I appreciate Asaph’s brutal honesty to admit that sometimes life’s ugly realities, such as injustice, leave us troubled, grieved, and even embittered. Sometimes God’s goodness just doesn’t seem like enough to overcome the unbearable burden of the ugliness of those realities, and we want to give up on God. Can you relate to that? Is it okay to say that? My experience tells me that taking my honest thoughts to God, disappointing though they may be, is my only hope for getting them addressed effectively.
Asaph’s testimony in Psalm 73 is another example to us of our need to take our cares to God. Speaking our ideas aloud to others has the psychological effect of cementing a commitment to an idea. If Asaph had spoken his doubt to others before bringing it to God, he may have been less willing to give that care to God and instead might have clung to his error. Further, if he had voiced his dissatisfaction to others, he might have caused them to doubt God and suffer unbearable discontent as well. They may have turned away from God. It is so much better to take our burdens to God, is it not?
Do you, like Asaph, find yourself envying the wicked for their seeming prosperity? Satan has only the temporal prosperity of this world with which to lure us, but sometimes it feels like a significant lure. But giving in to that lure would be sheer ignorance; for although Satan tries to deceive us into thinking that God is not good, He is actually the only source of goodness there is. Truly, this world offers nothing desirable in comparison to the glories that the future with God holds. Until we reach Heaven, we have blessings to sustain us on the way: God’s powerful presence to comfort and protect, His counsel and His guidance. In times of desperation like Asaph described in this psalm, those words may seem empty, like merely the correct Sunday school answer. Only when we hear them from God will they become true enough to us to matter in those desperate times. Only when we take the doubts to God will He respond with that convincing answer.
Do you know what it is like to cry out to God for help and find nothing? Asaph suffered that unsatisfied need, and chose to take comfort in recalling God’s mighty deeds from the past. It doesn’t say that he found the answer or the comfort he sought; what do you think? I think he hung in there and wrote Psalm 78….