Episode Details

Psalm 73: The Turning in the Sanctuary

Asaph nearly lost his footing, and he tells us so with disarming honesty. "My feet were almost gone; my steps had well nigh slipped." The cause was not tragedy but something more insidious: he looked at the wicked and saw that they were doing splendidly. No pain in their death, no trouble like other men, riches increasing while his own hands, washed in innocence, seemed to earn nothing but plague. It is the oldest and most corrosive temptation — the suspicion that goodness does not pay. And Asaph could find no answer to it until, he says, "I went into the sanctuary of God; then understood I their end." He does not tell us what happened there. No argument is reported, no theorem proved. He simply entered the presence and saw things differently, as a man who steps outside a house sees the landscape he could not see from within. And from that vantage point comes one of the most beautiful confessions in all Scripture: "Whom have I in heaven but thee? and there is none upon earth that I desire beside thee." The envious heart has become, in a single turn, the satisfied one.

00:00 My Feet Were Almost Gone
01:00 The Prosperity of the Wicked
02:00 Then Understood I Their End
03:00 Whom Have I but Thee