Introduction: This is the third day looking at Psalm 73. Yesterday’s section ended with ‘Until I went into the sanctuary of God; then I discerned their end.’ The psalm is about the Psalmist feeling envious and being tempted to give up the struggle, which it often is, to do the right thing all the time and rather just enjoy the pleasures of a sinful life!
18 Truly you set them in slippery places;
you make them fall to ruin.
19 How they are destroyed in a moment,
swept away utterly by terrors!
20 Like a dream when one awakes,
O Lord, when you rouse yourself, you despise them as phantoms. – How completely can God sweep away evil doers? As easily as reality comes back when on waking you shake your head and put the horrors of a dream into nothingness. The dream ghosts are no more! Thus at the command of God the problem of the evil doer is disposed of! Sometimes life crashes around the successful evil doer but certainly judgement faces them at death!
21 When my soul was embittered,
when I was pricked in heart,
22 I was brutish and ignorant;
I was like a beast toward you. – If only those choosing evil would see themselves as God does! The writer recognized this before he was set ‘in slippery places’!
23 Nevertheless, I am continually with you;
you hold my right hand.
24 You guide me with your counsel,
and afterward you will receive me to glory.
25 Whom have I in heaven but you?
And there is nothing on earth that I desire besides you. – is this what you have chosen as your relationship with God and His goodness?
26 My flesh and my heart may fail, – at eighty seven I’m realizing this more each day!
but God is the strength of my heart and my portion forever. – This is God’s promise to those who choose His side to walk on!
27 For behold, those who are far from you shall perish;
you put an end to everyone who is unfaithful to you.
28 But for me it is good to be near God;
I have made the Lord GOD my refuge,
that I may tell of all your works. – What do you sense the Psalmist to be feeling at the end of this psalm? Guilt? Repentance? Thankfulness? Praise? All of the above and more! Certainly the very last line ‘that I may tell of all your works.‘ to me removes any shade of gloating. He feels an unending responsibility to share the Majesty of God and what the end of this life is like with friends and neighbours. The end is not oblivion but judgement!
Comment: The picture at the beginning showed the start of the slide but these two photos show the absolute catastrophe which sliding can cause!
Proverbs 28: 13 – “Whoever conceals his transgressions will not prosper, but he who confesses and forsakes them will obtain mercy”.
I find myself humming this old Hymn as today’s Prayer: Rescue the perishing, care for the dying, snatch them in pity from sin and the grave; weep o’er the erring one, lift up the fallen, tell them of Jesus the mighty to save.
As I read it! 