You Have Acted Faithfully

The Israelites gather to corporately confess their sins. They sing about God's repeated faithfulness - recounting the story of God creating the world, covenanting with their fathers, and delivering his people from bondage. They confess their own arrogance and stiff necks - but God's gracious, slow-to-anger forgiveness. The pattern continues. God blesses and does not withold good; His people rebel. He compassionately sends deliverers; they do what is evil as soon as they find relief from their circumstances. And now that they find themselves once again restored by God (but still under foreign rule), they praise him for is faithfulness and ask him to again remember his people and his covenant in his steadfast love.

Israel's story is our story - one of repeated rebellion alongside God's repeated faithfulness. He is righteous in all that he has done. We have acted wickedly; he has acted faithfully and redeemed us by the work of Christ. And we find ourselves now very much in the place of v36 - slaves in the land given to our ancestors. The earth was given that we might enjoy its fruit and its goodness, but because of our sin, we still experience the pain and the effects of its brokenness. In fact, some of us are still enslaved by it. And all of us - even those who have been set free from the rule of sin by Jesus - cry out for the foreign intrusion of sin to be wiped away and the land returned to its rightful purpose. If you are "in great distress" - know that the invading oppression of sin's rule will soon be brought to an end in the Kingdom of King Jesus.