“When he slew them, then they sought him: and they returned and enquired early after God.”
My Notes
What Does Psalms 78:34 Mean?
Psalm 78:34 describes the most heartbreaking pattern in Israel's relationship with God: they only sought Him when He killed them. "When he slew them, then they sought him" — im-haragam uderashuhu. The conditional is devastating: if He killed them, then they sought. The seeking was triggered by death — not by love, not by gratitude, not by the beauty of God's provision. By slaughter. By watching the person next to them fall. By the immediate, visceral terror of realizing they could be next.
"And they returned and enquired early after God" — veshavu veshicharu-el. Shavu — they returned, they turned back. Shicharu — they sought early, they rose at dawn to look for God. The urgency is real. The desperation is real. The returning is real — for the moment. They came back to God with the intensity of someone who just watched their neighbor die.
But the next verses reveal the shelf life of this repentance. Verse 36: "Nevertheless they did flatter him with their mouths, and they lied unto him with their tongues." The seeking was real but shallow. The return was genuine but temporary. They sought God with desperate sincerity while He was killing them — and the moment the danger passed, the seeking evaporated into flattery. The crisis produced intensity without transformation. The terror generated seeking without depth.
The pattern is the Judges cycle compressed into two verses: death produces seeking, seeking produces relief, relief produces forgetting, forgetting produces death. The wheel turns again.
Reflection Questions
- 1.Is your devotion triggered by crisis or sustained by love? How can you tell the difference?
- 2.Have you experienced the pattern — intensely seeking God during a crisis, then fading when the pressure lifted?
- 3.What does it mean that their seeking was sincere but shallow — genuine mouths with unchanged hearts?
- 4.What would it look like to seek God 'early' when nothing is wrong — to pursue Him from love rather than from fear?
Devotional
They only looked for God after He started killing them. And the looking only lasted until the killing stopped.
Psalm 78 tells Israel's history without flinching — and this verse is the pattern underneath every chapter. Rebellion, consequence, seeking, relief, rebellion again. The cycle runs on a single engine: proximity to death is the only thing that makes Israel pray. When God strikes, they seek. When God relents, they stop.
"When he slew them, then they sought him." The word then is the indictment. Not before. Not during the thousand previous warnings. Not in the seasons of provision when gratitude should have produced devotion. Then — when the dying started. When the consequences were visible and immediate and landing next door.
"They returned and enquired early after God." The return looks genuine — and in the moment, it probably is. The desperation is real. The early-morning seeking is real. The cry that comes from watching someone else fall is sincere in the way all terror-produced cries are sincere. But verse 36 exposes the roots: flattery and lies. The mouths said the right things. The hearts didn't change. The crisis produced words, not transformation.
The question this verse asks you isn't whether you seek God in crisis — almost everyone does. It's whether you seek God without one. Is your devotion triggered by terror or by love? Do you rise early for God when things are good, or only when things collapse? The crisis-seeker and the constant-seeker look identical in the moment of emergency. The difference shows up the morning after the danger passes.
Commentary
Trusted original commentary from respected historical Bible scholars and theologians.
And they remembered that God was their Rock,.... Who had delivered them out of the hands of their enemies, had…
When he slew them - When he came forth in his wrath and cut them down by the plague, by fiery serpents, or by their…
In these verses,
I. The psalmist observes the late rebukes of Providence that the people of Israel had been under, which…
When he slew them, then they would inquire after him:
And return and seek God earnestly.
The tenses denote the…
Cross References
Related passages throughout Scripture