Sanctuary

The first line of the psalm is this bold summary of the psalm as a whole. He actually starts with the conclusion. This is where Asaph ends up, but it's certainly not where he begins. In this psalm it's kind of like a man planting a banner before the battle. It starts with this little Hebrew particle — "truly" — a particle of insistence or conclusion. It means you can take this to the bank. This is undisputed. You can absolutely count on this to be true. Truly, certainly, insistently — God is good. But it's not just that God is good. God is good to Israel, to His people, to His covenant community that He has created for Himself, that He has entered into relationship with. God is good to His people — the people He made for a purpose, and that purpose is to be a blessing. God's blessing, God's goodness upon Israel was never supposed to be just for Israel. They were the vessel, the instrument by which God was reconciling everyone everywhere back unto Himself. So surely, truly, certainly, God is good to Israel.

And then he qualifies it: "to those who are pure in heart." The second phrase tightens it up. God is good to the pure in heart. The Israel, the covenant people that God is good to, isn't defined simply or merely by bloodline or geography or religious performance. At its core it's defined by the heart. The word here for pure is bar — it means unmixed, it means pure, it has connotations of cleanness. So God is good to those whose hearts are unmixed, are focused, are clean. Now, for the ancient Hebrews — and I've shared this before — they don't think about the heart the way we do in our culture. We think about the heart as the emotional center, the feeling thing. When we think about decision-making, the logical, the focused part of us, we would say it's the mind. We think with the head and feel with the heart. But for the ancient Hebrews in the Bible, the heart was the seat of decision-making. So when we read in a text like this about "the pure in heart," it's not saying they have pure feelings — it's saying they have pure direction. Their eyes are focused. They're wide open to what God has. The heart is that which sets the direction or aim of the life. And that's going to be significant as we walk through this text.

So now we get into it. Verse two:

2 But as for me, my feet had almost stumbled, my steps had nearly slipped.

You already know this isn't going to go well at first. You start with "God is good to Israel, to the pure in heart," and then — "But as for me." I love this because already we're starting with some honesty. It's a picture of standing on ground that's giving way underneath your feet — not an accidental slipping on a banana peel, but a picture of being swallowed up by the earth, of absolute disaster. It is a near catastrophe of faith. God's good to Israel, to the pure in heart — but as for me, I almost lost it all. I know there's one or two of us in here who resonate with what Asaph is describing.

He continues. He says this is what almost took him out — verse three:

3 For I was envious of the arrogant when I saw the prosperity of the wicked.

"Envious when I saw." I think this is the heart of the psalm. It's the heart of what I've been trying to do with you all for the last nine months — this very simple biblical truth: we become what we behold. When we behold God, we become like God. When we behold broken things, we become broken. Asaph starts out this way: it's like, I've been aiming, I've been looking, my heart hasn't been pure. My heart has been focused not on the goodness of God but on the arrogance of the wicked. And when I saw the apparent blessings of the wicked, he says, it did something to me. Envy is not at its core simply wanting something that someone else has that you don't. Envy is a way of looking. It's a way of seeing. It's a posture of beholding. It's the direction that you are going in your life.

Asaph had become consumed with the apparent blessings of the wicked, and listen to how he describes how good the wicked appear to have it in verses 4 through 12. It's like this barrage of apparent blessings stacked upon each other:

4 For they have no pangs until death; their bodies are fat and sleek. 5 They are not in trouble as others are; they are not stricken like the rest of mankind. 6 Therefore pride is their necklace; violence covers them as a garment. 7 Their eyes swell out through fatness; their hearts overflow with follies. 8 They scoff and speak with malice; loftily they threaten oppression. 9 They set their mouths against the heavens, and their tongue struts through the earth. 10 Therefore his people turn back to them, and find no fault in them. 11 And they say, "How can God know? Is there knowledge in the Most High?" 12 Behold, these are the wicked; always at ease, they increase in riches.

He starts with that great phrase: "They have no pangs until death; their bodies are fat and sleek." Now, there are some interesting textual issues here, but here's the idea being communicated. If somebody comes up to you in our culture and says, "Man, you're looking a little fat," they might get punched in the throat — we just don't see that as a good thing. But in the ancient Near East, the culture the Bible was written to and in and from, fatness was a sign of vitality, of prosperity, of strength. So if you came up to somebody in biblical times and said, "Man, you're looking fat," they'd be like, "Oh, thank you!" And then there's this interesting combination — they're fat and sleek. These are not two things that naturally go well together, kind of like political honesty or governmental efficiency or pastoral brevity. But they're fat and sleek. What Asaph is doing is looking at the wicked and admiring their strength, their vitality, their prosperity, their abundance. They've got it going on — they're at the top of their game from his perspective.

He continues:

5 They are not in trouble as others are; they are not stricken like the rest of mankind. 6 Therefore pride is their necklace; violence covers them as a garment.

Every time I watched the news this last week that verse rang within me — the pride and the violence that go hand in hand as power seeks to assert itself over and at the expense of others with no sense of shame, no sense of remorse, no sense of regret. Just unshackled, unfettered pride.

Verse seven is interesting:

7 Their eyes swell out through fatness; their hearts overflow with follies.

Can you picture that? This is the image: they've got it so well, they've become so abundant, so fat, that they're actually blinding themselves to reality. And their hearts overflow with follies. I've been convinced that one of the greatest challenges and struggles that you and I face living in the time and place and country and culture that we do is not often lack — our big challenge is abundance, and we don't know what to do with it. It subtly and insistently corrupts us from the inside out. This is a little bit of what Asaph is getting at: they begin to live in the fantasy of their own abundance, their own strength, their own power. Their eyes swell shut with fatness. It's a beholding issue.

8 They scoff and speak with malice; loftily they threaten oppression. 9 They set their mouths against the heavens, and their tongue struts through the earth. 10 Therefore his people turn back to them, and find no fault in them. 11 And they say, "How can God know? Is there knowledge in the Most High?" 12 Behold, these are the wicked; always at ease, they increase in riches.

The freedom that people feel in our day and age — especially on social media — to casually and flippantly attack the reality of God, curse the name of God and the work of God, is a natural outflow of wickedness and the apparent blessing that it can bring.

Now, let me draw your attention back to verses 10 and 11, because did you catch how envy turned to doubt? How envy eroded Asaph's faith?

10 Therefore his people turn back to them, and find no fault in them. 11 And they say, "How can God know? Is there knowledge in the Most High?"

"His people": whose people? God's people. God's people are not looking to God; they're looking to the blessings of the wicked, to the abundance and prosperity, the fatness of the unrighteous, and they find no fault in them. "That looks good to me. I'd like that ease. I'd like that comfort. I'd like some of that." But it gets worse. They say, "How can God know? Is there knowledge in the Most High?" This is where it goes — God's blind. Does God see? Because isn't this really where we take our complaint? That's not fair, as adults — we don't have parents to take it to, we don't have teachers to take it to, we can take it to politicians but they don't care anything about us — so we take it to God. "God, that's not fair. Why'd you do this for them and not for me? Why'd you give them that and give me this? Why? Why? Why?" I've already talked to a couple of you this morning about why Jeremy's hair grows so fast. Why is it so long and luxurious? Because God didn't want me to be an usher — that's why. I've been away for a while. Got stuff building up.

Do you see how this works, in a psalm all about seeing? The wicked — their eyes swelling because of their fatness. Now God's people, instead of looking to God, are looking at the wicked and going, "God, do you even see any of this?" This is the corrosion underneath the whole thing. It's what I like to call practical atheism. They still believe in God — they just don't believe in God. It's not the loud kind that denies God exists, but the quiet kind that decides God isn't paying attention. And if we want our life to go the way we think it should go, we shouldn't look to God — we should look to those that seem to have it together.

I want you to notice something. In verse 11, it's "the Most High" — not the covenant name of God, just a generic name for deity. In fact, the covenant name of God is not going to appear in this psalm until the very last verse. It's this distant deity, this non-relational God. And that's what He has become to Asaph and to God's people as they've put their eyes on the wicked.

He continues — verses 13 and 14:

13 All in vain have I kept my heart clean and washed my hands in innocence. 14 For all the day long I have been stricken and rebuked every morning.

The wicked — they're blessed. I kept my heart clean, and what did I get? Stricken and rebuked every morning. Asaph is in kind of an existential crisis. Nothing's working the way he thinks it's supposed to. And so Asaph and the psalm are at rock bottom.

But in verse 15, he begins to make a turn. This is so interesting to me — the thing that begins to turn Asaph's eyes off the wicked and back onto God is the community of God. Listen to what he says:

15 If I had said, "I will speak thus," I would have betrayed the generation of your children.

He's been thinking all these thoughts about the wicked and about God's blindness and about all these things. But now he says, "You know, if I would have said that out loud, I would have actually betrayed the community and the people that I'm a part of." He realizes that to broadcast his bitterness would be to break faith with the next generation, with God's children coming up behind him who are listening to how he talks about God. And there's something about that that checks him. I don't want you to rush past that. I think it's doing structural and important work in this text. Before Asaph's perception is reoriented, his accountability to a people restrains him.

We live in a culture where community is optional at best, a hindrance at worst. I talk about it a lot — a culture of expressive radical individualism where we put the self at the height of everything. In our worldview, I think we can barely make sense of a sentence like verse 15. "I was held back because I was concerned for those coming after me." We're taught, don't worry about anybody else around you — the only thing that matters is how you feel, what you do. I say all the time: you'll never be who God made you to be, and you'll never do what God created you to do by yourself, because that's not the design of God. We are created for community. We haven't been taught or trained to think that way in the culture that we live in. Which is what makes this text, and so many other texts in scripture, so important for us, because we have to learn to reject the thinking of our culture and embrace the truth of God and the truth of His scripture — that we're not made to live lives of radical independence. It's not all about me. We're a part of something bigger, and it's always better to be part of God's community and people.

I think Asaph understood that and lived that. This is the discipline of community in action, and what it does for him is it keeps him from the brink. Community reorients his gaze. Listen to verse 16:

16 But when I thought how to understand this, it seemed to me a wearisome task,

I can resonate with that — that's why I've almost completely stopped watching the news. He tried to think his way out of it. He sat down with the problem. There are good people suffering. There are bad people thriving. Where is God in the ledger? And he tried to solve it by sheer mental effort, and it wore him out. It was a labor of weariness. I'm going to say this to you and to myself with all the love I have in the world: we're not nearly as smart as we think we are. Now, this is not anti-intellectual. It's not anti-thinking. It's just acknowledging the limits of who and what we are. This is not something we think our way out of.

Verse 17:

17 until I went into the sanctuary of God; then I discerned their end.

He doesn't think harder. He doesn't try to feel differently. He doesn't manage his attitude. He goes somewhere. Until I went into the sanctuary of God. The faculty is the same. The circumstances are the same. It's actually the same verb for "discerned" here as in the previous verse. What changed is not his mind or his idea or his plan — what changed is that from a new place he had a new perspective, and he finally began to see reality. A sanctuary in the Hebrew — the word literally means sacred space. It's the place where heaven and earth come together. Asaph could have been referring to the tabernacle, he could have been referring to the temple, he could have been referring to the various altars that had been set up where God met with His people. The point is not that it was a specific place in geography. The point is where he was — he was with the people of God, because the sanctuary was a communal event, and he was in the presence of God. And that's when Asaph began to change.

Then he actually saw the wicked as they are — he discerned their end. I want to focus on this: this is the discipline of community in real time. It's in the communal worship, in the sacred space of the sanctuary, that Asaph's eyes begin to truly be opened. Let me say it this way, because this is really what I want to say: Asaph did not fix his seeing in isolation. This whole season we've been in — "we become what we behold" — is not an individualistic, privatized act. Asaph did not fix his beholding in isolation. It was in community, in the presence of God, that he began to see clearly. And I could oversimplify that and say, "See, you need to make sure you come to church" — but again, it's not about being in the building. You can be in proximity and not be in intimacy. The first thing he begins to understand is: "I discerned their end." It's a word that means destiny — the direction and the outcome of the path they're on. In other words, Asaph had been looking at the prosperity, the abundance, the apparent blessing of the wicked in a very small time frame. In the moment, it looked great. But when he came into the community of God's people, when he came into the sacred space and the presence of God, his eyes were opened much bigger than just, "Hey, how big is your house? How large is your portfolio? How much power have you amassed in this moment in time?" His eyes were opened to the fact that they are on a path that is leading somewhere. Jesus might have had a thing or two to say about this — one path going one way, another path going another. Asaph looks at this and he realizes, "Man, I've been admiring the wicked, desiring the apparent blessings of the wicked — but now I look at them and I see where that's going, and I want nothing to do with that."

Let me be clear: he doesn't merely discern that the wicked will die — everyone dies, the wicked and the righteous alike. It's actually much worse than that. Winning here and now is just a small part of the equation. At the end of the day, life is short, and after life comes the judgment. And seeing that, beholding that, transformed the way that Asaph wanted to live his life.

As we continue, I want you to notice: nothing external has changed. The wicked are still prospering. They're still fat and sleek. What changed was Asaph's perception — his seeing — in the sanctuary, in the midst of God's people. The whole horizon looked different. And so the psalm begins to reverse itself.

18 Truly you set them in slippery places; you make them fall to ruin. 19 How they are destroyed in a moment, swept away utterly by terrors! 20 Like a dream when one awakes, O Lord, when you rouse yourself, you despise them as phantoms.

Remember how he started — "my feet nearly stumbled, I almost slipped" — like the ground underneath him was caving in. But now he looks and goes, "You know what? It's actually the wicked. It's actually those who are without God who are the ones falling, and they don't even know it." All the power, all the money, all the fatness, all the prosperity, all the vitality that the wicked might amass to themselves will not save or spare them from the reality of death and judgment. And it can happen in an instant. There are many of us in this room right now who are reeling from that reality.

And then he goes to this image that undoes all of it when it comes to the wicked. "Like a dream when one awakes." How many of you have had the experience of waking up in the morning to an angry spouse because they dreamt that you did something bad? And you're like, "Hey, good morning, honey," and they're like, "Don't talk to me." But here's the thing about it — graciously, by God's mercy, the dream begins to fade really quickly. One minute they're upset, and then soon enough, "I can't even remember what you did. I can't remember why I felt that way." Dreams are like that. When you're in the dream it feels absolutely real — whether it's something good or the terror of a nightmare. But as you awake, it just vanishes. This is what Asaph is saying about the prosperous, the powerful, the ones who have it all in this world and think they did it on their own, who despise God, who do all the things he listed. He says it's like a dream. One day it will be gone.

What I love about what he does next is that he doesn't rejoice in that. He doesn't go, "I'm going to be okay at the end and they're in trouble." Listen to what he does — so humble and profoundly honest:

21 When my soul was embittered, when I was pricked in heart, 22 I was brutish and ignorant; I was like a beast toward you.

As his perception changes, he's actually able to see himself better. He recognizes: "Man, I thought I had a real complaint. I thought You were blind, God. I thought the wicked were winning. And I actually felt really good about myself — I thought I was being sophisticated, I thought I was seeing more than everybody else. But in reality I was just an animal. A cow in a field chewing on the cud of his grievances." I love the honesty of that, and I want us to feel the sting of it — because envy always dresses itself up as clearsightedness. Envy feels like you're the one person willing to say the emperor has no clothes. You're the one realist in a room of naïve believers. And Asaph, from inside the sanctuary, looks back at the version of himself and says: that wasn't insight. That was a beast that couldn't see past its own nose. There's no self-help in this verse. There's just a man naming his sin plainly. I was looking wrongly, and I was wrong.

Then we get one word that changes the whole trajectory of the psalm. You thought it was going to be a big "but" — it's a "nevertheless."

23 Nevertheless, I am continually with you; you hold my right hand.

I was a beast. I was messed up. And yet — nevertheless, nevertheless — I am continually with You. Not because I held on to You, but because You hold my right hand. The reason Asaph didn't slip is not because he held on to God — it's because he was held by God. Listen to what that knowledge does to him — I love verses 24 through 26:

24 You guide me with your counsel, and afterward you will receive me to glory. 25 Whom have I in heaven but you? And there is nothing on earth that I desire besides you. 26 My flesh and my heart may fail, but God is the strength of my heart and my portion forever.

We read verse 24 and we might think of heaven. And I think conceptually that's part of it. But this is the opposite of perceiving the end of the wicked — the lifestyle, the path, the way of the wicked has a natural outcome and it's disaster. And the destiny, the eventual outcome of those who keep their eyes on God — that ultimate destiny is glory. A sense of purpose and meaning and value that cannot be touched by something as small as death. "You guide me with your counsel, and afterward you will receive me to glory." This is the confidence of those who have their eyes upon God.

"Whom have I in heaven but you? And 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 and my portion forever." Do you see now why it was important that I told you Asaph was a Levite? This is Levitical language. "Whom have I in heaven and earth besides you? You're my portion — my portion forever." My flesh, even my heart, may fail — but God never fails. You are the strength of my heart and my portion forever. For Asaph as a Levite, this is such a profound declaration. God is his inheritance. God is his portion. Who needs lands when you have God? Who needs riches when you have God? Who needs earthly power or prosperity when you have the God who's got you — and who will lead you to glory?

Denny talked about this a few weeks ago in Psalm 16 — "The Lord is my chosen portion and my cup." You've got to choose it. You've got to aim it. You've got to direct your life and say, "This is what I want." For Asaph as a Levite, that's all he had. And what he's saying here is: who needs lands when I've got God? Who needs riches when I've got God? Who needs earthly power or prosperity when I've got the God who's got me and who will receive me into glory?

I thought about that a lot this last week. Many of you know my wife's father Glen went to be with Jesus on July 4th. We had his service this last week, and man, was it beautiful. My wife did part of the eulogy with her brother, and she rocked it. I was so proud of her. She started off funny — that changes the tenor of the whole thing. She got up there and said, "Hi, I'm Wanda and I was my dad's favorite daughter." Which led me to get up later and say, "Hi, I'm the guy who got to marry the favorite daughter. And that was not as easy as you think it was.” But you know, many celebrations of life, memorials, funerals — whatever we want to call them — are profoundly tragic and sad events, and that is not what we walked through this week. We grieved a lot. There's a lot of missing and sadness. But not for Glen. Because Glen's doing all right. Glen's doing better than all of us put together and combined. He has surely been received into glory. And the perspective of that makes us treasure each day. It makes us recognize that every day, every breath, every beat of our heart — it's not guaranteed; it's a gift. And it means that how we choose to live, how we choose to use those heartbeats, those breaths, those days, it really does matter. And the direction we choose to go, the things we choose to see and behold, have an eternal impact.

Which brings us to the conclusion of the psalm:

27 For behold, those who are far from you shall perish; you put an end to everyone who is unfaithful to you. 28 But for me it is good to be near God; I have made the Lord God my refuge, that I may tell of all your works.

The wicked who are right now at their ease, prospering, engaging in evil, denying God — behold, they will ultimately perish. But for me — you remember how he started: "God is good to Israel, to those who are pure in heart. But as for me, I'm stumbling, I'm falling, I'm failing." But now, here we are after he's come into the sanctuary, after he's beheld the goodness of God, after his perception and perspective has been shaped and changed by the goodness and glory of God — now he says, "But as for me, it is good enough to be near God. Circumstances haven't changed. But as for me, it is good to be near God. I have made the Lord God my refuge." There it is. There's the covenant name of God — the name God gave when He entered into covenant with His people, when He formed them into a people out of nothing and made them His treasured possession to be a blessing to the ends of the earth. Asaph says, "You're my God and I'm Yours."

And I love how it ends: "that I may tell of all your works." Don't miss the outward communal expression of his perspective change. This is not Asaph in our modern world going, "I worked it all out with God, I'm good, and the rest of the world can go to hell." That's not what he's doing. That's not what he's saying. He says, "that I may tell of all Your great works." I love how the psalm ends with the communal and missional reality of God's people. We're God's people for a reason. We're God's people and we have a purpose, and we are blessed by God.

1 Truly God is good to Israel, to those who are pure in heart.

But He's not good to us just as an end unto itself. God's goodness is always meant to flow to us and through us. This is what Asaph discovers in the context of community, in the sanctuary and the sacred space of God. It's like: I'm choosing God. I'm going to keep my eyes on Him. I'm making Him my refuge. And my lips — my lips are going to proclaim His goodness.

So church, God is good — all the time — and all the time to His people, to the pure in heart, to those who look to Him. Jesus summed up this entire psalm in one verse in the Beatitudes:

8 "Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God.

That's the blessing. That's the freedom. That's the joy. It's found in the presence of God. And God delights to dwell in the midst of the praises of His people.

So let me ask you this morning: is God your portion? That's a different question than, "Do you believe in God? Do you believe that Jesus died and was buried and rose again?" Is He your portion? Is He what you're looking to see? Is He what you're treasuring? Is He the guiding north star of your life? Is He your portion? Have you chosen? Are you beholding Him, seeking Him?

This psalm falls within a rich biblical tradition of choosing to seek God and being satisfied in Him. We can go to Deuteronomy 4:29 — God's saying, "There's going to be a time when you're going to fail and you're going to be in trouble," and He says:

29 But from there you will seek the Lord your God and you will find him, if you search after him with all your heart and with all your soul.

It's not like a casual, "Hey, you over there, God? I don't see you." If you search after Him with all your heart and with all your soul. Go to the wisdom literature — Proverbs 8:17:

17 I love those who love me, and those who seek me diligently find me.

Now, to be fair, this is Lady Wisdom speaking in the book of Proverbs — but I think this is a prefiguring of Christ and a representation of the power and the wisdom in the word of God. If you seek for me diligently, you find me. I know you know this — Jeremiah 29:

12 Then you will call upon me and come and pray to me, and I will hear you. 13 You will seek me and find me, when you seek me with all your heart.

I think for many in American Christianity, we assume God's presence. We assume God's blessing. And you know what happens when we assume. And listen — to be fair — we seek God when the wheels come off. We seek God when we've got nowhere else to go. But as I already said, our real challenge is: do we seek God when things are going well? Do we seek God when we're in the abundance of His blessing? Do we value the gifts of God more than the Giver of the gifts?

If God is your portion — if you're aligned and aiming at God — then all of your life gets reorganized around that, around Him. It's not casual. It's certainly not convenient. It's never easy. But Jesus didn't offer easy. We follow the One who says, "If anyone would follow Me, let them come, deny themselves, take up their cross and follow." Oh church, may that be true of us. May we seek — like Asaph — to come into the sanctuary as God's people and have our perspective and our perceptions shaped by beholding the goodness of God. And like Asaph, may that be more than enough — for me, for you, for us. Let us seek God, together, with everything we've got. Amen.