The Bible Study Hour

Guest (Male): Is it ever right to question the ways of God? We all have times of doubt as we look around and see what appears to be the unfairness of life. Asaph, a temple musician, had those same doubts and he voices them in Psalm 73, which has been called an example of faith doubting what it actually believes.

Welcome to the Bible Study Hour, a radio and internet broadcast with Dr. James Boice, preparing you to think and act biblically. Having doubts doesn't cancel our faith, and Asaph shows us a pattern for handling the doubts that come to everyone as we observe the fallen world around us. Let's join Dr. Boice as he examines Psalm 73 and discover Asaph's conclusions as he studies the seeming prosperity of the wicked from God's perspective.

Dr. James Boice: There are a lot of buzzwords in the English language today, and one of them is buzzwords. Many of them come from our computer age. We talk about being online or downtime or user-friendly. Then we have things like political correctness and a lot of others like that. One of my favorite buzzwords is paradigm shift.

I've referred to it before and it's in the title of our study tonight. When I first began to think about it, I couldn't really think what a paradigm was. I had to look it up in the dictionary. In case you don't know, a paradigm is a complete working out of a conjugation of a verb or a declension of a noun. You get it down on paper in all its possible forms. If you master the paradigm, then you never make a mistake in the use of that particular word.

So, it's a system. When we talk about a paradigm shift, we're talking about a shift from one way of looking at things, one complete system to another. In philosophy or in theology, what we're really talking about is a world and life view. When we talk about a paradigm shift in the case of Asaph, who had one, we're talking about an entirely different way of looking at things.

This Psalm is by Asaph, the 73rd Psalm. It's the first of these Psalms in the third book of the Psalter. I suppose the place to begin is by asking who Asaph was. It is not exactly the kind of name that comes trippingly on the tongue. If that appeared on one of the game shows, nobody would be able to identify who he is.

He was one of the temple musicians who was appointed to that position by David as part of a section of the tribe of Levi who were the priests. Their job was to handle the music at the temple. Asaph was just one of them at the beginning seemingly, but he must have come to ascendance because the whole family of musicians, at least one block of them, began to be named for him.

They were all the descendants of Asaph. David, it would seem, when he wrote Psalms, gave some of the Psalms that he wrote to Asaph to set to music presumably, to sing, to perform. But Asaph did Psalms of his own. We've already seen one of them, the 50th Psalm is by Asaph. Now when we get into this portion of the Psalter, that is the beginning of Book Three, we have a whole block of them that are by him.

Eleven of them in all, Psalms 73 to 83. Just to round out what we find in this third book of the Psalter, there are six more in this particular section, and four of them are by the sons of Korah, who were also temple musicians. What distinguishes this block, this third book of the Psalter, is that it has Psalms by this official group of musicians that led and directed the worship at the temple.

One thing that makes Asaph so very attractive when we read the Psalms that go by his name is his honesty, his complete honesty. He's honest about everything, about himself and about what he sees around him. What bothers him in this Psalm is that he looks out at the people who are wicked, who aren't marked by godliness at all, and to all appearances, they seem to be doing very well.

They are prospering. He has a lengthy section of this where he describes what they're like, and that bothers him. It wouldn't bother him if he really believed in a chance universe, that is, some things just turn out well for some people, some things don't, just the way it is. You have to keep a stiff upper lip, grin and bear it, be a stoic.

He wasn't a stoic. That wasn't his philosophy. He was a Jew who believed in God. Indeed, he was involved in the worship of God. One thing we know about God is that He's good, and another thing we know about God is that He's sovereign. So the question is, in a moral universe ruled sovereignly by God, how is it that the wicked prosper?

Wicked ought to fail in their pursuits. They ought to lose their money. They ought to lose their reputation. But instead, they seem to go on and do quite well. The godly by contrast don't do nearly as well, and sometimes they even suffer. Sometimes the godly lose everything. That's a real question. That's a serious question.

Most Christians, among others, have had it at one time or another. It's debated at different places in the Bible, and this 73rd Psalm is not the only place. It is, for example, in the Book of Job, and it's also the issue that's raised in Psalm 37. We've already looked at Psalm 37 and occasionally here over the course of time, we've referred to Job.

The interesting thing about these three places where this particular problem is discussed is that the answer you get, or the answer the writer gives, is somewhat different in each case. All that really means is that they are each seeing a part of the problem, but they're only seeing part of the problem.

For example, in Psalm 37, that's a Psalm that is identified as being by David. David looks out at the wicked and he says, "How come they're doing so well?" The answer is, just wait a little while. They seem to be doing well now, but they're going to slip pretty soon and get into trouble. In other words, it's going to happen in this life.

If you just wait long enough, you'll see it. You may know the first two verses, they set the theme of that Psalm. Do not fret because of evil men or be envious of those who do wrong, for like the grass they will soon wither, like green plants they will soon die away. That does happen quite often. Sin has a built-in flaw.

The Greeks used to talk about them as flaws of character. It's true where you have those things, they do tend to bring you down, but not always. Sometimes the wicked die rich. We can't say they die in good health, of course, or they wouldn't die, but they seem to do pretty well for a long, long time. Then of course we all have to die eventually, so there's that problem.

That's the way David speaks about it in Psalm 37. How about Job? The whole book of Job is dealing with this question. From our perspective, we who are able to read the first chapter and the last, we understand that this has to do with a cosmic warfare. God demonstrating before the angels the rightness of His ways, that a man will worship God because of who God is and not because God makes him rich.

But the interesting thing about the book is that Job doesn't get the answer. God speaks to Job, but God doesn't give Job the answer. Job, you know, loses everything. He's the most extreme example of the suffering of the righteous in all the Bible. First of all, because God identifies him as righteous, and moreover God says there's none like him in all the earth.

He's more righteous than anybody. God spells it out, and then he loses everything. He loses all his possessions, all his family, even his health. Finally, in the end, he's sitting there on the ash heap scraping himself in absolute misery. That introduces the debates of the book. The counselors come, they try to provide answers to these questions.

They're all superficial. Nevertheless, they're the kind of answers you and I sometimes give or that we hear when we're in trouble. Only toward the end of the book does God begin to answer and we begin to say to ourselves, well, now at last we're going to get the answer. But what God does is reduce Job even further because God begins to say to Job, "Where were you when I made the earth?"

I mean you who think you're so smart who can figure these things. Were you around when I separated the firmament from the waters? Were you around when I put the stars in the heaven? Were you around when I created the animals that gamble upon the mountains or the fish that swim in the sea? After He gets through about four chapters of that kind of interrogation, Job has absolutely nothing to say.

All he confesses is that he's an absolute ignorant man. He doesn't understand what's going on, but he doesn't have any right to understand what's going on. What he says in the 42nd chapter is, surely I spoke of things I did not understand, things too wonderful for me to know. What's the answer in Psalm 73?

If this were a multiple choice, A, B, C, and D, and you had the answer of Psalm 37 and the answer of Job, the correct answer to that question would be none of the above. Asaph doesn't say, well, just wait around a little bit, the wicked are going to get it eventually. He doesn't say, goodness me, I don't know, I can't possibly know. That's not his answer.

What he says, and this is his perception, is that in the end, that is not in this life but ultimately in the life to come, the wicked will be judged. So his answer is this: regardless of how they get on in this life, it is still better to do good. It is still better to be righteous. It is still better to be a follower of the true God because this life is not all there is.

At any rate, Asaph, as he begins to think about that, not only sees the destiny of the wicked, but he sees that God is with him even in this life. So no matter what he has to go through, eternal verities are real, not only for the wicked, but they're true for himself as well. Now in providing that answer, Psalm 73 is in my judgment the most perceptive analysis and answer in all of scripture.

It is probably due, on the human level at least, to the fact that Asaph is so honest. He doesn't hesitate to put these questions before God. Now Psalm 73 is an example of faith honestly doubting what it doesn't in fact believe. Let me say that again. Psalm 73 is an example of faith honestly doubting what it does in fact believe.

The reason I say that is because of the way Asaph begins. You know, we're well aware of the kind of questions that are raised by particularly proud people, especially ministers come up with this. There are people who just take joy and pride in being able to raise questions that you're not immediately able to answer. They kind of have a smirk on their face if you can't come back with an immediate answer.

Asaph is not doing that. Asaph is doubting, he's raising questions, but he's not raising it that way. The reason we know is the starting point, the point from which he starts out, and that is verse one: "Surely God is good to Israel, to those who are pure in heart." Now the next verses are going to record in very graphic language how that faith was shaken in Asaph for a time, and how he found himself doubting and in fact on slippery ground, about ready to slide away from God and lose his faith entirely, which in fact he doesn't do.

But at any rate, what he does here at the beginning is tell the point at which he really came out. In the end, this is where he came out: Surely God is good to Israel, to those who are pure in heart. If you want to get a mental outline of this Psalm in your mind, you have to realize that it starts where it ends.

You start with the fact that God is good to Israel. God does right. He's a good God. Then you have this decline as Asaph describes how he looked around at the wicked, what happened to him, what he saw, and how he almost lost his faith. Then you come to a turning point in verses 16 and 17.

Here in the middle, he describes how he went into the sanctuary, into the house of God, how he went to church as we would say, and there he began to see things differently. That's where he had his paradigm shift. Then the second half of it describes how God by grace, having reached him here in the sanctuary, begins to lift him up out of that, and so finally at the end he gets back to the point at which he began: Surely God is good to Israel, to those who are upright in heart.

One of the great commentators on the Psalms, Stewart Perowne, says rightly, "This is no parade of doubt merely as doubt; he states first and in the most natural way the final convictions of his heart." And yet Asaph did doubt, that's the point of it, and we doubt too. So we want to see how it is that he doubted and what he actually did doubt.

Now he says in verse one, surely God is good. But in the next verse, he makes a contrast with himself: "But as for me." You see how that works? God is good, but I'm not. I'm corrupt in the debased reasonings of my heart. He wants to say, surely God is steadfast and can be trusted, but I'm not because my feet had almost slipped. I was beginning to slide.

Well, what is it? What is it that bothered him? What he observed, as I said, was the prosperity of the wicked. But that itself is not what launched him on this slippery downhill path. What he says in verses two and three, speaking now very honestly, his real problem is that he had become envious of the wicked.

It was as a result of this that his feet had almost slipped. In other words, his problem wasn't merely that he looked out and saw that somebody else was wealthy. Nothing wrong with that, they're wealthy. So what? Or even for that matter that he looked at himself and realized that he was poor, or that he looked at somebody else, realized that they had good health and he looked at himself and realized his health wasn't so good, or that they were among the young and the beautiful and he was the old and the ugly.

That in itself isn't bad. But the problem was he looked at them and he was envious that they had money that he didn't have, or they had health that he didn't have, or they had a reputation that he didn't have. They had it good and he had it hard, and so he was envious of that. You see, envy of others is really distrust and disbelief in God.

It's a way of saying that God isn't doing it right in my case. You see, it should be the other way around. What that really is, is sin. So what Asaph is doing here in a very bold and forthright way is confessing his sin. He does that in verses two and three. In verses 4 through 11, he begins to describe the wicked.

He tells us what they really seem to be like as he looked at them. Here's what he says, verses 4 through 6: "They have no struggles; their bodies are healthy and strong. They're free from the burdens common to man; they're not plagued by human ills. Therefore pride is their necklace; they clothe themselves with violence."

Verse 11: "They even say, 'How can God know? Does the Most High have knowledge?'" You see what he's saying here? They don't seem to have any problems. Why should they? They have plenty of money. It's the way we think too. Furthermore, they have good health. They got the best doctors, eat the best food. Nothing ever goes wrong with them.

Not only that, they thrive on pride. They're proud of being what they're like. It's bad enough that they got all these things, they're proud of it, you see? The more he thinks about it, the angrier he gets. One of the things that bothers the righteous often is that the wicked seem to get away with their wickedness.

Calvin recognized that in one of his places and he refers to an ancient tyrant of the island of Sicily whose name was Dionysius the Younger. Dionysius plundered the great temple at Syracuse on the island of Sicily and when he was going home, he said, "Do you not see how the gods favor those who commit sacrilege?"

He's proud of it, you see? Got away with it. That bothers us. We look at the wicked and they do that. So that's what he describes. Now in verse 12 he gives a summary. This is really kind of a neat little summary. This is what the wicked are like, he says. They are always carefree and they increase in wealth.

I think of television in that respect. You ever see the lifestyles, you know what I'm going to say, of the rich and famous, right? How good they have it. They're carefree. They jet set all over the world, almost like some preachers I know. Not only do they do that, they don't seem to have any worries at all. They're rich to boot.

Well, that's what he says they're like. Now having done all of that, he draws a conclusion. He says, this is where I came out when I was looking around at the wicked, verses 13 and 14. He's saying what I asked myself was if that's the case, what is the point of being godly? Or as we would say, what's the point of being a Christian if the non-Christians get all the things that I really want?

Not only do I not get them, things are even worse for me because I'm persecuted or I get in trouble for trying to be good. Surely in vain have I kept my heart pure, in vain have I washed my hands in innocence. All day long I have been plagued; I have been punished every morning. Well, before we go on, let's just ask the question.

Have we ever felt like that? Have you ever felt like that? Of course you have. We always find ourselves feeling that way when we get our eyes off God. That's exactly what Asaph had done. He was looking at the wicked. And so he began to be jealous of what they had. Now you might do that by looking at a neighbor who's doing better than you are, somebody at work who's prospering when you're not prospering.

He gets the job, you don't get the job. You might get it just by looking at television because I can't think of any way to look around and see the wicked more than watching television. Furthermore, it's glorified that way of life. It's a lie, but nevertheless, that's what we see. That's part of our culture, and that's what Asaph did.

Well, let me point out that even at this low point, when he is oppressed by what he sees and jealous of those who have things that he doesn't have, he's still a believing child of God. The reason I say that is because of what he says next. He says that although he felt this way, he did not want to say what he was feeling out loud because he didn't want to hurt the faith of other people.

What he refers to them as is this generation of your children. He said, "If I had actually said this, I was thinking it, it was consuming me, but if I'd actually said this, it would have hurt other children of God." Now, I think that's significant, significant for a number of reasons. First of all, it tells us that having doubts like Asaph had is not incompatible with actually being a believer.

As a matter of fact, you can't doubt unless you're a believer because you have to doubt something you actually believe. That's why Os Guinness some years ago wrote a book called Between Two Minds. If you don't have any faith at all, well, there's nothing to doubt. You just kind of go on and things are miserable without doubting a faith.

But you see, it's the believers who have trouble. So we learn something about that. We also learn something about keeping quiet where your personal problems are concerned. That must come almost as an unreal, unbelievable statement in our day because in our day we want to do exactly the opposite.

Our philosophy in our day is that you gotta let it all hang out. You got any doubts, you have to speak about your doubts. You got any problems, you gotta talk about your problems. And some ministers, I might say, make a whole career of doing that. I've heard some of them stand up and say, you know, I was reading this thing this week and I really can't believe it.

I find myself not being able to believe it. I just want to tell you where I'm coming from. And so they begin to unfold all the doubts that they have. That's no good to anybody. It's alright for them to have the doubts, but they ought to shut up about it and work through and find out the answer, which is what Asaph did.

But you see, we have the idea that we have to do that. Let me say we have responsibilities to others. Not only do I mean that we should be hypocrites. We ought to have people that we can talk to. Many of us do have that, but you see, we have a responsibility to present the truth to other people.

And so Asaph, even though he's having all these problems, nevertheless, deep in his heart knows what he says in verse one, that God is good to Israel and He's good to the upright in heart. And so that's the message he wants to be sure he communicates even though on this deep level he wrestles with his problem.

Now suddenly on this downhill path, there comes this turning point that I talked about. You find it in verses 16 and 17. Just when he was about to be swept away, Asaph, the honest doubter, entered the sanctuary of God, and there came to understand the final destiny of the wicked and a number of other things besides.

Now, the destiny of the wicked means their final judgment, that is, that they are going to die and be separated from God and spend eternity in hell. That much is clear. But what we want to ask here is, what is the connection between this important perception and the psalmist entering into the sanctuary?

Because you see, that's what he says. He says, "I had almost slipped until I went into the sanctuary, and there I perceived their final end." Now how did he get that insight? What's the connection between the two? Well, I mentioned John Calvin a moment ago. Calvin said it is because in the sanctuary he learned the law of God.

The word of God was taught to him. Calvin makes a point that the law of God was kept in the holy place next to the ark, and so part of the duty of the priest was to expound the law. So Calvin said he learned the truth by listening to the word of God. Just this spring at the Philadelphia Conference on Reformed Theology, Robert Godfrey, the president of Westminster Theological Seminary in California, preached on this Psalm and he said in his judgment it had to do with the altar.

Different view. The altar is where the sacrifices were made for sin. And so he supposed that what happened is this: Asaph went into the temple enclosure, in this case the tabernacle enclosure, and there he saw the altar and he realized, because he saw the altar and that great demonstration visually of the fact that the wages of sin is death and the animals have to die and perish or you have to perish yourself, that the end of the wicked would be judgment.

Now, I think both of those probably have an element of truth in them, but I think the real answer probably is a bigger answer than that. It has to do with what I call this turning point, this paradigm shift. The fact that he saw things one way and he came to see things the other way.

What happened when he went into the sanctuary of God is that instead of seeing things from a human point of view which was limited, he began to see all things from God's point of view, which is to say from the viewpoint of eternity. Let me point out that worship will do that for you, and that is one of the reasons for worship.

Worship, of course, is to give pleasure to God. He delights in the worship of His people. Worship is a joy for us. Enjoyment of God is seen in worship. But worship is also that where we get our minds reoriented. You see, all week long we're out there in the world, and the world is saying of man, we're the center of all things.

All things are from me and of me and to my glory. That's the world's message. And you come into church and you are reminded that it's not like that. This world is not here for man and was not by man, not built by him, and it's not for man's glory. But rather it's from God and it's built by God and it's for God's glory.

And furthermore, we're going to have an eternity to reckon with God and you begin to see that in the worship service. Roy Clements is a Baptist preacher in England at Cambridge, very well known over there, he's a great evangelical, and he's written a sermon on this Psalm where he links this new perspective explicitly to worship.

And what he says is this: "Worship puts God at the center of our vision. It's vitally important because it's only when God is at the center of our vision that we see things as they really are." Well, when I began I gave you a little overview of the flow of the Psalm. We've seen the starting point, the decline, the turning point. Now it begins to go back up.

Now in verses 18 through 26, that is the second half of the Psalm where this happens, Asaph touches on three main areas. Number one, he had a new awareness of the destiny of the wicked. Those are verses 18 through 20. That's what we've been talking about. The wicked seem very secure in their wickedness, in their wealth.

But what Asaph came to see is that they are not actually secure. They're actually very insecure. They're on slippery ground. It only takes a gentle puff by God to blow them off their pedestal of wickedness and send them down to ruin. Having learned to look at those he had envied from God's perspective, he now sees that this prosperity they're enjoying is, if you look at it in that perspective, just a fantasy.

He calls it a dream. A dream is just in your mind. You wake up in the morning, it's gone, there's nothing to it. And so he says that's what their prosperity is like. "I didn't know that. I didn't really understand it or feel it till I went into the sanctuary." And then he says there's a second thing.

Not only did he get a new awareness of the destiny of the wicked, where they're headed, he got a new awareness of himself. And you would say at this point, well, that new awareness must be: they're headed to judgment but I'm headed to glory. But that's not where he begins.

His first awareness of himself is that he realizes that when he was doubting God and taking things into his own hands and questioning what God was doing in the world, he was actually being senseless and ignorant and not wise. As a matter of fact, he says, "I was like a brute beast before God."

Now, remember I said that envy is sin. That's what sin does to us. It turns us into beasts. We're made to be in the image of God and to know God and to worship God. But if we don't do that, we turn our back on God and go our way as Asaph was doing. That's what the slippery slope was all about.

Then you begin to behave like animals. You begin to think like animals and you begin to behave like animals too. That's what is happening with our culture. Let me say that in a certain sense this is as far as Job got. As far as God revealed the thing to Job. Job came to the point at the end of God speaking to him after that interrogation that I described in chapters 38 to 41 of that book to recognize he was simply ignorant.

He just did not know. And when he was questioning God, he was like an animal, like a brute beast. You see what they're saying there is wisdom, reason, rationality consist when we're talking about ourselves on the one hand and the way of God on the other, not in saying that we know, but recognizing that we don't know.

So Asaph is saying at least that is true. But now number three. Not only did he have a new awareness of the destiny of the wicked and a new awareness of the way he'd been acting, he also had a new awareness of God's presence and thus also of God's genuine blessing on the righteous even in this life.

He recovered a new spiritual balance, you see. And what he realized when he went into the sanctuary is that God had been with him all along. So that even in his doubting, God was with him and was holding him up and bringing him to the point to which he was coming now. Now these verses, 23 to 26, are really the apogee of his testimony and they're filled with some of the finest expressions of faith and true spirituality in all the Bible.

They really need to be read, and I'm going to read them. They should also be memorized. This would be a wonderful passage to memorize if you're in the practice of memorizing scripture from time to time, and I hope you are. Listen to what he says: "Yet I am always with you; you hold me by my right hand. You guide me with your counsel, and afterward you will take me into glory."

Sometimes you hear people who talk about the Old Testament as if the Old Testament saints didn't have any true understanding of the afterlife. They only lived for the present. Well, they had a great concern for the present, that's true. But it's not true that they didn't understand about the afterlife.

Here's a great example of it. "You guide me with your counsel," that is now, "You keep me on track" is what he's saying, "and afterward," that is when I die, "you're going to take me into glory." So he's not only talking about the destiny of the wicked, he's talking about the destiny of the righteous too.

And now verse 25: "Whom have I in heaven but you? And being with you, I desire nothing on earth. My flesh and my heart may fail, but God is the strength of my heart and my portion forever." Those last two verses are a particularly fine expression of true spirituality and righteousness and they've been a blessing to many people down through the ages.

Many people have memorized them. You may not know that Charles Wesley, the great Methodist hymn writer, was reflecting on those verses on his deathbed and he actually composed a hymn based on those verses as he was dying. It was the last thing he wrote. He couldn't even write it down, but he called his wife over to his bedside and this is what he dictated.

Imagine this man's dying and his mind is still working in a poetic fashion and what he's thinking about is scripture, and he's thinking about those verses I just read. Remember: Whom have I in heaven but you, and being with you, I desire nothing on earth. My flesh and my heart may fail, but God is the strength of my heart and my portion forever.

Now, here's what Wesley did with it:

In age and feebleness extreme,

What shall a sinful worm redeem?

Jesus, my only hope thou art,

Strength of my failing flesh and heart.

Oh, could I catch a smile from thee

And drop into eternity.

Isn't that good? Isn't that a great testimony by a great saint? Well, many Christians have been able to echo the psalmist, confessing that in the final analysis the only thing that really matters is God and our relationship to Him. Because that's going to come. One day you and I are going to die.

It may be soon, it may be late, it may be suddenly. You might not have an opportunity to think about it. But whether it's sudden or slow, early or late, in the final analysis, it's you and God. It's not how much money you have, it's not your reputation, it's whether when you die you go to be with Him forevermore or whether you suffer the judgment of the wicked.

God is all we have in the final analysis, but He is also all we need. You see how important that is? He guides us here and afterwards He'll receive us into glory. Now the very last verses contain Asaph's final testimony and it's a summary of what he stated previously. First, that the wicked will perish in the end, and second, that God will be with the righteous and they will be with Him.

And then in a great understatement he declares, "But as for me, it is good to be near God." Do you feel that? It's good to be near God. That's why we go to church. That's why we study the Bible. It's why we pray. It's why we fellowship with other Christians. It's a means of keeping us near God. And it's good to be near God.

Oh, we have to go into the world, you have to make a living, you can't get out of the world. God will take care of that in time when He takes you to heaven, but now you have to be there. But you see, it is good to be near God. And so that's the point at which Asaph ends.

Now, look, I want to give you a final observation and I hope you'll be able to remember it and take it with you. It concerns the progression of the pronouns in the Psalm. You look back at the first section, as far as verse 12, you find that the pronoun that is emphasized there is they. It's referring to the wicked.

The psalmist has his eyes fixed on them. That's his problem. In the second section, verses 13 to 17, the dominant pronoun is I. Having looked at the wicked, he now compares himself with them and it's an unfortunate comparison from his point of view. He's not doing well, they are, and I'm not.

So now he's thinking about himself. That's where the envy comes in. In the third section, verses 18 through 22, after he has this paradigm shift when he goes to the sanctuary, the dominant pronoun is you. That's referring to God. So here he has stopped thinking about others and comparing himself to them and thinking about himself. He's thinking about God instead.

Then notice this: in the final section of the Psalm, verses 23 to 28, you and I are combined because here Asaph is saying you, that is God, have set your hand on me, and I for my part want nothing on earth but you. You and I really need to learn that lesson. We need to learn it in the deepest possible way.

Nothing in the world is going to help us learn that. Nothing in the world out there is going to point your attention to God and point your attention to yourself, and you're always going to be dissatisfied. But you see, if you learn to lift your eyes up from other people, who are not worth all that contemplation anyway, and from yourself, who deserves it even less, and look to God, you'll say, ah, ah, things are really different.

And you'll begin to say as Jesus taught us to understand, heaven and earth are going to pass away, all of that, but the one who knows God and does the will of God is going to abide forever. Let's pray.

Our Father, we are thankful for this Psalm, for the lesson that is in it, for the struggle that this man went through, and for the way it has been a blessing to so many people down through the ages. Grant that it may be a blessing to us too. So easy for us who are consumed by the world, surrounded by the world, permeated by the world never really to think in spiritual ways.

But here's a man who did, and we can do it too by your grace. Help us to do it and so grow in grace for the sake of Jesus Christ with whom by grace we will spend eternity. Amen and amen.

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