Asaph opens with a doctrine he still believes and a crisis that nearly capsized it. 1"Truly God is good to Israel." Then he confesses how close he came to losing it. 2"my feet had almost stumbled, my steps had nearly slipped." Belief and near collapse lived in him at the same time, and he tells the psalm's readers that both are possible.
The cause was envy, plain and specific. 3"I was envious of the arrogant when I saw the prosperity of the wicked." Psalm 1, which opens this whole collection, had promised that the righteous flourish like a tree by streams and the wicked blow away like chaff. Asaph watched it run backward. The wicked were 12"always at ease," gaining in riches, while his own clean heart seemed spent in vain. Every reward he had been promised for righteousness seemed to be landing on people who mocked the whole idea.
He does not broadcast his bitterness. Had he spoken it aloud, he says, he would have betrayed the generation of God's children, aware that a private crisis of faith could wound a whole community's trust if handled carelessly. What ends the deadlock is a place: 17"until I went into the sanctuary of God; then I discerned their end." Reasoning got him nowhere. Worship, entering God's presence and no longer arguing about God from a distance, cleared his sight.
What he sees there reverses everything. 18"you set them in slippery places." The ground he envied is slick and not solid, and the prosperity he wanted is 20"Like a dream when one awakes."
Then Asaph turns the same honesty on himself. In his bitterness, he says, he was brutish and ignorant, a beast toward God. He offers no excuse. And then comes the turn the whole psalm has been building toward. 23"Nevertheless, I am continually with you; you hold my right hand." Even at his lowest, God's grip on him never loosened. He holds Asaph's hand, and Asaph does not have to hold on. 24"afterward you will receive me to glory." Whatever Asaph glimpsed in that word afterward gave him a horizon large enough to make his present envy look small.
The climax follows, and it is one of the most quoted lines in the Psalter. His circumstances have not changed. His body will still fail, and so will his heart. God is his portion, and portion is the word for an inheritance, the share of the land that belonged to a family for good. The one thing that cannot be taken is the one he holds by being held.
The psalm closes where it started, with a doctrine restated, except it has now been tested to the edge of collapse. 28"But for me it is good to be near God." The wealth he envied was a dream already dissolving as he watched. The wealth he already had, without knowing its worth, was never going to end.
Prayer
Father, we have envied the ease of people who mock the very idea of you, and felt that our faithfulness bought us nothing but trouble. Bring us into your sanctuary as you brought Asaph, until we see what our reasoning alone could never work out. Whatever our flesh and heart fail to hold, be the strength of our hearts and our portion forever. In Jesus' name, amen.