Until I Went into the Sanctuary

Read Psalm 73 in full before proceeding. Watch for the turning point in verse 17, and notice how differently the psalm sounds before that verse and after it. Keep your Bible open throughout this session.

Whom do I have in heaven but you? On earth there is no one I desire but you. My flesh and my heart may grow weak, but God always protects my heart and gives me stability.
Psalm 73:25–26

Last session we sat with the steady counsel of an old believer who had watched the wicked prosper for seventy years and come out settled. Psalm 37 told us, calmly and from the outside, Do not fret … Do not envy evildoers! … the oppressed will possess the land. It was wisdom that had already arrived. This session takes up the same question, the prosperity of the wicked and the struggle of the faithful, but from the inside, while the storm is still blowing, told by a man who very nearly did not come through it at all.

Psalm 73 is the confession of Asaph, one of the worship leaders of Israel, a man whose whole calling was to stand before the LORD and lead the praises of the people, and who tells us, in his own words, that he came within a single step of throwing the whole thing away. But as for me, my feet almost slipped; my feet almost slid out from under me (v. 2). This is not a skeptic on the outside taking shots at the faith. This is a man on the inside, a leader of worship, admitting that the prosperity of the wicked nearly capsized him. If it could happen to Asaph, the honest believer in the pew will not be surprised to find it can happen to him.

Where Psalm 37 said Do not envy, Psalm 73 says, flatly, I envied: For I envied those who are proud, as I observed the prosperity of the wicked (v. 3). Here is the man who did the very thing the last psalm warned against, and lived to tell what it nearly cost him. That is the gift of having both psalms. One gives us the command and the long view; the other gives us the honest record of a saint who broke the command, slid to the very edge, and was hauled back. So no believer who has felt his own faith slipping over this need think he is the first, or that the slipping means he was never a believer at all. Asaph led the choir, and Asaph nearly fell. The Psalter is not embarrassed to tell us so.

And the psalm is built with a fascinating honesty. It puts its conclusion in the very first line, Certainly God is good to Israel, and to those whose motives are pure (v. 1), the settled truth Asaph reached, stated before he tells us how nearly he lost it. The rest of the psalm is the story of how a man gets from almost-slipping back to certainly God is good; and the remarkable thing, the thing that makes this psalm so useful, is that he does not get there by an argument. He never solves the problem. He gets there by going somewhere. Then I entered the precincts of God’s temple, and everything changed. The hinge of the whole psalm is not a thought. It is a place.

We will follow Asaph down into the doubt and up out of it, and we will find Christ along the way: in the pure heart that God is good to, in the hand that holds the slipping believer, in the glory he is promised on the far side of death, and in the nearness to God that is the only good Asaph finally wants. For now, hold the shape of it in your mind: a worship leader nearly loses his faith over the unfairness of the world, cannot think his way out, goes into the presence of God, and comes out able to say the most astonishing words in the Psalter, whom do I have in heaven but you?

My Feet Had Almost Slipped

Certainly God is good to Israel, and to those whose motives are pure (v. 1). The little word certainly (ʾak in the Hebrew, which the NET will also render surely) is going to do quiet work all through this psalm. It is the word of a man planting his feet and insisting on something, and here at the start he insists on the conclusion: God is good. We will hear ʾak again at the bottom of the psalm, in his doubt, and again at the turn, in his recovery. Watch the surely move from stubborn confession, through bitter complaint, to settled certainty. The whole journey is compressed into that one repeated word.

And then the confession, immediately, with no attempt to look better than he was: But as for me, my feet almost slipped; my feet almost slid out from under me (v. 2). The images are of a man losing his footing on a steep, wet path, feet sliding out from under him, about to go down. This is the language of nearly falling away, of faith almost lost. And the cause is named without flinching: For I envied those who are proud, as I observed the prosperity of the wicked (v. 3). Envy. The very thing Psalm 37 forbade in its opening breath, Asaph here confesses he indulged, and it nearly destroyed him. Envy is not a harmless feeling. Asaph treats it as the thing that almost cost him his soul, and he is right to. The man who feeds his envy of the wicked is standing on the wet path, his feet already sliding.

And do not pass too quickly over whom the opening line says God is good to: those whose motives are pure, literally, “the pure in heart.” That phrase ought to make us nervous, coming as it does just before Asaph confesses how foul his own heart had gone with envy. If God’s goodness is reserved for the pure in heart, and Asaph’s heart was anything but pure, where does that leave him, or us? The answer is the same one the Lord Jesus gives when He takes this very phrase into the Beatitudes: Blessed are the pure in heart, for they will see God (Matthew 5:8). The pure in heart are not the people who have scrubbed themselves clean; Asaph tried that and nearly despaired of it (Surely in vain I have kept my motives pure). They are the people God Himself makes pure, the people given a clean heart by His mercy. And notice what the pure in heart are promised: they will see God, which is exactly what happens to Asaph the moment he enters the sanctuary. The impure heart could see nothing but the wicked’s prosperity. The heart God cleanses gets to see God, and once it does, everything else comes into focus.

Always at Ease, They Increase in Riches

Asaph does not pretend the provocation was imaginary. He spends nine verses describing, in unsparing detail, exactly what he saw, and it is worth letting it land, because a believer who has felt this will recognize every line. The wicked seem to sail through life untroubled: For they suffer no pain; their bodies are strong and well fed. They are immune to the trouble common to men; they do not suffer as other men do (vv. 4–5). No struggle, no reckoning, no apparent consequence. Arrogance is their necklace, and violence covers them like clothing (v. 6). They wear their arrogance like jewelry, openly, and it costs them nothing.

Worse, they are not merely comfortable; they are contemptuous. They mock and say evil things … They speak as if they rule in heaven (vv. 8–9). And then the line that cuts deepest of all: They say, “How does God know what we do? Is the Most High aware of what goes on?” (v. 11). The wicked do not just prosper while denying God; they prosper and mock the very idea that God sees or cares, and their prosperity seems to prove them right. That is the real barb in the whole problem. It is not only that the cheat is comfortable; it is that his comfort looks like evidence that the cheat was correct, that God is absent or blind, and that the believer scrubbing his conscience clean has been played for a fool. Asaph sums it up with weary disgust: Take a good look. This is what the wicked are like, those who always have it so easy and get richer and richer (v. 12). Always easy. Always richer. The psalm refuses to pretend it does not sting.

And Asaph is in good company in his bewilderment, which is worth saying to the believer who feels guilty for even asking the question. This is not a stumble peculiar to one weak worshiper; it is one of the oldest wounds in the life of faith, and Scripture’s most faithful people press it hard. Job demands of God why the wicked go on living, grow old, even increase in power. Jeremiah, who was no doubter, takes God to court over it: LORD, you have always been fair whenever I have complained to you. However, I would like to speak with you … Why are wicked people successful? (Jeremiah 12:1). Habakkuk plants himself on his watchtower and will not come down until God answers the same complaint. Scripture does not treat this question as faithlessness to be scolded; it treats it as a real wound that real believers carry to God, and it gives them, in Asaph, a whole psalm for the carrying. The question is not the problem. Carrying it anywhere but to God is the problem, and Asaph is about to show us the one place it can finally be brought.

All in Vain

And so Asaph arrives at the bottom, and says the dangerous thing out loud, or nearly does. I concluded, “Surely in vain I have kept my motives pure and maintained a pure lifestyle. I suffer all day long, and am punished every morning” (vv. 13–14). There it is, the conclusion the whole envy has been driving toward: it was pointless. The faithfulness, the clean conscience, the daily struggle to do right, all of it for nothing, because the reward for keeping faith has been a daily punishment while the faithless lounge in their riches. Every honest believer who has white-knuckled his way through some costly obedience and then watched someone cut every corner and come out ahead knows this verse from the inside. In vain. What was the point?

But notice what holds him back from speaking it aloud as a settled creed. If I had publicized these thoughts, I would have betrayed your people (v. 15). Even at the edge, something in Asaph will not let him say it publicly, will not let him hand his poison to the LORD’s people and call it wisdom. There is a kind of doubt that a believer carries privately to God and a kind he broadcasts as gospel, and Asaph, even slipping, knows the difference. He brings his complaint to God. He does not preach it to the children of God. And still he cannot resolve it: When I tried to make sense of this, it was troubling to me (v. 16). He tried to think his way out. He could not. The problem would not yield to reasoning, and the harder he worked at it the more exhausted and no nearer he got. Anyone who has lain awake trying to argue himself back into peace knows that weariness. It is the weariness of a problem that has no solution on the level where we keep attacking it.

It is worth naming exactly what Asaph’s in vain reveals about the heart underneath it, because the same thing hides in ours. Surely in vain I have kept my motives pure assumes that keeping the heart pure was a transaction: that faithfulness was a payment the believer made, and prosperity the wage God owed him in return. On that accounting, the comfort of the wicked is unbearable, because it looks like God stiffing an honest worker while paying the cheats. But the accounting itself is the error. Faith was never a transaction by which we purchase the good life; the prosperity of the wicked feels like a broken contract only to the believer who was secretly treating his obedience as a contract. And so this crisis does a strange mercy: it exposes the hidden bargain in Asaph’s heart, the quiet expectation that his pure life had earned him a comfortable one, and burns it away. By the end of the psalm he will have stopped asking God to pay him in the wicked’s coin at all, because he will have discovered that the reward of faith was never things in the first place. The reward was God Himself, and he had Him the whole time.

Until I Went into the Sanctuary

And then, in a single verse, the whole psalm turns: Then I entered the precincts of God’s temple, and understood the destiny of the wicked (v. 17). The Hebrew opens the verse with a small word the NET smooths into then: until, as older translations have it, until I went into the sanctuary of God. Stop and feel the force of that until. For sixteen verses Asaph has been sliding, complaining, reasoning, getting nowhere, until. The deadlock breaks. But look closely at how it breaks, because this is the lesson the whole session has been building toward, and it is one of the most quietly Lutheran things in the Psalter. Asaph does not say, until I found the argument that answered it. He does not say, until I thought of a verse that solved it. He says, I entered the precincts of God’s temple. The cure for his slipping faith was not a better idea. It was a place: the place where God was present to His people, the tabernacle, the holy place where the LORD gave Himself in worship and word and sacrifice.

This matters more than almost anything else in the psalm, so let us be plain about it. The problem of the prosperity of the wicked is not, at bottom, an intellectual problem with an intellectual solution. It is a problem of the heart, and the heart is not healed by argument; it is healed by the presence of God. Asaph had been doing the very thing that deepens the wound: sitting alone with his envy, turning the unfairness over and over in his own head, trying to reason his way back to peace in the echo chamber of his own embittered thoughts. That way lies the slipping foot. What broke the spell was leaving that echo chamber and going to where God gives Himself. In the sanctuary, surrounded by the worship of God’s people, in the presence of the living LORD, the whole thing suddenly looked different, not because he won the argument, but because he was no longer alone with it; he was with God.

And this is exactly the counsel the church still gives the believer whose faith is slipping over the unfairness of the world. The cure is not to isolate and ruminate until you have it figured out; that is the road that nearly destroyed Asaph. The cure is to go to the sanctuary. For us the sanctuary is no longer a tent in the wilderness or a temple in Jerusalem; it is wherever the Lord Jesus Christ has promised to be present for His people: in the preaching of His word, in the water of baptism, in His body and blood given and shed. The doubting believer is not told to stay home until he has resolved his questions and feels ready to return. He is told to come, precisely while he is slipping, and let God give Himself to him there. Faith is not finally rescued by figuring it out. It is rescued in the sanctuary, where Christ feeds the very people whose feet have almost slipped, and most of them have, at one time or another.

And what does Asaph see, once he is there? He understood the destiny of the wicked: their ʾacharit, the same word Psalm 37 used, their latter end, where the road of the wicked actually comes out. In the sanctuary the long view that Psalm 37 commended from the outside is suddenly given to him from the inside. He had been staring at the prosperity of the wicked as though it were the whole story, a snapshot frozen at the moment of their greatest ease. In God’s presence he sees the rest of the reel, and the ending is nothing like the snapshot.

The Slippery Places

Surely (there is ʾak again, the surely now turned from complaint to clear sight) you put them in slippery places; you bring them down to ruin. How desolate they become in a mere moment. Terrifying judgments make their demise complete (vv. 18–19). And here is the great reversal of the psalm, the thing Asaph could only see in the sanctuary. Back in verse 2 he thought it was his own feet on the slippery ground, his feet that had almost slipped, while the wicked stood secure. In the presence of God he sees the truth: it is the wicked who are standing in the slippery places. Their prosperity is not solid ground; it is a sheet of ice over a drop. The believer who felt himself sliding was, all along, the one being held, and the wicked who looked so steady were the ones a single moment from going down.

Their whole glittering life, seen from the sanctuary, turns out to be insubstantial: They are like a dream after one wakes up. O Lord, when you awake you will despise them (v. 20). A dream can be vivid, overwhelming, utterly convincing while you are in it, and then you wake, and it is nothing, and you cannot even hold onto what seemed so real a moment before. That, says Asaph, is the prosperity of the wicked: dream-thin, gone the instant God awakes. He had been envying a dream.

And now Asaph turns the honest eye back on himself, and what he sees is not flattering. Yes, my spirit was bitter, and my insides felt sharp pain. I was ignorant and lacked insight; I was as senseless as an animal before you (vv. 21–22). This is real repentance, and it is bracing. He does not excuse his envy as understandable under the circumstances; he calls it what it was: senselessness, the reaction of an animal that cannot see past the feed trough in front of it. The man who had nearly congratulated himself on his pure motives now confesses that in his bitterness he had been a beast before the God who made him. That honesty is itself a fruit of the sanctuary. You cannot stand long in the presence of God and keep thinking well of your own resentment.

That word the NET renders animal (older translations have beast) is sharper than it first sounds, and Scripture has shown us before what it means for a man to become one. Nebuchadnezzar, the proudest king in the world, looked out over his prosperity and took the glory of it to himself, and was given the mind of a beast, driven out to eat grass, until, the account says, he lifted his eyes to heaven and his reason returned (Daniel 4). To forget God in the contemplation of prosperity, whether your own or the wicked’s, is to sink toward the beasts, who see the feed in front of them and nothing beyond it. Envy had done exactly that to Asaph: it had narrowed his sight to the trough of the wicked’s prosperity until he could see nothing higher. And like Nebuchadnezzar, he is restored at the moment he lifts his eyes: in the sanctuary, to the God he had nearly stopped seeing. The cure for beastlikeness is to look up.

Nevertheless

And now comes the word the whole gospel could hang on. After the slipping, the envy, the bitterness, the beastlike ignorance, after all of it, Asaph says: But I am continually with you; you hold my right hand (v. 23). But I. Older translations render it Nevertheless, and they feel its weight rightly. In the Hebrew it is waʾani tamid (but I [am] continually), and it turns the whole psalm on its hinge. Everything Asaph has just confessed about himself should, by rights, have ended the relationship. He had been senseless toward God, a beast in his bitterness, his feet sliding toward apostasy. And the next word is not therefore I was cast off but but I am continually with you.

And see exactly why. You hold my right hand. Not I held onto you: that is the whole point, and missing it loses the gospel of the psalm. Asaph did not keep his footing on the slippery path by the strength of his own grip. His grip failed; his feet had almost gone out from under him. What kept him was not his hold on God but God’s hold on him. Back in verse 2 his own feet had almost slipped; here in verse 23 he understands at last why he did not finally go down: a hand he was not even gripping was gripping him. This is the deepest comfort a slipping believer can be given: your security does not rest on the firmness of your hold on God, which fails, but on the firmness of His hold on you, which does not. The Lord Jesus said it in as many words: no one will snatch them from my hand (John 10:28). Asaph, senseless and beastlike, was held the whole time by a hand he had nearly let go of.

There is deep comfort here for every believer who has feared his faith might not last, who has watched his own grip on God weaken and wondered whether he would finally slip away after all. The psalm answers that fear at its root. What holds the believer to the end is not the strength of his faith but the faithfulness of his God. The one who began a good work in you will perfect it until the day of Christ Jesus (Philippians 1:6); the One who took hold of you does not lose His grip when yours fails. This is not a license to be careless. Asaph’s slipping was real, and real damage was done to his peace and nearly to his soul. Nor is it a promise to the one who lets go of Christ and walks away in unbelief; faith can be lost, and the Scriptures warn of it plainly. But to the believer who is slipping and afraid, it is a promise that the final outcome does not hang on the steadiness of our hold. It hangs on His, and His does not shake. The believer falls asleep at night not because he has managed to keep believing hard enough, but because the hand that holds him does not tire or loosen while he sleeps.

And the hand that holds him is leading him somewhere. You guide me with your counsel, and afterward you will receive me to glory (v. 24 ESV). Afterward: after this life, after the slippery path is walked to its end, you will receive me to glory. The verb for receive is the word used when God took Enoch so that he did not see death, and when Elijah was taken up; it is the language of being gathered to God Himself on the far side of dying. Here, in an Old Testament psalm, is a real glimpse over the edge of the grave: the believer’s ʾacharit, his latter end, is not the slippery ruin of the wicked but to be received into glory. We have stood here before, at Psalm 16’s path of life that ran through death into the Father’s presence. What Asaph glimpses, the Lord Jesus has secured: I will come again and take you to be with me, so that where I am you may be too (John 14:3). The hand that holds the believer through the slipping does not let go at the grave. It holds him through it, and receives him to glory on the other side.

Whom Have I in Heaven But You

And so Asaph climbs to the summit, and it is one of the highest points in the whole Psalter: Whom do I have in heaven but you? On earth there is no one I desire but you (v. 25). Hear what has happened to the man who, a few verses ago, was sick with envy of the wicked’s possessions. He has been cured, not by getting what they had, and not by their losing it, but by the reordering of his wanting. When God Himself becomes the one thing the heart desires, the prosperity of the wicked simply loses its grip, because it holds nothing the believer wants anymore. You cannot envy a man his pile of dream-gold when the living God is your treasure. The cure for envy is not to acquire more; it is to want God so completely that on earth there is no one you desire but Him. Asaph did not get richer. He got God, and discovered God was enough, and more than enough; God was, in fact, the only thing he had ever really been after.

My flesh and my heart may grow weak, but God always protects my heart and gives me stability (v. 26). He looks straight at his own mortality now and is not afraid of it. My flesh and my heart may grow weak: they will; the body wears out and the heart gives way and every one of us comes to it. But God is, in the Hebrew’s own words, my portion forever, the phrase the NET renders gives me stability. There is the word from Psalm 16 again: portion, the Levite’s inheritance, the LORD Himself as the believer’s allotted treasure, now stretched past the failing of the flesh, forever. When everything that can be taken has been taken, down to the body itself, the believer still has his portion, because his portion is God, and God does not fail when flesh and heart do. The man who envied the wicked their strong and well-fed bodies now knows that the body is exactly the thing that fails, and that what he has cannot.

And the psalm lands where Psalm 37 landed, on nearness and refuge: Yes, look! Those far from you die … But as for me, God’s presence is all I need. I have made the Sovereign LORD my shelter (vv. 27–28). The Hebrew of that last good thing is, literally, the nearness of God is good to me, which is why older translations read it is good to be near God. The whole problem is resolved into a single contrast, far from you and near God, and the good Asaph had been chasing in the wrong place turns out to be simply this: God’s presence, nearness to God. Not to be rich, not to be comfortable, not to be vindicated in front of his enemies, but to be near. And here the gospel comes fully into view, because nearness to God is precisely what the Lord Jesus came to give. But now in Christ Jesus you who used to be far away have been brought near by the blood of Christ (Ephesians 2:13). The far and the near, the perishing and the saved, divide over one thing: nearness to God. And the Lord Jesus is that nearness, the One who brings the far-off home. Asaph made the Lord his shelter. We have a shelter with a name and a face and pierced hands, who has brought us near at the cost of His own blood.

The Cure for a Slipping Faith

Gather it up, then, and let the psalm hand the believer its hard-won medicine. The ache it treats is one almost everyone who follows the LORD will feel sooner or later: the sight of the wicked at ease, prospering, mocking, while the faithful are punished every morning, and the slow poison of envy that whispers in vain. Psalm 73 does not scold that ache or pretend it away. It confesses it, in the voice of a worship leader whose own feet had almost gone out from under him.

And its medicine is threefold. First, do not try to think your way out alone; that is the troubling task that gets nowhere and the isolation that deepens the wound. Go to the sanctuary, to where God gives Himself; for the Christian, go to where Christ is present in His word and at His table, and let Him heal what no argument can reach. Second, when you get there, remember the reversal: it is the wicked who stand in the slippery places, their prosperity a dream that vanishes when God awakes; and the believer who felt himself sliding is the one being held, held when he was senseless and beastlike and barely holding on, by a hand he was not even gripping. And third, let your wanting be reordered, until you can say with Asaph whom do I have in heaven but you, and the prosperity of the wicked loses its power because it offers you nothing you still want.

So the two psalms stand together, and the believer needs both. Psalm 37 is the calm counsel of one who has come through: Do not fret … Do not envy evildoers! … Wait patiently for the LORD! Psalm 73 is the honest record of one still coming through: I envied … my feet almost slipped … Then I entered the precincts of God’s temple. The first tells us what to do; the second tells us it is all right that doing it is hard, and shows us the way back when we have failed at it. And both come to rest in the same place: not in the believer’s strength but in the LORD’s, not in getting what the wicked have but in having God Himself as portion and refuge forever. That is the wisdom of the Psalter on the oldest ache of faith. And at the center of it, holding the slipping believer’s hand and bringing the far-off near, is the Lord Jesus Christ, in whom alone it is good, and safe, and forever, to be near God.

Gathering the Threads

We followed Asaph the worship leader down into a doubt that nearly drowned him and up out of it into one of the highest confessions in the Psalter. He stated his conclusion first, certainly God is good, and then told us, without flinching, how close he came to losing it: his feet had almost slipped, because he had envied the proud when he saw the wicked at ease. He let us feel the full sting of the provocation (the wicked comfortable, contemptuous, mocking the very idea that God knows) and the dangerous conclusion it bred, surely in vain I have kept my motives pure. He tried to think his way out and could not; it was troubling to him.

And then the hinge, not an argument but a place: Then I entered the precincts of God’s temple. There he was given the long view from the inside: the wicked are the ones in the slippery places, their prosperity a vanishing dream; and he, who thought himself sliding, had been held all along. But I am continually with you; you hold my right hand. He was held by a hand he was not gripping, even while he was senseless and beastlike, and guided toward the day God would receive him to glory. So his wanting was reordered until he could say whom do I have in heaven but you, and his mortality lost its terror because God was his portion forever, and the whole problem resolved into one good thing, nearness to God: God’s presence is all I need. That is the very nearness the Lord Jesus came to give, bringing the far-off home by His blood. The cure for a slipping faith is not a better argument. It is the sanctuary, the holding hand, and a heart that has learned to want nothing in heaven or earth but God.

For Discussion

Psalm 37 commanded the believer not to envy the wicked; Psalm 73 confesses my feet almost slipped … I envied those who are proud. Why is it valuable that the Psalter gives us both the command and the honest record of a saint who nearly broke it? What does Asaph’s confession say to a believer who has felt his own faith slipping over the same thing?
The turn comes in verse 17: Then I entered the precincts of God’s temple. The session argued that the cure was not a better argument but going where God gives Himself. Why does it matter that Asaph found his footing in God’s presence rather than by reasoning the problem out alone? Where is the sanctuary for a Christian today?
In verse 2 Asaph says his own feet almost slipped; in verse 18 he sees that it is the wicked whom God has put in slippery places. How does that reversal change the way a believer should see both the prosperity of the wicked and his own struggle?
Verse 23 turns on a single word: But I am continually with you; you hold my right hand, said right after Asaph confessed he was as senseless as an animal before God (v. 22). What does it mean for a believer’s security that God held his hand while he was at his worst, rather than because he held tightly to God? Read John 10:28 alongside it.
Verse 25 reaches the summit: Whom do I have in heaven but you? On earth there is no one I desire but you. How is making God one’s only desire the real cure for envying what the wicked have?
Verses 24 and 26 look past death: afterward you will receive me to glory (v. 24 ESV), and God as the believer’s portion forever (v. 26, literally). How does the hope of being received to glory reframe the whole problem of the wicked prospering in this brief life? Connect it to Psalm 16’s path of life.

Looking Ahead

Asaph found his footing again in the sanctuary, and the next psalm is, in a sense, the song of a man who has built his whole life inside that sanctuary, around the one thing that steadied Asaph: the word of God. The next session takes up Psalm 119, the longest chapter in the Bible, an enormous acrostic of one hundred and seventy-six verses, nearly every one of them about the LORD’s instruction: His law, His word, His statutes, His commandments, His promises. We will not march through all twenty-two of its alphabetic strophes; we will settle into a few, and learn how the psalm loves what it loves.

Because Psalm 119 has its own danger to navigate, the same one we met in Psalm 1 and Psalm 37: a psalm so taken up with the law can sound, to a Lutheran ear, like the very self-righteous law-keeping the gospel frees us from. We will read it more carefully than that. The believer who cries O how I love your law! is not boasting in his own obedience; he is delighting in the word through which God gives Himself, the word that, as we have said all along, finally shows forth Christ. Psalm 119 is the long love song of a heart for the God who speaks, and we will read it as the delight of those who have found, in God’s word, the Word made flesh.

Before the next session, read at least the opening strophes of Psalm 119 (verses 1–32), and if you have time, read the whole psalm slowly across the week. Notice how many different words the psalm uses for God’s word, and how rarely it speaks of the law as a burden.

Closing Prayer

O LORD our God, we confess that our feet have slipped where Asaph’s nearly slipped: we have envied the proud and brooded over the ease of the wicked until our hearts grew bitter and our trust grew thin, and we have whispered to ourselves that our faithfulness was all in vain. Forgive us our envy and our senselessness; forgive us for trying to reason our way to peace alone in the dark when You were waiting to give Yourself to us in Your house.
We bless You that You did not let us go, even when we had nearly let go of You; that You held our right hand while we were beastlike and barely holding on; and that You are bringing us, by Your counsel, toward the glory into which You will receive Your own. Reorder our wanting, until we desire nothing in heaven or on earth besides You. Be the strength of our hearts when flesh and heart fail, and our portion forever. And keep us near You, in the sanctuary where Your Son gives Himself to us in word and supper, for it is good to be near God, and He has brought us near by His blood. Through the same Lord Jesus Christ, our refuge, who lives and reigns with You and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and forever. Amen.