Psalm Chapter 73 - A Psalm of Asaph

Psalm 73: Until I Went Into the Sanctuary

Asaph begins with a confession so honest it is almost embarrassing: he was jealous of the wrong people. Not of the righteous, not of the wise — of the wicked. Because the wicked, he noticed, seem to sail through life on the smoothest seas, their bodies fat, their deaths painless, their mouths running at the heavens without consequence. Meanwhile he, keeping a clean heart, was getting plagued every morning. "Verily I have cleansed my heart in vain," he nearly concludes — the most dangerous sentence a soul can speak. And then comes the turn, on a single hinge word: until. "Until I went into the sanctuary of God; then understood I their end." Nothing in the outward facts changed; what changed was the room Asaph was standing in. From the street, the wicked looked unstoppable; from the sanctuary, they were revealed to be standing on ice. The psalm ends with one of the great lines of the Psalter: "Whom have I in heaven but thee? and there is none upon earth that I desire beside thee." He did not lose his envy by arguing with it. He lost it by walking into the presence of God and finding, there, that he already had everything worth wanting.

00:00 Truly God Is Good — But My Feet Almost Slipped
01:00 The Prosperity of the Wicked
02:00 Until I Went Into the Sanctuary
03:00 Whom Have I in Heaven But Thee