Forgetting God's provision 'while the food was in their mouths'

Free Will(y)

Regardless of which side of a blessing you're on, it's in our nature to forget God's goodness and instead wallow in our own doubts or self-aggrandizement.

Psalm 78 -- one of the many "contemplative" psalms (Hebrew: maskills) -- examines the recurring trend of how success can become the beginning of defeat if the focus is misplaced. In the case of the children of Israel fleeing Egypt, they went from one extreme to the other -- doubting God's ability "to provide a table in the wilderness" (v. 19)  to acknowledging God's power (the sending of manna, quails, favorable winds, water from a rock, etc.) but giving him mere lip-service and going as far as to lie to him (v. 36). God saw this change of heart "while the food was still in their mouths" (v. 30)!

You're probably familiar with the Exodus account. At points, the Israelites even preferred death or becoming re-captive to Egypt over continuing to wander (even with the most obvious and spectacular of God's miracles to guide them in the desert). Strange how even the greatest blessings can become curses based on how we react to them. It's not that the Israelites ever hated God, per se, but in their selfishness and forgetfulness inadvertently became the enemies of God at various times.

Breakpoint's blog had a creative way of explaining this phenomenon, relating it to a situation where a love for God's creation in our oceans morphed into a setback for those whose life mission it is to save the creatures in it.