Psalms 78:21, commentary and pictures

Psalm 78 recounts the rich blessings God bestowed on Israel and the people's poor return for all those benefits. It was made into a song for Israel marching in the wilderness to keep time in step as they journeyed. The setting is the wilderness after God had revealed His power and mercy and Israel had accepted Him as king and covenanted to obey Him.

The provocation was Israel questioning whether God could provide food in the wilderness, demanding meat and distrusting His ability to provide, because they did not believe in God and did not trust in His salvation. Their murmuring was rebellion and not mere complaint, and they tempted God by asking meat for lust and saying He could not furnish a table and provide flesh. They were not murmuring from hunger but from perverted appetite formed in Egypt where they had lived largely on flesh food. God had given them the very best food, manna, the bread of heaven, angels' food, which would have kept them in health and lengthened life, and He withheld flesh because it is not man's natural food and produces disease and shortens life.

His purpose in the wilderness was to discipline them and educate them in correct habits with simple, wholesome food and wise limits so they could live in Canaan as a pure, holy, healthy people, but they rejected those limits and were dissatisfied. Therefore fire was kindled against Jacob and anger came up against Israel, consuming people at the edges of the camp, with the most guilty complainers struck by lightning, as a prompt punishment to preserve Israel from anarchy and ruin. The place was named Taberah, meaning a burning. In anger God also gave them their own desire by bringing wind that rained flesh and feathered fowl like dust and sand around the camp until they ate and were filled, and while the meat was yet in their mouths His wrath came and slew the fattest and the chosen men of Israel.

The wrath and fire came through their own disobedience as the sure result of their own course of constantly working against a good God, followed by repentance under rebuke and chastisement and then falling again under temptation, self-indulgence, and self-gratification. Their self-indulgence led to physical and mental decline, with consequences for their descendants. This is written as an example for admonition to those at the ends of the world to take heed against unbelief and indulgence of appetite. The children of Israel complained when trials came and forgot God as the source of their strength, while those who have Bible religion with Christ abiding in them and they in Him fully receive truth of heavenly origin, are sanctified through it, continually advance in the divine life, and do not complain in trial.

The verse warns against dishonoring God by branching out to consult lawyers and leaning on the arm of the law, like going to the god of Ekron to inquire, instead of coming into harmony with the church, and it calls health workers and gospel ministers to unite more, harmonize, and come into line, with ministers no longer blocking health reform. God will not vindicate ministers or church members who give the world a testimony of division on health reform, nor work undertaken in unappointed lines, nor written documents that divide instead of uniting, nor making the food question a commercial enterprise apart from the spirituality of His law and the true principles of health reform, and unless there is conversion point after point of present truth will be given up.