson Israel had failed to learn: You are not to put the Lord your God to the test. Where Israel tested, He trusted. Where they grumbled for bread, He refused to make bread on the tempter’s terms and lived by every word from God’s mouth. Where the whole nation, over centuries, proved as unreliable as a malfunctioning bow that would not shoot straight, He was the arrow that flew true. He kept the covenant from our side. He did it not for His own sake, for He needed no rescue, but for ours, so that His faithfulness might be counted to a faithless people.

And He did more than keep it; He bore the penalty for our breaking of it. The compassion that atoned for their iniquity and did not destroy them found its full meaning at the cross, where the iniquity of all the stubborn and rebellious generations was laid on the one faithful Son, and the wrath that was restrained through all the centuries of the psalm was at last poured out, not on us but on Him. Even the wilderness provisions, it turns out, were pointing to Him all along. The manna, the food of the mighty ones, was a shadow of the true bread from heaven, for the Lord Jesus said, Your ancestors ate the manna in the wilderness, and they died … I am the bread of life. And the rock that gave water in the desert was a shadow of Him too, for, the apostle says plainly, the rock was Christ. The faithless people were fed and watered, all along, by the One who would come to be their faithfulness and their food.

And here is the wonder of it for us: His faithfulness is not merely an example we are to admire from a distance, but a gift that is counted as ours. The gospel is not finally that the Lord Jesus shows us how covenant-keeping is done, so that we might go and do likewise, for Psalm 78 has just spent seventy verses proving we cannot. The gospel is that His covenant-keeping is reckoned to us, that we who are faithless stand before God clothed in the faithfulness of Another. God made the one who did not know sin to be sin for us, so that in him we would become the righteousness of God. The faithful Son took our place at both ends of the exchange: He took our faithlessness to the cross and bore its judgment, and He gives us His faithfulness as a robe to wear. So when the Father looks upon a believer (a stubborn, forgetful, often-rebellious believer like the people of this psalm, like us), He sees us in His faithful Son, and counts us faithful in Him. That is a gospel worth telling the next generation: not try to be more faithful than your fathers were, but there is One who was faithful for you.

He Chose David His Servant

And so we come to the psalm’s surprising ending. After seventy verses of human failure, how will the story resolve? Not, as we might expect, with the people finally getting it right; there is no reformation, no turning over of a new leaf. The resolution comes entirely from God’s side. But then the Lord awoke from his sleep (v. 65), routed His enemies, and made His choice, and the choice is the gospel in miniature. He rejected the proud tribe of Ephraim, but he chose the tribe of Judah, and Mount Zion, which he loves (v. 68). And then, the climax of the whole long psalm: He chose David, his servant, and took him from the sheepfolds … and made him the shepherd of Jacob, his people, and of Israel, his chosen nation. David cared for them with pure motives; he led them with skill (vv. 70–72).

Sit with where the psalm lands. A history of relentless faithlessness does not end with a demand that the people do better. It ends with God’s gift of a shepherd: a king taken from the sheepfolds to tend a flock that had proved, over and over, that it could not tend itself. The answer to a faithless people is not a better people; it is a faithful shepherd, given by God. And David, for all his greatness, was only the first sketch of the answer. He cared for them with pure motives, says the psalm (older translations, with upright heart), and yet David’s own heart would prove not wholly upright; he too would sin grievously, and the kings who came after him would mostly fail. The shepherd-king of Psalm 78 is a promise that outruns David himself.

For the true Shepherd-King, the Son of David that David’s reign could only foreshadow, is the Lord Jesus. He is the one who shepherds God’s people with a heart truly and wholly upright; who, unlike every shepherd before Him, lays down his life for the sheep; who is the great shepherd of the sheep and the shepherd and guardian of your souls. The whole weary history of Psalm 78 (the wonders, the rebellions, the patient compassion, the atonement quietly promised) flows toward this: that the God who would not abandon His faithless people gave them, at the last, a faithful Shepherd-King to keep them when they could not keep themselves. And that is the deed above all deeds we are to tell the next generation: not chiefly that we must do better, but that God has given us a Shepherd who does for us what we could never do for ourselves. The honest history of our failure ends in the good news of His faithfulness, and that good news is the inheritance we hand on.

And there is deep rest in this for the weary believer. If the keeping of the flock depended on the faithfulness of the sheep, Psalm 78 would leave us in despair, for the sheep are hopeless: they wander, forget, rebel, and stray in every generation. But the psalm does not end with the sheep; it ends with the Shepherd. The flock is kept not by its own steadfastness but by the upright heart and the skill of the One who tends it. This is the difference between a faith that exhausts and a faith that rests. The believer who thinks he is kept by the strength of his own grip on God will live in fear, for his grip is weak and his heart unsteady. But the believer who knows he is held by the grip of the Good Shepherd can rest, for that grip does not fail. We are not the keepers of the covenant; we are the kept. And the Shepherd who laid down His life for the sheep will not lose one of them, not because they are faithful, but because He is.

Gathering the Threads

We listened to the great history psalm, and heard its urgent purpose: to tell the next generation about the LORD’s praiseworthy acts, that they might place their confidence in God and not forget His works, handing the treasure forward across the generations, even to great-grandchildren not yet born, lest the people slide back into the old forgetting and rebellion. We walked the long, honest recital of Israel’s faithlessness, wonder after wonder met by grumbling and doubt and testing, and found it a mirror, not a portrait of strangers: the bent and forgetful heart of Israel is our own, and the whole weary cycle is a seventy-two-verse proof that we cannot fix ourselves, that teaching alone cannot cure a heart not committed and faithful to God. And then we reached the great yet of verse 38, yet he, being compassionate, atoned for their iniquity and did not destroy them: the gospel breaking through the history, God’s faithfulness shown to be not the reward of ours but its opposite, mercy to people who had earned only judgment, because He remembered that they were made of flesh, and because He is faithful even when we are faithless.

And we saw the whole story point beyond itself to the Lord Jesus: the one faithful Son who broke the cycle no generation could break, the true Israel who trusted where they tested and obeyed where they rebelled and kept the covenant from our side, and who then bore on the cross the iniquity of every stubborn and rebellious generation, so that the wrath restrained through all the centuries fell on Him and not on us. The manna and the rock that fed the faithless in the wilderness were shadows of Him, the true bread from heaven and the Rock. And the psalm’s surprising ending (God’s choice of David the shepherd-king, taken from the sheepfolds to tend a flock that could not tend itself) pointed past David, whose own heart was not wholly upright, to the great Son of David, the Good Shepherd who lays down His life for the sheep. The history of our failure ends in the good news of His faithfulness. And that good news, that God has given us a Shepherd who does for us what we could never do for ourselves, is the inheritance we are to hand on to the next generation.

For Discussion

Psalm 78 states its purpose: to tell the next generation about the LORD’s praiseworthy acts (v. 4), so that they would place their confidence in God and not forget the works of God (v. 7). Why is telling the next generation what God has done among the most important things the people of God do, and what are the deeds we must tell?
The psalm is brutally honest about Israel’s repeated faithlessness: they continued to sin, did not have faith in God, and challenged God again and again, despite His wonders. Why does the psalm refuse to romanticize the past, and what does this honest record show us about ourselves?
At the heart of the psalm is a stunning turn: Yet he, being compassionate, atoned for their iniquity and did not destroy them … He remembered that they were made of flesh (vv. 38–39; v. 38 ESV). How does God’s faithfulness outlast His people’s faithlessness, and what comfort is there in this for someone who feels they have failed Him repeatedly (consider 2 Timothy 2:13)?
Israel could not keep the covenant; they forgot and rebelled in every generation. How does this point to the need for the one faithful Son, the Lord Jesus, who kept the covenant from our side (consider how He refused to test God in the wilderness, Matthew 4:7)?
The wilderness provisions (the manna, the food of the mighty ones, and the water from the rock) pointed beyond themselves. How do they find their fulfillment in the Lord Jesus, the true bread from heaven and the Rock (consider John 6 and 1 Corinthians 10:4)?
The psalm ends not with Israel’s reform but with God’s choice of David the shepherd-king (vv. 70–72). How does this resolution, God’s gift of a faithful shepherd for an unfaithful people, point to the Lord Jesus, the Good Shepherd and Son of David?

Looking Ahead

From the long history of God’s dealings with His people, the last of our psalms lifts its eyes to the night sky and asks the oldest question of all. Psalm 8 is a short and luminous hymn that frames the whole of human life between two declarations of God’s majesty, and at its center stands a question every thoughtful person has asked under the stars: When I look at your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars, which you have set in place, what is man that you are mindful of him, and the son of man that you care for him? (Psalm 8:3–4 ESV).

It is a psalm about the smallness of man under the vast heavens, and the staggering dignity God has nonetheless given him: crowned … with glory and honor, given dominion over the works of your hands (Psalm 8:5–6 ESV). And it is a psalm the New Testament reads as being, in the end, about one Man in particular, for the Letter to the Hebrews takes its words and applies them to the Lord Jesus, the Son of Man, who was made lower than the angels for a little while and is now crowned with glory and honor because He suffered death for everyone. We will end the volume’s journey through the Psalms by asking, with David, what is man? And we will find the answer in the Man who is the true and final Adam.

Read Psalm 8 in full before the next session; it is nine verses. Notice how it opens and closes with the same line of praise, and how its central question, “what is man?”, is set against the vastness of the heavens.

Closing Prayer

O LORD, You have done glorious deeds, and we will not hide them from our children, but tell the coming generation Your might and the wonders You have done. Make us faithful in the handing-on of the faith to our children and our children’s children, even to those we will never meet, that they may set their hope in You and not forget Your works. We confess that we are like the fathers of old: that we too have seen Your faithfulness a thousand times and still forgotten it by morning, still grumbled, still tested You, a people whose heart is not steadfast. We cannot mend ourselves; the long history of our failure proves it.
But we bless You that, being compassionate, You have atoned for our iniquity and have not destroyed us; that You remember we are but flesh, and that You remain faithful even when we are faithless, for You cannot deny Yourself. We thank You for the one faithful Son, the Lord Jesus, the true Israel, who trusted where we tested and obeyed where we rebelled, who kept the covenant from our side and bore its broken penalty on the cross, and who is Himself the true bread from heaven and the Rock that follows us. And we thank You that the story of our faithlessness ends in the gift of a faithful Shepherd, the Son of David, the Good Shepherd who lays down His life for the sheep and keeps us when we cannot keep ourselves. Let this be the inheritance we hand on. Through the same Lord Jesus Christ, who lives and reigns with You and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and forever. Amen.