Psalms 78:31-52

³¹God became angry with them and he killed their strongest men, striking them down in the prime of life.

³²Despite all this they went right on sinning. Despite the miracles, they refused to trust him.

³³So he snuffed out their futile lives, bringing them to an end in terror.

³⁴When he began killing them, the rest came back to God in repentance, praying to him.

³⁵They remembered that God was their rock, that God Most High was their Savior.

³⁶They flattered him by what they told him, but they were only lying.

³⁷Deep down they were not sincere, and did not keep the agreement they had with him.

³⁸But being compassionate he pardoned their guilt and did not destroy all of them. He often held back his anger—he did not pour out all his fury.

³⁹He remembered their mortality—that they were like a puff of wind that would not return.

⁴⁰How often they rebelled against him in the wilderness, giving him grief in the desert!

⁴¹Again and again they provoked God, causing pain to the Holy One of Israel.

⁴²They did not remember his strength when he rescued them from their oppressors,

⁴³performing miracles in Egypt, doing wonderful things on the plain of Zoan.

⁴⁴There he turned their rivers and their streams into blood so that no one could drink from them.

⁴⁵He sent flies among them to destroy them, and frogs to ruin everything.

⁴⁶He gave their crops to locusts; everything they worked had for was taken by locusts.

⁴⁷He destroyed their vines with hail, and their fig trees with freezing rain.

⁴⁸He handed over their cattle to hail and their flocks to lightning bolts.

⁴⁹He poured out on them his fierce anger—rage and hostility and anguish—sending a band of destroying angels against them.

⁵⁰He sent his unrestrained anger against them; he did not spare them from death, handing them over to the plague.

⁵¹He struck down all the firstborn of Egypt, the first to be conceived in the tents of Ham.

⁵²But he led out his people like sheep, and guided them like a flock in the wilderness.