The View from the Sanctuary Text: Psalm 73:17-20
Introduction: The Poison of Envy
There are few spiritual maladies more corrosive to the soul than envy. It is a secret, grubby little sin, one that few will confess to outright. A man might admit to anger or lust, but to admit to envy is to confess that you are small-souled, petty, and mean-spirited. Envy is the feeling of bitterness you have when you see someone else prosper, especially when you believe, in your own private court of appeals, that they do not deserve it. And in our day, as in Asaph's, the wicked certainly do seem to prosper.
Asaph, the author of this psalm, was a worship leader in Israel. He was a man who knew the right answers. He begins the psalm by stating the bedrock truth: "Truly God is good to Israel, to those who are pure in heart." But then he immediately confesses that his own feet had almost slipped. Why? "For I was envious of the arrogant when I saw the prosperity of the wicked." He looks out at the world and sees the godless, fat and sleek, their eyes bulging with arrogance, their mouths setting themselves against the heavens. They get away with everything, and they do it with a golden necklace of pride. Meanwhile, Asaph, who has kept his heart clean and his hands washed, finds himself plagued and afflicted all the day long.
This is a profound spiritual crisis. It is the crisis that comes when our lived experience seems to contradict the clear promises of God. It is the temptation to believe that holiness is a fool's game. What is the point of righteousness if the unrighteous get all the rewards? This is not an academic question. This is a gut-level, faith-shaking struggle. Asaph's feet are on the verge of slipping out from under him. His theology says God is good, but his eyes say the wicked have it good. And this vexing problem was, in his own words, "oppressive" to him, too painful to understand through carnal reason alone.
The entire psalm pivots on one crucial word: "Until." He was tormented by this apparent injustice, this cosmic unfairness, until something happened. He did not solve the problem by looking harder at the wicked, or by navel-gazing his own feelings. The solution, the grand perspective shift, came from a change in location, a change in vantage point. And that is where our text picks up. The answer to the problem of evil in the world is not found in the world; it is found in the sanctuary of God.
The Text
Until I came into the sanctuary of God;
Then I understood their end.
Surely You set them in slippery places;
You cause them to fall to destruction.
How they become desolate in a moment!
They are completely swept away by terrors!
Like a dream when one awakes,
O Lord, when aroused, You will despise their form.
(Psalm 73:17-20 LSB)
The Divine Perspective Shift (v. 17)
The turning point of the entire psalm is found in this first verse of our text.
"Until I came into the sanctuary of God; Then I understood their end." (Psalm 73:17)
Asaph had been trying to solve a spiritual problem with earthly math, and the numbers were not adding up. He was looking at the wicked's present prosperity and his own present affliction, and the equation would not balance. But the solution was not found by staring at the variables on the ground. It was found by ascending. He went into the sanctuary.
What does this mean? It means he went to worship. He drew near to God in the place appointed for meeting with God. He entered the liturgy, the place where God's reality, not man's perception, sets the terms. The sanctuary is where heaven and earth meet. It is the embassy of heaven on earth. When you are in the sanctuary, you are on holy ground, and you begin to see things from God's point of view. This is the absolute necessity of corporate worship. It is a worldview adjustment clinic. You come in with your vision blurred by the dust of the world, and in the sanctuary, through the Word, the prayers, and the sacraments, God cleans your glasses.
And what did he understand there? Not the reason for their present prosperity, but the certainty of "their end." He stopped focusing on their fat bank accounts and started focusing on their final account. In the sanctuary, God grants an eschatological perspective. He pulls back the curtain of time and shows Asaph the final act of the play. The wicked may have a good run in the second act, but the Author has already written the third, and it does not end well for them. This is not wishful thinking. This is not a coping mechanism for the oppressed. This is faith grasping the revealed reality of God's righteous judgment. From the vantage point of the sanctuary, their end is not a possibility, but a certainty.
The Precariousness of Pride (v. 18-19)
Once Asaph sees from God's perspective, the reality of the wicked's position becomes terrifyingly clear.
"Surely You set them in slippery places; You cause them to fall to destruction. How they become desolate in a moment! They are completely swept away by terrors!" (Psalm 73:18-19 LSB)
What looked from the ground like a secure fortress of wealth and power is revealed from the sanctuary to be a sheet of ice over a cliff. God Himself has "set them" there. Their prosperity is not a sign of God's blessing, but a part of His judgment. He gives them enough rope, and they use it to fashion a noose. He places them on a high, slippery ledge, and their own pride and arrogance is what makes them strut and swagger right to the edge.
Who envies the man preening on the gallows? Who is jealous of the turkey being fattened for Thanksgiving? This is the folly of Asaph's envy, which he later confesses. He was envying men who were careening toward destruction. Their fall is not a slow decline; it is sudden, catastrophic, and total. "In a moment!" The desolation is a flash. One minute they are toasting their success, and the next they are swept away by terrors.
This is the consistent testimony of Scripture. The rich fool was planning bigger barns on the very night his soul was required of him. Belshazzar was feasting with the vessels of God's temple when the hand appeared, writing his doom on the wall. The destruction of the wicked is not something God has to labor to bring about. All He has to do is withdraw His sustaining grace for a moment and let gravity do its work. Their own sin is the precipice, and their pride is the grease on their heels.
The Great Awakening (v. 20)
The final verse in our passage gives us one of the most powerful similes in all of Scripture for the insubstantial nature of godless prosperity.
"Like a dream when one awakes, O Lord, when aroused, You will despise their form." (Psalm 73:20 LSB)
Think of the most vivid dream you have ever had. In the dream, you might have won the lottery. You can feel the tickets in your hand, you can see the numbers, you can smell the new car. It is utterly real. And then the alarm clock goes off. You blink, the sun is coming through the window, and you realize with a jolt that none of it was real. You have nothing to show for it but a fading memory. How much of that dream wealth can you carry into the waking world? Not a dime.
This is God's verdict on the life of the prosperous wicked. Their entire existence, their empires, their portfolios, their reputations, their swagger, is a dream. It feels real to them, and it looks real to us when we are half-asleep spiritually. But the moment of death is the great awakening. And on the other side of that awakening, they will find that all their treasures were dream-trunks filled with dream-gold. They have nothing.
But it's worse than that. Not only is their substance revealed to be nothing, but their very "form," their image, their being, is despised by God. When the Lord is "aroused" to judgment, He looks upon their phantom-like existence and holds it in contempt. They spent their lives building an impressive-looking sandcastle, and the tide of God's reality simply washes it away, leaving not a trace. They made themselves the center of their own universe, and God awakens to show them that they were not even a footnote in His.
Conclusion: Waking Up in the Sanctuary
The problem Asaph faced is a perennial one. We are constantly tempted to evaluate the world by sight and not by faith. We see the wicked prosper and are tempted to envy, to despair, or to compromise. We begin to think that perhaps God's rules don't really apply, or that He is not paying attention.
The solution of Asaph must be our solution. We must, regularly and faithfully, go into the sanctuary of God. We must get ourselves into corporate worship, where the Word of God is truly preached and the sacraments are rightly administered. It is here that our spiritual vision is corrected. It is here that we are reminded of "their end." It is here that we see that the slick, prosperous path of the wicked is a slippery slope into oblivion.
And more than this, in the true sanctuary, which is Christ Himself, we see our end as well. For the Christian, the one who has taken refuge in Jesus, our end is not a fall into destruction, but an entrance into glory. While the form of the wicked will be despised, we will be transformed into the very image of Christ. While they awaken from their dream to a terrifying reality, we will awaken from the bad dream of this fallen world into the arms of our Redeemer.
The cross of Jesus Christ is the ultimate sanctuary. It is the place where the problem of evil and injustice is finally and fully dealt with. At the cross, the only truly innocent man was treated as the most wicked, so that we, the truly wicked, could be treated as perfectly righteous. God set His own Son in the slippery place of our sin and caused Him to fall into the destruction of death for us. He was swept away by the terrors of the wrath of God in our place.
Therefore, we must not envy the wicked their fleeting, dream-like prosperity. They are grasping at shadows. In Christ, we have true substance. They have a moment of comfort followed by an eternity of terror. We have a moment of affliction followed by an eternity of glory. Do not let your feet slip. Get into the sanctuary. Look to Christ. See things as they really are, and you will understand their end, and rejoice in yours.