Psalms 78:33 - Joseph Benson’s Commentary on the Old and New Testaments

Their days did he consume in vanity In tedious and fruitless marches hither and thither, sometimes forward and sometimes backward, which they knew would never bring them, in their own persons, to their promised and much desired land; and their years in trouble In manifold diseases, dangers, and perplexities. In such vanity and trouble were they condemned, by an irreversible doom, for their unbelief, distrust of God, their murmurings and rebellions against him, their idolatries and other sins, to wear out thirty-eight tedious years in that wilderness, which indeed were consumed in it: for in all those years there was not one step taken nearer Canaan, nor one stroke struck toward the conquest of it. Observe, reader, those that sin still must expect to be in trouble still; and the reason why we spend our days in so much vanity and trouble, why we live with so little comfort, and to so little purpose, is because we live in sin, or do not live by faith.