Doubt
Psalm 73 28.6.20
The proverb says “Ignorance is bliss”. A school teacher writing a report on a student, to be sent home to his parents wrote “If ignorance is bliss, your son should have a very happy life.”
If ignorance is bliss, knowledge can make your head hurt. Too much news about the spread of the pandemic can spread fear. With each new discovery in science comes the knowledge of another 100 things we don’t know. The more we see what we are really like on the inside, the more confusing it becomes.
Should we ask big questions and learn all we can? Of course. I am just saying that doing that comes at a price.
One man who knew that is Asaph, the writer of Psalm 73. He is the music director in the tabernacle in Jerusalem where he also preaches. He is one of King David’s top men, and he is not a dill (idiot), but his head is hurting because of what he sees around him.
Over here are those who are healthy (“no pangs until death” v4), their dinner tables are loaded and they have the best personal trainers (“their bodies are fat and sleek” v4b) … they don’t have any trouble paying their bills (“they are not in trouble as others are; they are not stricken like the rest of mankind” v5).
They so blessed because they are humble servants of the Living God? No. They are arrogant and proud: “they scoff and speak with malice; loftily they threaten oppression. They set their mouths against the heavens, and their tongue struts through the earth” (v9).
Do people see them for what they are? No. People are blind to their arrogance, besotted with their success. Others “turn back to them, and find no fault in them” (v10).
Are they well off because, despite all that, they love and serve the living God? They don’t. They mock him – “What would he know?” they ask, verse 11.
Asaph sees a second group of people. They do love the Living God and aim to live by his laws. If the first lot are the bad guys, these are the good guys. Are they also full, and healthy, and popular?
No. It’s the opposite. Speaking from his own experience, Asaph says in verse 13 “All in vain have I kept my heart clean and washed my hands in innocence. For all the day long I have been stricken, and rebuked every morning.”
The pains in his body which he takes to bed are still there next morning. His reputation gets trashed. His children die. His money runs out. His friends walk out on him and his family members treat him as a loser, and yet he is the man who fears the Lord!
It’s not like that for every person, but it’s true enough to be able to generalise … more crooks (dishonest person)) and tax cheats and God mockers live in luxury than in prison cells. It’s generally true that God-fearers, the truly true believers are not as rich and famous.
Shouldn’t it be the other way round? Doesn’t God bless the godly, and withhold good things from the ungodly? No wonder the more that Asaph saw, the more his head hurt.
Facts are facts. What are his options?
He thought of giving God away. Verse 2: “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.” Like a man walking a muddy track across a hill who is about to slip into the valley below, he was close to falling out of the faith.
Remember, this is the man who is responsible for the church services in the tabernacle. He is one of the preachers, and HE is in danger of walking away from it all, but he can’t, for reasons we shall see.
There is a lesson for us in his honesty, I think. Having doubts from a hurting head are normal. Doubts do not make you an unbeliever. You have doubts only because you have belief. Unbelievers don’t doubt – there is nothing to doubt. So don’t confuse doubting and unbelieving, will you?
If walking away from God is his first option, his second is to blab, to vent, to put it all out there. To sound off to people about how it doesn’t pay to serve the Living God. He has, however worked out that’s not a good option. Look at verse 15 “If I had said ‘I will speak thus’, I would have betrayed the generation of your children.”
His head may be hurting, but blabbing and taking others down with him is not an option.
That doesn’t mean we don’t get help from someone who can help us, in our doubts. It does mean we don’t turn doubts into certainties, and let rip. Especially if we are leaders of others – and that’s a tough call.
Asaph has a third option for solving this problem which is hurting his head so badly. Trying to work it out himself only makes things worse … “When I thought how to understand this, it seemed to me a wearisome task” (verse 16). There isn’t enough information in his head, or in his world, to answer the question as to why the ungodly prosper and the godly do not.
Your dog doesn’t have the capacity to work out that if he leaves half the bowl of dried food you give him tonight, he’ll have some for breakfast tomorrow. Dogs don’t have the capacity for reason, and live by instinct and habit.
Asaph is not a dog, but he says “I was brutish and ignorant; I was like a beast (a dog) toward you.” (verse 22) I don’t have the ability to work this one out.
Reasoning it all out can’t work. Blabbing and taking others down isn’t right. Walking away from God is deadly.
So what are his options for a hurting head? He needs something bigger and better than his reason, something that means he doesn’t have to sound off or walk away. He tells us he found it.
When you write an essay, you probably have your conclusion at the end “having seen this and this and this, therefore …”.
You might, however, put it at the start. “This and this is true … I will prove that by looking at 5 events in the novel.”
Asaph has done this in this poem. His conclusion is at the start … “Truly God is good to Israel, to those who are pure in heart.” (v1)
How did he get there, when all that he saw with his eyes seemed to say that God was not good to Israel, and that being pure in heart was a waste of time?
He saw two things that you can’t see with your eyes.
Now is not all there is.
He says in verse 17 that he “discerned their end”. He saw where unbelievers end up. They may be healthy and prosperous and popular now, but one day they will be the ones who are on a slippery path and there is nothing good about that slide.
“They are destroyed in a moment, swept away utterly by terrors” … like people in a dream that cease to be once you wake up (19,20) … “those who are far from you shall perish; you put an end to everyone who is unfaithful to you.” (27)
Will people pay for their evil deeds and their pride and their hostility toward the Living God? Maybe not in this uneven world, but what a payment there will be at the end!
Any version of Christianity which promises that believers win now, with health and wealth and all problems fixed is a fraud. We get to see about 1% of what is real in our 50 or 70 or 90 years on this planet. What we do see now doesn’t make enough sense without a big future.
Do you think you when that future comes, you will then envy the rich man as he perishes? Or the woman who had so much here, as she is swept away by eternal terrors? Do you think that at the end you will be wishing you could have traded places with them?
Does that fix all the injustices here and now? No, but it sure makes sense of the fact that they don’t get fixed here and now. Now is not all that there is.
What is most real now is best.
We are all swamped day in, day out, with the belief that success, awards, money in the bank and all the other signs of prosperity are what matter, but they have never been what is most real.
Speaking of the Lord, Asaph says from verse 23 … “you hold my right hand” … “you guide me with your counsel” … “afterward you will receive me to glory” … “my heart and flesh may fail, but God is the strength of my heart and my portion forever.”
I may not hold food in my hand, but that hand is held by my Creator who does all things well. I may not be noticed by others, but the eye of my covenant God is on me. While my body wastes away, God Almighty owns me, and dwells in me.
Tell me: which unbeliever is richer than the poorest believer in Tamworth this morning? Who has a more wonderful family tree? Who has eternal prospects which come even close? Who has status and security and guaranteed delights like you do?
You can’t see what’s most real, but it is. You can’t see the end that’s coming. That is also real.
Where did Asaph get this information about the ugly future for unbelief, and the beautiful present for belief? He didn’t get it out of his head, from social media or the television news, or from what his teachers at university taught him.
He saw these bigger things when he “went into the sanctuary of God” (v17). That’s really written not as something he did once … it is “when I go”. Whenever he goes into the tabernacle he sees that there is another world that is bigger and better than anything he sees in this one.
Where do WE go? God says that Jesus is the tabernacle – it is in the person of Jesus that God tabernacled among us. The fullness of God dwells bodily in him. When we go to him, the way we see things changes. He answers things that make our heads hurt.
Your head will always hurt if the only information you have to answer your questions is what you see or work out for yourself.
When you know who runs the world, and what lengths he has gone to, to love you, things start to make sense.
Where do you get to see this future, and what’s really real here and now? Where do you see Jesus who makes sense of so much that you see each day with your eyes? Like Asaph, it is when we are with the people of God where ...
When I am at church, I don’t need to be entertained or find more of the stuff that I see out there. I need to see things that are radically different from what I see and experience day-in and day-out. I need to see things I can’t see with my eyes.
Yes, the sanctuary to which we go, is Jesus, and when I am with people who believe in and celebrate the unseen world, that is when I am urged on to Jesus, to find that he is my treasure, and to find my rest in him not in anything in this world.
That is why we are together in the way that we are this morning. That is why we are holding out for the time when we are all back together, physically. It is because Jesus is our true sanctuary.
I want to live life in this world on the basis of what is most real, not just what I see. Don’t you?
DOUBT Trinity