Our fathers understood not Thy wonders in Egypt.
Sin: its spring-head, stream, and sea
Great things, whether good or evil, begin with littles. The river that rolls its mighty volume to the sea was once a tiny brook; nay, it started as a spring-head, where the child stooped down to drink, and, with a single draught, 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.
I. Want of understanding of God’s wonders is the source of sin. Many professing Christians of whom we have a good hope that they will prove to be sincere, never had any deep conviction of sin, nor any overwhelming sense of their need of Jesus: hence they have seen little of our Lord in His glorious offices, and all-sufficient sacrifice, and have gained no thorough understanding of His truth. They are like slovenly farmers, who have ploughed their fields after a fashion, but they have not gone deep, and the land will never yield more than half a crop. We have all around us too much surface work.
II. Failure of memory follows upon want of understanding.
1. Mercies should be remembered. It is a great wrong to God when we bury His mercies in the grave of unthankfulness. Especially is this the case with distinguishing mercies, wherein the Lord makes us to differ from others. Light, when the rest of the land is in darkness! Life, when others are smitten with the sword of death! Liberty from an iron bondage! O Christians, these are not things to be forgotten!
2. Mercies multiplied should never be forgotten. If they are new every morning, our memory of them should be always fresh. Read the story of the ten plagues, and see how the Lord heaped up His mercies upon Israel with both His hands. Even if they had forgotten one wonder they ought to have remembered others. “Forget not all His benefits.”
3. The Lord’s mercies ought to be remembered progressively. We should think more and more of His exceeding kindness.
III. Grievous provocation followed their forgetfulness of God. It is a high crime and misdemeanour to sin in the presence of a great mercy. Abhor the sin which dogs your heel, and follows you even to your knees, and hinders you in drawing near to God in prayer. Oh, the accursed sin which even on Tabor’s top makes us fall asleep or talk foolishly! Lord, have mercy upon us, and forgive the sins of our holy places, and let it not stand against us in Thy book that “They provoked Thee at the sea, even at the Red Sea.” (C. H. Spurgeon.)
The Israelites’ ingratitude to God
I. Their unworthy and ungrateful deportment towards God upon a most signal mercy and deliverance. To provoke, is an expression setting forth a peculiar and more than ordinary degree of misbehaviour; and seems to import an insolent daring resolution to offend. A resolution not contented with one single stroke of disobedience, but such a one as multiplies and repeats the action, till the offence greatens, and rises into an affront: and as it relates to God, so I conceive it strikes at Him in a threefold respect:
1. Of His power;
2. Of His goodness;
3. Of His patience.
II. The aggravation of their unworthy deportment towards their Almighty Deliverer. The baseness and ingratitude of which He casts in their teeth, by confronting it with the eminent obligation laid upon them, by the glorious deliverance He vouchsafed them: a deliverance heightened and ennobled with these four qualifications:
1. Its greatness;
2. Its unexpectedness;
3. Its seasonableness:
4. Its undeservedness.
III. The cause of this unworthy behaviour, which was their not understanding the designs of mercy in the several instances of it: “They understood not Thy wonders in Egypt.” Now, in every wonderful passage of providence, two things are to be considered:
1. The author, by whom;
2. The end, for which it is done: neither of which were understood by the Israelites as they ought to have been (R. South, D.D.)