Metropolitan Tabernacle Pulpit · Sermon No. 2204
“Our fathers understood not Your wonders in Egypt; they remembered not the multitude of Your mercies; but provoked Him at the sea, even at the Red Sea.” Psalm 106:7.
OUR fathers! From them we derive our nature. We inherit our fathers’ propensities, for that which is born of the flesh is flesh. As is the nature, such is the conduct. Hence the Psalmist writes in verse 6, “We have sinned with our fathers, we have committed iniquity, we have done wickedly.” If we must mention our fathers’ faults, it is not to screen ourselves, for we have to confess that our life’s story is no brighter than theirs. It is not because the fathers have eaten sour grapes that the children’s teeth are set on edge, for we, ourselves, have greedily devoured those evil clusters—“We have sinned with our fathers.” “As in water, face answers to face, so the heart of man to man.” When we read of the sins of others, we ought to be humbled and warned, for, “all we, like sheep, have gone astray; we have turned, everyone, to his own way.” We have no space wherein to set up a monument to our own glory. As we cannot boast in our pedigree, for we are the children of sinners, so we cannot exalt ourselves because of our personal excellence, for there is none that does good, no not one. We come before God and confess our iniquities as a race and as individuals. And we cry unto Him, in the words of the 47th verse, “Save us, O Lord our God.”
It may help us to escape out of the meshes of our natural depravity if we look back and see the causes of our fathers’ sins. To confess our personal sin will tend to keep us humble and, in view of the Lord’s mercy, which has spared and pardoned us, a sense of our guilt will make us grateful. The less we think of ourselves, the more we shall think of Him whose “mercy endures forever.” And if we see where our fathers’ sins began and how they grew, and what they came to, we may hope that the Spirit of God will help us to turn from the beginnings of evil and forsake the fountainheads of our iniquities. This will tend to repentance and holiness. May we be so worked upon by the Spirit of God that we shall not be as our earthly fathers, but become like our heavenly Father, who says to us, “Be you followers of God, as dear children.” We are not to take our fathers after the flesh for our example wherein they have gone astray, but our Father who is in Heaven we are to imitate by the power of His Grace.
Great things, whether good or evil, begin with little things. The river that rolls its mighty volume to the sea was once a tiny brook. No, it started as a springhead, where the child stooped down to drink and, with a single drink, seemed as if he would exhaust the supply! The rivulet ripples itself into a river. Sin is a stream of this sort. It starts with a thought. It increases to a resolve, a word, an act. It gathers force and becomes habit and daring rebellion!
Follow me, therefore, first, when I notice, that lack of understanding lies at the fountainhead of sin—“Our fathers understood not Your wonders in Egypt.” Out of this lack of understanding comes the greater offense of ungrateful for-getfulness. Failure of memory follows upon a lack of understanding—“They remembered not the multitude of Your mercies.” This readily leads on to the sad consummation of rebellion. Provocation follows upon forgetfulness. Inward faults display themselves in outward offenses—“They provoked Him at the sea, even at the Red Sea.”
I. Let us begin at the beginning. LACK OF UNDERSTANDING OF GOD’S WONDERS IS THE SOURCE OF SIN. The wonders that God worked in Egypt were exceedingly great and instructive. The 10 plagues were memorable masterstrokes of God’s judgment upon the proud and notable displays of His favor to the oppressed. How Egypt staggered beneath the blows of Jehovah! Those tremendous judgments came one after another with righteous deliberation and yet with terrible rapidity! Pharaoh and his proud nobles were wounded and humbled—the leviathan of Egypt was broken in pieces as one that is slain. Surely they for whom all these plagues were worked ought to have considered them
and ought to have spied out the plain lessons which they taught! But they failed to do so, for they were dull of understanding. Albeit, God had come out of His secret places and had made bare His arm for them, yet, “our fathers understood not Your wonders in Egypt.”
We see this to be the case when we read the story, for, at first, when God began to work for them, they were so taken up with the present that they complained of Moses, for the cruel retort of Pharaoh! He had gone in unto the proud monarch and had urged the demand of Jehovah—and the tyrant had replied, “You hinder the people from their works; get you unto your burdens.” He increased their toil by refusing to give the people straw to make bricks—and so their bondage was made bitter to the last degree—and they groaned as they saw “that they were in evil case.” They are not blamed for groaning, but it was very blameworthy that they should say to Moses and Aaron, “The Lord look upon you and judge; because you have made our savor to be abhorred in the eyes of Pharaoh, and in the eyes of his servants, to put a sword in their hands to slay us.”