HAVE YOU EVER tried to imagine what people would say at your memorial service? What stories might your friends and family tell? Would they be glowing tales of your wisdom, love, and kindness? Angry diatribes? Or would no one have a story to tell?

Of course, in my experience at least, people are more or less on their best behavior in that context, believing it inappropriate to speak ill of the dead. Even those who have deeply painful stories to tell generally focus on the positive, sometimes to the point that the people listening wonder, “Are we talking about the same person?” And I’ve watched others fumble awkwardly at the mic, actively trying to filter their words as they spoke, hinting at the difficult parts of the relationship without wanting to say it outright.

But what if the whole story about us were to be told? What if people were to describe the stupid and hurtful things we’ve done, things we’d rather forget? Moreover, don’t we all have private sins no one knows about, things we’ve never confessed to anyone? We may not even have confessed them to God, though God already knows. Those stories can’t be told unless we tell them.

Or unless God were to take the mic… If that happened, we might just be undone.

And yet sometimes the stories we avoid telling need to be told. We’d prefer to tell a more positive and heroic tale, but there may come a point at which the whole, unvarnished truth needs to come out and even the worst parts of the story must be confronted and owned.

The prophets of ancient Israel knew it. And so did the psalmists.

KING DAVID, AS we’ve seen, instructed Asaph and his worship team to sing a song of praise to celebrate the return of the ark of the covenant and its coming to his new capital city of Jerusalem. The song is positive from start to finish, filled with gratitude and praise for the covenant faithfulness of God. When it had been sung by Asaph and his musicians, the people said “Amen” and praised God themselves (1 Chron 16:36).

Psalm 105 then mirrors the first 15 verses of David’s song and adds a particular emphasis on the exodus from Egypt as the central example of David’s theme. Though the psalmist doesn’t recount all of the miraculous plagues nor even name them in chronological order, the point is clear: God is and always has been faithful to the promise he made to Abraham. He therefore expects his people to be faithful to the covenant in turn.

If only.

We don’t know when Psalms 105 and 106 were written. We don’t know if they were written by the same psalmist, or at the same time. And it seems likely that one or both psalms were written before the two books of the Chronicles, since the narrative there extends all the way through the Babylonian exile. But if we take 1 Chronicles 16 as recounting what actually happened when the ark was brought to Jerusalem, then I imagine the history unfolding something like this. One psalmist elaborates on David’s song, to encourage the people first to remember and celebrate the faithfulness of God, and second to be faithful themselves.

But sometime later, another psalmist looks back at David’s song, as well as Psalm 105, and mourns just how badly the people have failed. This time, the psalmist wants to tell the whole story. The song will not merely be about the faithfulness of God, but the faithlessness of the people, about their idolatrous betrayals of the covenant.

What would prompt such a brutally honest retrospective?

The exile.

PSALM 106 BEGINS and ends with a hallelujah, meaning “praise God.” These two hallelujahs act like bookends to the rest of the composition. Like the author of Psalm 105, the psalmist who wrote 106 continues by building on David’s song of celebration. But whereas Psalm 105 cites the first 15 of that song, Psalm 106 cites the last three. Here’s how they read in 1 Chronicles 16:

Give thanks to the LORD, for he is good;
    his love endures forever.
Cry out, “Save us, God our Savior;
    gather us and deliver us from the nations,
that we may give thanks to your holy name,
    and glory in your praise.”
Praise be to the LORD, the God of Israel,
    from everlasting to everlasting. (1 Chron 16:34-36, NIV)

“Give thanks to the LORD, for he is good; his love endures forever.” Other than the opening hallelujah, this is also the first line of Psalm 106. But the other two verses aren’t quoted until the very end of the psalm, just before the final hallelujah. The three verses from David’s song, therefore, are like bookends within bookends, and the psalmist changes David’s wording just slightly. Here’s the psalmist’s version:

Save us, LORD our God,
    and gather us from the nations,
that we may give thanks to your holy name
    and glory in your praise. (vs. 47)

Did you notice the difference? First, where David’s song says, “Cry out, ‘Save us, God our Savior,'” the psalm reads simply, “Save us, LORD our God.” The psalmist drops the instruction to cry out to God, because that is what the psalmist is already doing, and the psalmist addresses God a little differently, calling upon God by name.

Second, notice that where David’s song says “gather us and deliver us from the nations,” the psalm has merely “gather us from the nations.” As we’ll see, while Psalm 105 focuses mainly on the exodus, Psalm 106 goes much further, giving a long, sad litany of the people’s failures after the conquest of Canaan, lending the psalm a different historical backdrop. Angry at the people’s flagrant disobedience, God “gave them into the hands of the nations” (vs. 41). The prayer to be gathered from the nations, then, immediately follows this summary statement of God’s covenant mercy:

Yet he took note of their distress
    when he heard their cry;
for their sake he remembered his covenant
    and out of his great love he relented.
He caused all who held them captive
    to show them mercy. (Ps 106:44-46)

It’s as if to say, God’s done it before. Covenant love, faithfulness, and mercy is God’s nature. He will do it again. He will rescue us from captivity. Gather us, LORD, gather us up from the nations that we might praise your name.

This is the prayer of a people in exile. In stark contrast to the celebratory tone of Psalm 105, Psalm 106 is a corporate confession of sin that prays for a salvation that is completely undeserved. Yet one thing remains constant: the covenant faithfulness of God. That is the only ground for hope. It’s what makes it possible for the psalmist to tell the whole story, the whole sorry truth that we’ll explore next.