Psalm 73
Let’s hear God’s word together.
This is Psalm 73. It’s a Psalm of Asaph, who was
one of the musicians. Also Korah, the sons of Korah
were the same. And so Psalm 73 begins book three,
which is Psalm 73 to 89. And Asaph wrote 73 to 83, as
well as Psalm 50. And then the sons of Korah did
Psalms 84 to 89. So this is a short little book
of Psalms, book three is, but they were the temple musicians.
So here’s Psalm 73, a Psalm of Asaph. Truly God is good to Israel,
to those who are pure in heart. But as for me, my feet had almost
stumbled. My steps had nearly slipped,
for I was envious of the arrogant. When I saw the prosperity of
the wicked, for they have no pangs until death, their bodies
are fat and sleek. They are not in trouble as others
are. They are not stricken like the rest of mankind. Therefore,
pride is their necklace. Violence covers them as a garment. Their eyes swell out through
fatness. Their heart overflows with folly. They scoff and they speak with
malice. Loftily, they threaten oppression.
They set their mouths against the heavens and their tongue
struts through the earth. Therefore, his people turn back
to them and find no fault in them. And they say, how can God
know? Is there knowledge in the most
high? Behold, these are the wicked, always at ease. They increase
in riches. All in vain I have kept my heart
clean and washed my hands in innocence. For all the day long
I have been stricken and rebuked every morning. If I had said,
I will speak thus, I would have betrayed the generation of your
children. But when I thought how to understand this, it seemed
to me a wearisome task, until I went into the sanctuary of
God, and then I discerned their end. Truly, you set them in slippery
places. You make them fall to ruin. How
they are destroyed in a moment, swept away utterly by terrors.
Like a dream, when one awakes, oh Lord, when you rouse yourself,
you despise them as phantoms. When my soul was embittered,
when I was pricked in my heart, I was brutish and ignorant. I
was like a beast toward you. Nevertheless, I am continually
with you. You hold my right hand, you guide me with your counsel,
and afterward, you will receive me to glory. Whom have I in heaven
but you? And there is nothing on the earth
that I desire beside you. My flesh and my heart may fail,
but God is the strength of my heart and my portion forever. For behold, those who are far
from you shall perish. You shall put an end to everyone
who is unfaithful to you. But for me, it is good to be
near God. I have made the Lord God my refuge
that I may tell of all of your works. Amen. This is God’s word
to us. Well, you have probably heard
and even asked the question, why do bad things happen to good
people? But this psalm asks a different
question. Why do good things happen to
bad people? Or you might ask it this way.
Why do the wicked prosper and the godly have a difficult time? These are age-old questions.
These are not questions new to us. They were not new questions
last millennia or the one before. These are ancient. These are
old. These are questions that go back in the history of time. Some of you last year studied
Job during the Sunday school hour. Job was old, not just in
age, but Job goes back to the days of the patriarchs, you know,
four or five thousand years ago. And so this is an age old question. And it’s one that will never
be reconciled in this life. It’s one of those that will boggle
your mind, it will vex your heart, and it will stretch your philosophical
self to its limits. It plagues us if we let it. So, can we gain perspective? Well, Psalm 73 says yes. Psalm
73 is like a new pair of glasses. Most of you have some sort of
corrective lens like I do, and without them, you cannot see.
Without them, the world is not clear. Without them, words are
fuzzy. Without them, your perspective is skewed. And from time to time,
we have to go to the eye doctor. I went just a year ago and gave
them my life savings. came out with new lenses and
just the other day I get a phone call and a thing in the mail
that says you need to come back and I wanted to call them and
let them know that I was still getting over last year and I
was doing just fine thanks but actually can’t see too well sometimes
and You know, you feel like you want to take care of yourself.
And so what do you do? You call the doctor and you go. Well,
how about spiritually when we cannot see? We come into the
house of the Lord. We look at life through the lenses
of scripture. We look at the bigger picture.
We look at the grand scheme of things. Sometimes we like to
say we’ve lost sight of the forest for the trees. And sometimes I wonder if we
haven’t lost sight of the forest because we’re zeroed in on the
poison ivy or we’re zeroed in on the hole in the ground that
tripped us up and cracked our ankles and we lose sight of the
hole for the little. Well, one way to gain some perspective
on life, one way to gain perspective on how we look out and see others,
particularly this issue of why do good things happen to bad
people? We have to remember the end of
it all. Where will the wicked be in eternity?
Where will the righteous be in the next life? Well, this Psalm
takes us through one man’s Difficult journey. This is a really honest
Psalm. Psalm 73 takes us through, I
think, four parts. Verse one gives us a testimony.
Verses two through 15 tell us the trouble that he finds as
he looks around the world. Verses 16 and 17 are a sort of
turning point. I went to church, saw things
differently. And then verses 18 through 28.
give us a little testimony from Asaph. Well first, let’s look
at verse one, Asaph’s testimony. Verse one says, truly God is
good to Israel, to those who are pure in heart. Now it’s gonna
quickly turn from there. It’s gonna go from acknowledging
God, acknowledging the goodness of God. He’s good to Israel.
He’s good to those who are pure in heart. And how is verse two
gonna start? But. but as for me, and it’s
not gonna go well from there. But verse one, at least Asaph
begins with the statement, God is good, and he’s gonna end,
we’ll see, in the last verses of this Psalm, with basically
the same statement, God is good. There was a book that came out,
I wanna say 20 years ago, and it has a wonderful title. You
don’t even need to read the book because the title’s so good.
When Life and Beliefs Collide. Isn’t that a good title? When
Lifes and Beliefs Collide. It was written by a lady, I think
her husband maybe taught history or something like that at Reform
Seminary down in Orlando. But it was a book about living
life and having beliefs and how a lot of times they’re just not
compatible. Life and beliefs do collide. And life and beliefs
have collided here for Asaph. You know, a lot of times we have
our religion on paper. This morning in Sunday school,
there was a distinction made between the definition of assurance. And the definition of assurance
is something like this. When you come to faith in Jesus
and rest in him alone for your salvation, God, because you are
justified and he will never leave you or forsake you, nothing in
this life can separate you from the love of God in Christ. You
have assurance of salvation. You can never be snatched away
from Jesus, the great shepherd. That’s assurance on paper. And
it’s true. But what is assurance in real
life? Well, assurance in real life is like your gas gauge on
your old car that doesn’t really work. And that needle just pops
around. And sometimes you’re assured, sometimes you’re not.
Sometimes you’re like the lovers of olden days where they pick
a flower. He loves me. He loves me not. He loves me
and he loves me not. And we wonder some days, does
God love me or does he love me not? And our assurance can ebb
and flow based on our closeness to God, our nearness to God,
our making ourselves available to the means of grace, our confession
of sin, different things going on in our complex and crazy lives. Well, religion on paper is one
thing. Religion lived out is another. We live in a real world with
real life. and with real life experiences. And that’s what
Asaph is going to express here in Psalm 73. Look at the second thing we see
about Asaph. He goes from the high point of
verse one to a good low point. We see it in verses two through
14. We’ll pick our way through this.
We’ll call this little section Asaph slips, he stumbles, and
he is envious. We’ll use his own words. Look
at verses two and three. He says, but as for me, my feet
had almost stumbled, my steps had nearly slipped, for I was
envious of the arrogant when I saw the prosperity of the wicked. You know, every one of us has
a set of values. We have a system. We have an
economy and we measure the world by that metrical system. I can
remember as a kid looking at people that had more than we
did. They had a nicer car, a bigger house. They took more trips.
And I would say, Dad, those people are rich. And he gave his wonderful
philosophical answer. Well, you know, son, there’s
more ways to be rich than just money. And of course, when you’re
young and you value things over life because you don’t have a
real big perspective yet you think that’s a bunch of hooey
but you grow up and you get about 23 and you realize they’re right
but we have a value system we have an economy and we run everything
that through that economy we see the world we run it through
that that system of measurement and we say surely i must have
come to the right conclusion and the psalmist says he slips
and he stumbles because he is envious of the wicked because
bad people seem to be having good things. We say things sometimes,
why is it not fair that a wicked person got cancer? And a good
Christian man or woman did. Or why is it that so-and-so got
this and I didn’t? Why is it that, and we fill in
the blank, and we run life through that system of values. And what
we’re gonna see in Psalm 73 is you got the wrong value system.
If you’re thinking that way, you got the wrong economy in
your mind. And so we see the psalmist run
life through a non-Christian worldview because he had slipped.
He had stumbled, he had become envious. Well, look at verses
four through 11. He says of the wicked, they have
no pains until death. Their bodies are fat and sleek.
They are not in trouble as others are. They are not stricken like
the rest of mankind. Therefore, pride is their necklace.
Violence covers them as a garment. Their eyes swell out through
fatness. Their hearts overflow with follies. They scoff and
speak with malice. Loftily, they threaten oppression.
They set their mouths against the heavens, and their tongue
struts through the earth. Therefore, his people turn back
to them. They find no fault in them, and they say, how can God
know? Is their knowledge in the Most
High? Somehow we can get so warped
in our worldview. We can lose sight of eternity.
We can lose sight of what is good and right and true. And
we can somehow get in our minds and hearts that the wicked and
their way of life and their prosperity is where it’s at. If you want
to have the good life, be like the wicked because there’s something
in the water. that they’re drinking. And you
know, sometimes we can come to church on Sunday, we can hear
God’s word, we can sing his praises, we can experience communion,
we can be in the fellowship with other Christians, and then we
go out in the world and we spend our life at the mall, we spend
our life watching afternoon television, we get our philosophy from Dr.
Phil and Oprah, and we get filled full of craziness. What other
way is there to put it, right? We get filled full of worldliness
and sugar and cotton candy and junk. And we realized there’s
a collide of worldviews. There’s the worldview that is
godly and there’s the worldview that is Hollywood. There’s a
worldview that is full of pride and violence and overindulgence
and folly and looseness of tongue. We idolize movie stars. We even put criminals and TV
stars up on a pedestal. And so we wonder, We wonder sometimes
why our hearts are so unsettled. Look at verse 12. Verse 12 sort
of stands alone. He says, behold, these are the
wicked always at ease and they increase in riches. How is it
that we get it in our heads sometimes that the more dollars we have
in the bank, the happier we will be? I didn’t hear a single prayer
tonight. And I don’t think I’ve ever heard
one in the three years we’ve been praying together that says, dear
Lord, thank you that my bank account is full. I mean, you
may have said it in your heart. And if you’ve got a few bucks
in the bank, good for you. That’s a good thing. It’s not
an evil thing. But I hear, thank you, Lord, for my salvation.
Thank you, Lord, for putting up with me. Thank you, Lord,
for my sins being forgiven. Thank you, Lord, for healing.
Thank you for providing jobs. You see, there’s a right perspective
in our hearts in this room, and that’s a wonderful thing. But
how far down is this man slipped and stumbled when he says what
he says in verse 12? Behold, these are the wicked.
They’re always at ease and they increase in riches. And notice, It gets a little
worse there, verses 13 and 14. All in vain, I have kept my heart
clean. I have washed my hands in innocence.
For all the day long, I have been stricken, and I’ve been
rebuked every morning. You know, this is beginning to
sound a bit like a teenager. I don’t even know how to put it,
because my kids are sweet. They’re not like this. But what
do we say when we get teenagerish? I have to live under your roof,
and I have to live under your rules, and I have to do chores.
I mean, heaven forbid you’re not living in a tent, or under
a bridge, or without. I mean, what, 80% of the world
doesn’t live like we do. And we can get that way with
God. I’ve obeyed your rules. I’ve confessed my sin. I’ve come
to the house of the Lord every week, and I’ve washed, and I’ve
washed twice, and I’ve scrubbed behind my ears, oh God. And somehow
the wicked have it better. They have it better than I do.
In verses 13 and 14, you may ask the question here, how low
can you go? How bad can it get for it? I
mean, this is a Christian person, right? This is a follower of
God and he is oppressed. He is oppressed. He is oppressed. He is oppressed. by what he believes,
what he perceives to be the prosperity of the unrighteous. I mean, this
is Asaph. This is the song leader in the
house of Israel. This is the guy who leads the
songs in worship for King David. This is a guy that knows his
Psalter, at least one of it exists at this time. This is a guy who
knows the five books of Moses. This is a guy that knows how
to sing the song of Mary and Moses when they look back and
saw the Egyptians and the sea fall in upon them and God give
them the deliverance. This is a man who is honest. He’s going to be biblical, but
at first he’s going to be honest and he’s going to show you how
far you can get when you get far from God’s word and God’s
house and God’s people. This is an interesting, interesting
look at the anatomy of where you can go when you take off
the lens of scripture. Now, wonderfully, there’s a turning
point. And in verses 16 and 17, we see that turning point. But
when I thought, but when I thought how to understand this, it seemed
to me a wearisome task until I went into the sanctuary of
God, and then I discerned their end. He had stumbled, he had
slipped, he had nearly gone off the edge. He had nearly lost
his mind. Now, we don’t really think much anymore. When’s the
last time you went outside and looked at the stars? When’s the
last time you sat on the back porch and you listened to the
crickets? When’s the last time you lighted a fire on the back
porch and watched the flames just do their thing? Instead
of turning on the noise box. I was looking through my little
file of papers the other day. keep everything, and I look through
it from time to time. And there was a show on television years
ago, 25 years ago, Ted Danson was the character, and I forget
what the show was called, but he said, the TV is the Petri dish
where America grows its idiots. That’s one of the best quotes.
Wrote down in a long time, it’s an old one. But we don’t sit
and listen, we don’t sit and think, we don’t watch and pray.
We are just bombarded with noise. What’s the first thing we do
in the morning? We pick this thing up and we look at it and
we read it and we’re attached to it all day long. And so our
worldview is coming through this thing. It’s coming through that
thing on our wall or that thing on the console in our living
room. And we can nearly stumble and
slip. We get wrapped up in a worldly
worldview. A worldly worldview that is a
quagmire. It’s full of despair. And we
can come unhinged. We can say, why, why, why? And beat our chest. Why don’t
I have a house like the Jones? Or why does so-and-so get a new
car? Or why is he healthy and she’s not? Why have I lost my
mother and I loved her and my friend who hates his mother has
lost hers? We ask these sorts of questions.
And what is the only solution? It’s here in this turning point.
Go to church. Pretty simple, isn’t it? Go to
church. You know, we are an over… analyzed,
over-psychologized, over-medicated, over-doctor-saturated culture. And you know why that is? It’s
not because we’re a sicker people than there was at some other
time. You know why it is? It’s because
we’ve told God we don’t need him in our lives. And you see
how quickly even a Christian person, even a person like Asaph,
can unravel and become unhinged, because we say another trip to
the beach will do just fine, or it’s a sports day, or the
children are doing well in soccer, and so we hope they’ll get into
college, and so we sign up for the travel team, and we get ourselves
away from the house of God, and then we wonder, why have we got
problems? Have you noticed that in our
culture? Go to church, the psalmist says. This was wearisome, this
was vexing, until I went into the sanctuary of God, And then
I discerned therein, I mentioned this morning, this Psalm, Psalm
73 is like a four wheel alignment. It’s like getting a four tire
balance. It’s like putting your body up
on the rack. You come to church and instead of pews, just imagine
there’s a lift and you drive yourself up on it and say, I
am all out of whack. I’ve been pulling to the left.
I’ve been pulling to the right. I’ve been bumpy and the ride
hasn’t been good. It’s a four wheel alignment.
Now that’s good for you men. How about a spa day? And these
things don’t even pale in comparison to coming to church and what
it does for us. But sometimes we need perspective
change. We need to be adjusted. We need
to be fixed and repaired. And the only place we can gain
that is in the sanctuary of God. Now, one thing that God has designed
for us as his people is he’s designed a six-day week with
one day of rest. Six days we labor, and on the
seventh, we shall rest. unto the Lord. It’s a day of
rest and worship. It’s a six day work week. It’s a six day world. And we
get warped and we get beat up. Our tires hit the curb and we
run into potholes. And every seventh day we need
to come in for a checkup, for a tune up, for a recall, if you
will. How does this, how does this
help us? How does coming into the house of the Lord help us?
Well, think about Asaph for a moment. He wasn’t coming to a New Testament
church in the year 2018. He was worshiping in the tent
before David and Solomon would build the temple. He was worshiping
in the tent and no doubt as he came out of the world and into
the tent, he saw the altar. He saw the perpetual fire burning. He saw the showbread on the table.
He saw the sacrifices being made. He saw the blood dripping down
the altar. And on his mind was Yahweh and
atonement and sin and law and the goodness of God. And outside
that tent was paganism. We come into the church. just
as Asaph went into the tent. And we come into the church,
and what do we find? We find the presence of God. We find
that God is altogether lovely in comparison to the rest of
the world. And we get perspective about what is good, about what
is right, and what is true. And something we have to understand
as Christians, we should understand it, but I don’t necessarily think
we do, but it’d be good for us to understand, there is nothing
greater in this life than worship. There is nothing more reorienting
in life than worship. There is no better experience
than coming into the house of God after a week of living in
this world. And that leads us to the last
little section of the psalm, verses 18 through 26. And we’ll
call this just out of maybe respect for the hymn that we sang at
the beginning. We’ll call this he leadeth me.
Look at verses 18 through 20. He says, truly you set them in
slippery places. You make them fall to ruin. How
they are destroyed in a moment, swept away utterly by terrors. Like a dream when one awakes,
oh Lord, when you rouse yourself, you despise them as phantoms. You may look on the wicked and
say, why do good things happen to bad people? but it is only
for a moment. Read the book of Proverbs, read
the book of Ecclesiastes, read a lot of the wisdom Psalms. God
seems to say, it’s all a mist, it’s all a vapor. Just like that,
it’s over with. You will die and your riches
that you worked hard for will be spent by another person. And you pick up in verses 21
and 22, when my soul was embittered, when I was pricked in heart,
that’s when he was struggling with all of this. Look at what
he says about himself in 22. When I was brutish and I was
ignorant, I was like a beast towards you. That’s not a good way to be towards
God, is it? Most of our posture before God is face down. It’s
woe is me. But this guy dared to get in
the ring with God. I mean, even Job wouldn’t do
that, but this guy was going to get in the ring with God.
He was going to go to the mats. He was going to put on the boxing
gloves because he had gotten so far down. He became like a
beast, a brute. And in his ignorance, he was
ready to take on Yahweh. At the end of the day, we have
to beat our breast and say, thy ways are mysterious. I’ve come
to the end of myself. I’ve come to the end of knowledge.
I cannot fathom any further. God, you’re God, and I am not. And so he confesses. Then look
at verses 23 to 26. He says, nevertheless, I am continually
with you. You hold my right hand. You guide
me with your counsel, and afterward you will receive me to glory.
Whom have I in heaven but you? There is nothing on earth that
I desire besides you. Stop there for just a moment.
What about being fat? What about being sleek? What
about having so much food that your eyes are popping out of
your body? What about all the good things that the bad people
have? All I need is you, he says. You guide me with your counsel.
Afterward, you will receive me into your glory. Verse 25 says,
whom have I in heaven but you? There is nothing on earth that
I desire besides you. My flesh and my heart may fail,
but God is the strength of my heart. He is my portion forever. Notice he’s taking an eternal
look here. He’s no longer looking at things
that may last 50, 60, 70 years, but you’re my portion forever.
For behold, verse 27 tells us, behold, those who are far from
you shall perish. You put an end to everyone who
is unfaithful to you. We’ll stop there for just a moment.
He comes around. He comes around and notice what
he says, God, you never left my side. While I was brutish,
while I was ignorant, while I was beastly towards you, I was thinking
of, what was that Mark Twain quote about fatherhood? You know,
our parents are, idiots until about age 23. And then we realized
how smart they were. I’m not butchering Mark Twain,
but it’s something of that sentiment. And it’s not really until about
your age 23, maybe it’s older for some, younger for others,
when you really write your parents a Father’s Day or a Mother’s
Day card and you say, thank you. Thank you for what you taught
me. And thanks for putting up with me. I was a real idiot child.
You ever said that to your parents? Maybe you should. But I was a
real pain in the neck child. But you were right. And you never
left my side. That’s what the Psalmist is saying.
You put up with me. You put up with my brutishness,
my beastliness. You put up with my ignorance. What a honest Psalm this is. God never left my side. What
do we take from this at the end of the day? Well, he says, he
said, it is good. It is good to be near God in
verse 28. It is good for me to be near
God. Where is near God? It’s in the
sanctuary. It is in the house of the Lord.
It is not good to be distant from God. It is not good to get
away from the word, to quench the Holy Spirit, to not be a
person of prayer. It is not good to be away from
him because you get vexed. You get smitten with this world
and you begin to say God surely cannot be good. But he says here
at the end, it is good to be near God. One of the wonderful
Commentaries on Psalm 73 points out the change in the dominant
pronouns in Psalm 73. Psalm 73 begins with they, the
evil ones. Look at them. They are fat. They
are sleek. They are blessed. They have it
all. And then it moves to I. I am brought low. I cannot figure
this out. I have come into the house of
God. You have not left my side. but how does the Psalm end? What
personal pronoun comes? Whom have I in heaven but you? Not the wicked, not me, not I,
but the personal pronouns change to you. You know, it is good
for us as the children of God to put ourselves up on the rack
or to go to the spa weekly Come to church. Because all week long
you look at the they, all week long you look at the me, when
our eyes need to be fixed on the you. Pray with me. Lord, help us. Help us to see. Help us to see you. Help us to
see what is good and right and true. And help us to see the
world with the proper perspective. Lord, it’s a wearisome thing
to live in this world. It’s a wearisome thing to see
good things happen to bad people and bad things happen to good
people. But we know you, we know your ways, we know eternity,
and we long for the day when all things The things that are
reversed, the things that are upside down, the things that
are loppy-jawed and backwards, they’ll be made right. But until
then, let us not lose sight of what is good and right and true.
Help us. We need your grace, and we pray it in Christ’s name.
Amen. We have for our hymn of response
on the back of your paper, In Sweet Communion, Lord with Thee,
and it is based on verse 23. Nevertheless, I am continually
with me. You hold my right hand.