Sermon preached on Sunday, August 5, 2012 at Garden Valley Chapel during our morning worship service based on Psalms 78:9-72.

Turn in your Bible, if you will, to the seventy-eighth chapter of the book of Psalms - Psalms seventy-eight.

I invite you to stand in the reading of God´s Word. Read Psalm 78:9-20.

It was Dr. Arthur T. Pierson who said, "History is His story" and this psalm bears that out.

Philosopher and Spaniard George Santayana put it this way, "Those who do not remember the past are condemned to relive it."

That is how we approach this particular psalm, which is known as an instructive psalm. We come knowing that history is just that, God´s story.

We also come knowing and believing that God intended for us to learn from history which Calvin sometimes called sacred history.

As Solomon wrote in Ecclesiastes 1:9 -

9 That which has been is that which will be, And that which has been done is that which will be done. So there is nothing new under the sun.

It is a harsh reality but nothing is new. We just need to turn the things of old to things newly discovered that we might glean from ages past.

Is it not amazing to notice how slow we always are to learn the great lessons of life and of history?

In highlighting the authority of Scripture, R.A. Torrey has said -

"Oh, happy is the man who has sense enough to learn from the unvarying history of the past and believe what God says in spite of the proud unbelief of men, no matter who they may be."

So let us be happy men who have sense enough to learn from sacred history and believe that God intends for us to learn lessons from His Word for us this morning - lessons that we are commanded to teach the coming generation that they might know God; "that they should put their confidence in God and not forget the works of God, but keep His commandments" (v. 7).