Doubts – Choosing to Trust God | Psalm 73

INTRODUCTION

What do you do when with your theology clashes with reality? How do you hold to the conviction that God is good when life stinks? How to deal with doubts? I want to talk with you about the hardest, the most painful, the worst days of your life when our theology does not make sense.

Psalm 73

A psalm of Asaph.

Surely God is good to Israel,

to those who are pure in heart.

But as for me, my feet had almost slipped;

I had nearly lost my foothold.

For I envied the arrogant

when I saw the prosperity of the wicked.

They have no struggles;

their bodies are healthy and strong.

They are free from common human burdens;

they are not plagued by human ills.

Therefore pride is their necklace;

they clothe themselves with violence.

From their callous hearts comes iniquity;

their evil imaginations have no limits.

They scoff, and speak with malice;

with arrogance they threaten oppression.

Their mouths lay claim to heaven,

and their tongues take possession of the earth.

Therefore their people turn to them

and drink up waters in abundance.

They say, “How would God know?

Does the Most High know anything?”

This is what the wicked are like—

always free of care, they go on amassing wealth.

Surely in vain I have kept my heart pure

and have washed my hands in innocence.

All day long I have been afflicted,

and every morning brings new punishments.

If I had spoken out like that,

I would have betrayed your children.

When I tried to understand all this,

it troubled me deeply

till I entered the sanctuary of God;

then I understood their final destiny.

Surely you place them on slippery ground;

you cast them down to ruin.

How suddenly are they destroyed,

completely swept away by terrors!

They are like a dream when one awakes;

when you arise, Lord,

you will despise them as fantasies.

When my heart was grieved

and my spirit embittered,

I was senseless and ignorant;

I was a brute beast before you.

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.

Whom have I in heaven but you?

And earth has nothing I desire besides you.

My flesh and my heart may fail,

but God is the strength of my heart

and my portion forever.

Those who are far from you will perish;

you destroy all who are unfaithful to you.

But as for me, it is good to be near God.

I have made the Sovereign Lord my refuge;

I will tell of all your deeds.

ILLUSTRATION

On January 17, 2004, a 66-ton whale died and was beached on the southwestern coast of Taiwan, near the city of Tainan. Two weeks later, on January 29, authorities decided to truck the dead whale to a laboratory where they could do an autopsy. It took 50 laborers and three lifting cranes 13 hours to hoist the 56-foot behemoth onto a flatbed trailer truck. Pedestrians and shop owners poured into the streets to watch the spectacle of a whale carcass driven through the streets of downtown Tainan.

And then it happened. As the truck crawled through that downtown region, with crowds looking on, the whale exploded. That’s right, it blew up. The inner conditions of the dead mammal, combined with the bumps in the road caused an eruption that the townspeople will not soon forget. Cars, people, and local shops were splattered with whale entrails. Traffic was brought to a halt for hours. The smell was almost unbearable.

(Lee Eclov, Vernon Hills, Illinois; source: “Thar She Blows!” AOL News (1-29-04); see also BBC News http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/3437455.stm)

No one got up that morning thinking they would have whale guts on them by noon!

Isn’t that just like life sometimes? You’re going about your business, and a whale explodes. You didn’t see that coming and didn’t plan for it. You certainly don’t welcome it. Life has a way of suddenly altering its course down hard paths, leaving us hurt, confused, and weak, with lots of unanswered questions.

What do you do when with your theology clashes with reality? How do you hold to the conviction that God is good when life stinks? I want to talk with you about the hardest, the most painful, the worst days of your life when our theology does not make sense.

PSALM 73 | God is Good | How to deal with your doubt?

Psalm 73 is a psalm of Asaph.

Now, Asaph is one of the three major worship leaders in the administration of King David. He had Asaph, Ethan, and Heman. They were the leaders in the Levitical choir that sang in David’s day.

In Psalm 73, Asaph one of the priestly choir singers in the Israel’s temple is praying through a crisis. He is going though both an intellectual and emotional crisis in his life. He is struggling with doubt.

So here again the Psalm speak to these universal human experiences, in this case doubt.

In Psalm 73, the psalmist struggles with doubt and now doubts God. The Psalmist’s words of doubting God have become God’s words to doubting people. The Bible has resources for doubting because people in the Bible have gone through doubts.

The scripture makes it clear that people sometimes struggle to believe God in difficult times, so we have been given the struggles of God’s people to overcome our struggles.

This psalm is so relevant today. This is a profound prayer that has huge resources to offer anyone who is going through the crisis of doubt.

• See how Asaph unpacks the source of his doubt.
• Then the tells us what to do with our doubts.
• How to process our doubts?

See how Asaph begins:

Psalm 73:1

Surely God is good to Israel,

to those who are pure in heart.

Asaph starts off this Psalm by telling, “Surely God is good…” His theology is in the right place. He begins with a statement of faith, but he goes to on say that he cannot understand it anymore because of his situation.

He starts with the generic statement that we speak, “God is good.” It is different for an 80-year-old person to say that God is than an 18-year-old to say that God is good.

For Israel, the goodness of God is always related to how God delivered his people from Egypt. This is the foundation story of God’s goodness.

Here is the statement we say: God is good, all the time and all the time God is good. But that is the not fact that the Psalmist is facing always.

Psalm 73:2-3

But as for me, my feet had almost slipped;

I had nearly lost my foothold

For I envied the arrogant

when I saw the prosperity of the wicked.

The Psalmist says that he knows God is good but then he experienced a situation where he actually could not feel the goodness of God.

He is using two metaphors here:

• His feet almost slipped.
• He nearly lost his foothold.

Think about that. If you are walking on the road, if you trip do you lose your foothold? No. Then what kind of pathway is this person walking on to describe this experience? This is not flat. It is a pathway that is steep.

So he is describing his spiritual journey or life journey as a harsh, extremely steep slope; climbing up a mountain or rock or something like that. It is hard. It takes effort and intention to do that and is difficult. And in that difficulty you do not think God is good.

He says, “I came to a point where I almost slipped..” He did not slip but he felt he almost slipped.

This is a provocative image where he understands the goodness of God but he is not experiencing that in his life. He is in a phase of doubt.

He is describing a situation where the psalmist had a route and knew what his future or next station would be andwas climbing something steep. But then something totally unexpected happened. It did not hold well, he lost his balance and he almost slipped.

This is an image of doubt.

Somehow we have a view of how things must be. We have our views on how things must be in our life, in our family, in our career, and in the world. Then things happen to us and we feel that we are shaken. Unexpected things happen to us and then we think, “If God is good why is that this is happening to me?” It is like hanging all of a sudden on the rope if your climbing a mountain and your foot is loose. This is a powerful image of doubt.

He describes the experience that he had.

Psalm 73:3

For I envied the arrogant (why did he envy the arrogant?)

when I saw (what did he see?) the prosperity of the wicked.

Hebrew word for prosperity here is – Shalom.

Shalom  means wellbeing, abundance, prosperity, harmony.

The psalmist saw the people in the world experiencing Shalom.

Psalm 73:3-12

They have no struggles;

their bodies are healthy and strong.

They are free from common human burdens;

they are not plagued by human ills.

Therefore pride is their necklace;

they clothe themselves with violence.

From their callous hearts comes iniquity;

their evil imaginations have no limits.

They scoff, and speak with malice;

with arrogance they threaten oppression.

Their mouths lay claim to heaven,

and their tongues take possession of the earth.

Therefore their people turn to them

and drink up waters in abundance.

They say, “How would God know?

Does the Most High know anything?”

This is what the wicked are like—

always free of care, they go on amassing wealth.

They are self-promoting, self-important. They mistreat others. Taking advantage of other people for their own advantage. They treat people like dirt. They have no level of accountability for their lives. Doing whatever they want. They are just getting away with it, but they are actually living a good life. They get Shalom for this kind of behaviour.

APPLICATION

Asaph said, “God is good to the pure in heart.” He said, “I have been keeping my heart pure. I am now wondering if it is worth it because these wicked people they get shalom and what do I get? What I get is afflictions every day and punishments every morning.

Psalm 72:13-14

Surely in vain I have kept my heart pure

and have washed my hands in innocence.

All day long I have been afflicted,

and every morning brings new punishments.

So, I am getting punishment and afflictions every day. But the people who totally neglect God, they are like getting Shalom.

This psalmist has clearly had a personal experience that questioned everything the thought he believed about God and his life.

He saw the wicked prosper, he saw his life slipping away, and now he feel he is afflicted and punished every morning. He does not mention what it is for us but he had some level of personal experience of real loss of affliction and pain. And he says, “It does not make sense of what I believe about God, that God is good.”

Doubt

 The word doubt in English is something that is happening in your head. Here the Psalmist is describing something that is happening in his head, his heart and also in his life experience. His doubt does not come from learning a new idea about God or the scripture, his doubt is generated from a life experience.

All of our doubts are struggles that comes from ideas, relationships, life circumstances. Our experience of doubt comes from a lake that is fed from all kinds of different streams and rivers.

His mind has been taught to say that God is good to Israel and the pure in heart but he now has a life experience and he is doubting God.

When we have doubt all our of emotional, psychological, and circumstantial situations come into play.

Is he having a pleasant experience? Clearly not. But just because this experience is an unpleasant experience, does not mean that it is a bad experience. We would not have Psalm 73 if the psalmist did not have this experience.

What Do Most People Do When Situations Of Doubt Come Like This?

• Some feel God is unfair.
• Some say, “I do not believe God exist. If God exists, why is there so much evil.”
• Some say, “You must have more faith to come of this situation.”
• Some say, “You must have done some sin for such a situation to come to you.”

Doubt Is An Opportunity To Grow.

These are moments of growth.

How many of you have experienced growing pains? How many of you remember growing pains?

You wake up in the night and your legs are aching. Ex: Grace. It is actually unpleasant to grow and not pleasant. It involves experiencing a lot of pain. So it could be that you are at a point where you are following Jesus where the explanations and the way that you are reading the Bible like that you did a year ago, are not going to work anymore. That is not a sign that you are losing faith, it is because you are growing. Your faith needs to catch up with your growth in faith. You need to grow up in faith, in prayer, in the scripture.

So what if you really process the crisis of doubt in you, you will grow from it. One day you will thank God for it.

Doubts are complex, multifaceted, it happens when life experiences make us doubt what our minds say we believe. But Doubt is an opportunity to grow. So as you sit with your doubt and questions, and you struggle, and all of a sudden you will realize that you have grown as you wrestle with your doubt.

How Does Asaph Move Towards His Doubts?

3 Moves. The psalmist makes 3 moves towards his doubt

1. ANALYSE YOUR DOUBT

Psalm 73:3

For I envied the arrogant

when I saw the prosperity of the wicked.

The first step is:

He deconstructs his own doubt.

His real issue is not that he is in this situation. He understands his real issue is that he is jealous of others. In other words, he actually has a real raw, character issue that is motivating the crisis of doubt for him.

Envy or jealousy is a negative emotional energy that gets aroused when I feel that I don’t get what I deserve. I feel like I am entitled to something, I do not get it, it is not happening, I am envious. Now if I feel that I am not getting something that I deserve, then I have a specific target, a person or a leader or God. This is a heart or character issue.

I think what Asaf is almost confessing here is that the origins of his own doubt might be about God’s character, God’s goodness, but he is actually having a problem with his own character. He now feels that this is a real honest issue that he is wrestling with in his character.

Actually, if I am honest, there are a lot of streams that is feeding into this complex world that is my doubt and one of the major stream that is running into that is that I am jealous.

There is a whole bunch of people living in the world having an expectation of the way I have to live. I have been doing the religion thing. I have been living like a priest and keeping my heart pure, washing my hands in innocence, so that God will help me and then there is like the wicked person in my office and he is prosperous?” I am a Levite, I don’t get anything. A Levite does not even have any inheritance in the land. So he is filled with jealousy.

We all need to do some raw heart searching to see, “What is my vested interest here? I say I am struggling in faith, I am not getting my blessed life even after following God. Is it possible that there is some other deep issue and my doubt against God is just the smokescreen, but the real matter is the character of my heart?”

It is possible that my behaviour towards God is affected because of a genuine heart doubt or is it a smokescreen?

Many people delay following Jesus for such reasons. They have all these kinds of intellectual doubts and practical doubts, but they are not willing to pay the price of discipleship but the reason they give is a smokescreen of the questions regarding God, the doubts.

If you are honestly battling out doubt, you have to be sceptical of your scepticism. You have to analyse/deconstruct your doubt which is precisely what Asaph does.

Look at the key turning moment in this poem:

Words Of A Doubtful Person Betrays Others.

Psalm 73:15

If I had spoken out like that,(He is a leader in the religious community. If I had spoken out in my doubt to those innocent people)

I would have betrayed your children.

He recognises this his own character, his own words, his own doubt is connected to the wellbeing of other people’s faith. Gossip is toxic, this causes doubt in people.

Doubt Leads To A Troubled Heart.

He said:

Psalm 73:16-17

When I tried to understand all this,

it troubled me deeply

till I entered the sanctuary of God;

then I understood their final destiny.

He went to church. The sanctuary or the temple in Jerusalem, which is filled with pilgrims from all over. There is singing in the Temple, there is choir, there are sections in the temple where people are learning Torah, and teaching and debating and dialoguing. People are spending time there, there is worship happening, there are courts of prayer. There is sacrifice that is going on. There are 100’s people all around all day and all night in the temple.

So what Asaph says that he went into the community of faith, worship, prayer, and learning and somehow in that fellowship in the community and he understood the destiny of the wicked.

2. BRING YOUR DOUBTS TO GOD IN THE COMMUNITY.

So when the psalmist went to the temple, in some part of the worship, it reminded him about God and gave him the right perspective on his circumstance and doubt.

Doubts are not just intellectual ideas, it comes from a life experience. If you want to address a real doubt in your life, you cannot get out of it with just thinking. You need to immerse yourself in the community of worship and learning and faith.

The object of our faith is not a thing, it is a person. The person of our worship is Christ and his church. I need to get to the community and relate to God to sort out my issues. As long as I have the doubt in my head, it is not going to work out a solution.

ILLUSTRATION

If I have a problem with my wife, and I keep thinking about her in my head, it is not going to solve the problem or doubt I have. I need to get to her in fellowship and talk with her to solve the problem. I need to seek her out in the context of the family and solve the issue.

If doubt arise from a life experience, then immerse yourself in another kind of experience deep in God, that will help you process from every different kind of angle. If the doubt is a set of ideas, go to the set of godly intellectuals in your community. I guarantee you are not the only one asking that question. This is a 3000-year-old poem.

If his heart is moved primarily by his emotive side, then going and joining in song and meditation prayer might be precisely what you needs.

If your heart is moved by the intellectual side, then go and speak to the godly intellectuals, they will have the answer you need.

whom are you meeting, if you are battling with doubt? Who are the people that are influencing you? It should be the word of God and the godly people around you.

There will be a season of doubt when you do not feel connect to the community of God, you do not feel belonged. That is because you are processing doubt and you need to deal with it. God to the community and reshape your mind like the psalmist did when he went to the temple.

ILLUSTRATION

You read some blogs or you read some history of Christianity or you read some new age stuff out there. You probably have a teacher or a friend who has thoughts against Christianity in the first place, they have a very liberal way to look at things and life, you have other students in the class or as friends, and you are afraid to say that you are a Christian in the classroom and workplace. They seem to be prosperous and you may be going through trouble. You start doubting. You need to enter into the temple.

Going through the Bible and the Bible talks about God and the existence of God, and then I go to my classroom and my teacher teaches and questions the existence of God, my friends question the existence of God. I do not know how to explain these things, so I am not going to sacrifice of what I know about the existence of God on the altar of what I do not know, the conspiracy theories.

You need to deconstruct your doubt, immerse yourself into a community that will move towards their answers.

The Psalmist Finally Gets The Right Perspective.

Psalm 73:18

Surely you place them on slippery ground;

you cast them down to ruin.

What he did initially say about himself in his own experience of doubt? How did he describe himself? He said, “I almost slipped, I almost lost my foothold.”

• But he moves towards his doubt.
• He reconstructs his doubt.
• He understand it lead him to a troubled heart.
• He immerses himself in the community

Sinner in the hands of an angry God – Jonathan Edwards; July 8, 1741; Revives Enfield Connecticut. That God will judge the sinners.

And then all of a sudden he realises that the people that he represented as prospering is now on slippery ground. I know that God is good but there is still injustice in the world, I may still face injustice. I got to work through that. But when I actually compare my foothold to their foothold, they are much worse off. They reject God altogether.

He is comparing footholds.

The world says Christianity is a belief but the world wants to reason it out. They say that the oppositive of faith is reason. Or that there is believe or unbelief. It is belief in God or the worlds view of belief not in God. The only way you question a belief against the Bible or Christianity is because you are standing on some other truth claim by which you are saying is superior to the truth claim of the gospel. There is belief in God and there is other belief that says there is no God. You need to compare them. When you compare them you will soon realise that you are not standing on slippery ground, the Bible does not stand on slippery ground, but the world stands on slippery ground.

There are chances that your faith can be on slippery ground, if you do not process your doubt and stay in the community of God. This is processing your faith.

Book; A Severe Mercy by Sheldon Vanauken

This book tells the story of a young American student becoming a Christian through his friendship with C.S.Lewis.

“When it came to believing in Christ, there was a gap between what is possible and then what could be proved. (It is possible that Jesus is God and it is all true, it is possible. But can it be proved? I cannot prove it, so there is this gap.)

“There is a gap between the probable and the proved. How was I to cross it? If I were to stake my whole life on the risen Christ, I wanted proof – I wanted certainty. I wanted to see him eat a bit of fish, wanted letters of fire across the sky. I got none of these. And I continued to hang about on the edge of the gap … it was a question of whether I was going to accept him or reject him.

The position was not only that here was a gap before me. My God, there was a gap behind me as well. Perhaps the leap to acceptance was a horrifying gamble, but what of the leap to rejection! There might be no absolute certainty that Christ was God, but there was no certainty that he was not God. This was not to be borne. I could not reject Jesus. There was only one thing to do once I had seen the gap behind me. I turned away from it, and flung myself over the gap towards Jesus.”

Working through Doubts

When you are in a moment of doubt, you are doubting about your forward movement towards Christ. But you need to deconstruct your doubt and ask to yourself, “What other faith am I standing on to say that I doubt Christ.” There is some other thing that you are believing in, someone’s writing or someone’s influence upon you. You need to go talk to someone about it, do not make conclusions on your own self.

The psalmist is struggling through the issue of injustice and suffering which I think is the most challenging in following Jesus. It is a tough path to work through. If the reality of suffering injustice is a problem for a Christian, it is more of a problem for the atheist, for a nonChristian.

Psalm 73:21-22

When my heart was grieved

and my spirit embittered,

I was senseless and ignorant;

I was a brute beast before you.

He has hit bottom here in his doubt. He is bitter, he is grieved, he feels like he is an animal. I cannot make any sense of my life experience and God’s existence.

But right in that place the Psalmist comes to the realization:

Psalm 73:23-25

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.

Whom have I in heaven but you?

And earth has nothing I desire besides you.

He comes through this journey of doubt.

He deconstructs his doubt.

Realises that he is a jealous man.

He compares his footholds.

Compares his belief system in God and the belief system of the world.

He concludes that actually the only good thing he has is the nearness of God.

God who is committed to be always with him and for him all along even when he was slipping away in his doubt. God was right there, holding me all along.

Psalm 73:26-28

My flesh and my heart may fail,

but God is the strength of my heart

and my portion forever.

Those who are far from you will perish;

you destroy all who are unfaithful to you.

But as for me, it is good to be near God.

I have made the Sovereign Lord my refuge;

I will tell of all your deeds.

This is beautiful. He began by saying, “Surely God is good to Israel.” He realized that by meaning good, God is supposed to always give benefits to the people of Israel. That did not happen and he was in doubt when the wicked got the benefits and they got shalom. Now all of a sudden he processed his doubt. It striped away his envy and his jealousy. It led him to the temple of God and all of a sudden when he thought that God was absent, he realizes that that was the form of God’s presence in his life to bring him back this place of dependence and relationship. All of a sudden he is overwhelmed by this intimate relational language, that it is as if this experience of doubt is actually the best thing that could have happened to him.

What does it mean to experience the goodness and nearness of God when you are feeling low, and embittered and grieved and senseless with what is happening to you?

3. LOOK FOR GOD’S PRESENCE IN HIS ABSENCE.

We need to look for God’s presence in his absence.

ILLUSTRATION

Think about the garden of Gethsemane when Jesus is on his knees, he is crying in this garden. All of his friends are asleep. They are going to run away from him when he is arrested in just a few hours and Jesus quotes the psalms and says: Matthew 26:38 I am deeply grieved to the point of death.

He says twice, “Father, I don’t want to do this.”

In the garden of Gethsemane and on the cross, one may feel that God is absent, but God was present. How can God forsake his own son? He was just reciting Psalm 22 on the cross.

Jesus never spoke His Father forsaking Him.

John 16:32

“The time is coming when you will leave me all alone. Yet, I am not alone, for my Father is with me”

So we sometimes need to go to the garden of Gethsemane at various points of our life and kneel beside Jesus when I have crisis of doubt. I need to recognize that I was not here first, Jesus was here before me.

CONCLUSION

So, here I am have doubt regarding my experience. I do not know what to do about it, the world questions God, you start doubting everything around you, what are you going to do? You kneed beside Jesus in the garden and as you experience God’s absence, that itself is the experience of God’s presence. Then all of a sudden in your doubt, you realize that Jesus is right there holding your hand, kneeling alongside you, grieving over your state and the state of the world and its brokenness with you. He has the power to do something about your doubts and circumstances.

I don’t know where you are at. But as we got to the bread and cup let us knee beside Jesus in the garden and examine our heart and our motives. See what you are going to do to immerse yourself in a community of faith or in a conversation with someone, how you are going to compare footholds, how you are going to join Jesus. But he is there when you feel he is absent.

• Don’t Look At What The World Has.
• Don’t Look At What The People Of The World Has.
• Don’t Look At How They Live And Compare It With Your Own.
• You Look At What You Have Got In Christ.
• In Christ, You Have Everything, Because He Has Everything.
• Process Your Doubt.
• Bring Your Doubt Into God’s Community.
• Look For God’s Presence In His Absence.