The basic question behind Psalm 73 is: “How can God allow the righteous to suffer?”.
Right up front, I should say that you’re unlikely to come away with a nice, neat, satisfactory response to that question in this post. My hunch is that any response might deliver two out of three of ‘nice, neat and satisfactory’ but the third would go missing.
The psalmist feels it. Asaph looks around and while you might read the first phrase, ‘Surely God is good to Israel’, as a confident declaration, it unravels pretty quickly. I think it more likely reads ’You’d think that God might do the right thing and do the right thing by Israel…after all, we’re the chosen people, it’s only proper that you look after us and not them’.
Having talked about answered and unanswered prayer at The Big Table yesterday, I think we’d agree that the questions haven’t changed too much over the millenniums.
Psalm 73 splits conveniently in two. Up to verse 15 Asaph struggles with his observation of the wicked being blessed (while he’s clearly not). I find it interesting, but not surprising, that we’re quicker to notice others having the good time we should be having when we’re not having it than when we are!
Why are they doing so well when I’m not? Why have they got x, y and z when I haven’t? Why did they got to achieve/realise/whatever it is…when I didn’t?
We’re less likely to play the comparison game when we’re comfortable in our own skin. Or the skin of the image in who we’ve been created.
Anyway, tangent…back on track.
The second half of Psalm 73 deals with Asaph’s faith triumphing over his circumstance when he turns from protest to praise; from confusion to a fresh declaration of the goodness of God.
I haven’t touched the initial question yet (I told you this post wouldn’t deliver a neat answer) but the seeds of it are in Asaph’s response and perhaps the foundation of all prayer: remember who God is. Understand who God is in relation to our circumstance.
The question: ‘How can God allow the righteous to suffer?’ while reasonable enough, is loaded with some flawed thinking. The first is that suffering is innately evil and therefore irreconcilable with God’s goodness.
Joseph is probably the first God-seeker we heard utter (in Genesis): “God made me fruitful in the place of my suffering”, but I don’t think I’ve ever heard a testimony to God’s faithfulness, grace and mercy from anyone that hasn’t reinforced the fact. Suffering, refining, purification, regeneration…call it what you will, is where God is able to work some of His greatest miracles in our hearts.
The second flawed assumption is of the question is a failure to understand righteousness as it relates to those adopted into Jesus’ family.
This morning I was reading 2 Corinthians 4. Here’s what Paul says:
7 But we have this treasure in jars of clay to show that this all-surpassing power is from God and not from us. 8 We are hard pressed on every side, but not crushed; perplexed, but not in despair; 9 persecuted, but not abandoned; struck down, but not destroyed. 10We always carry around in our body the death of Jesus, so that the life of Jesus may also be revealed in our body. 11 For we who are alive are always being given over to death for Jesus’ sake, so that his life may also be revealed in our mortal body. 12 So then, death is at work in us, but life is at work in you.
I don’t think Paul is under any illusion. He’s been hammered but the feeble frame or delicate jar that’s being hammered doesn’t diminish the all-surpassing power of God that he carries within him. It enhances it. It allows it to radiate and not be confused as some greatness on behalf of the jar!
We who are alive are always being given over to death for Jesus’ sake, Paul says. Well that doesn’t seem very fair! Actually, Paul doesn’t say that last sentence…though we might. He says that it is so that the life of Jesus can be revealed in us.
Bottom line: God is great. Greater. Stronger. All superlative adjectives. And he’s greater than anything that can come against the ‘jar of clay’ or our feeble frame.
Where does Asaph head to discover all this? Worship. He reminds himself (probably through music since that was his bag) that God is bigger than all that.
‘When I entered the sanctuary of God’, Asaph says, ‘I understood my final destiny’. Think of the sanctuary as a building if it helps, but I think Asaph is saying: ‘when I entered God’s presence, I got my thinking right about all this stuff’.
He goes on to inspire Hillsong’s “Made me Glad”, but the journey is the bigger deal. The journey was one from fixation on the unjust fortune of the wicked, to focussing on the goodness of God in every circumstance.
Worship is just that. It is the act, process, journey of reminding ourselves again of God in us and God in our circumstance. Lord of all. Lord over all.
Nice and neat? No.
Eternally satisfying? Heck, yes.
– Simon Elliott