We have followed Asaph from his introductory statement of faith in the goodness of God, through his steep descent into doubt and near unbelief, to the important turning point as a result of which he began to see things from God's perspective. Here we see him coming back. This radical reordering of his thinking, described in verses 18-26, touches on three main areas.
Suddenly on this downhill path into floundering unbelief there comes a turning point. It is in verses 16 and 17. For just when he was about to be swept away, Asaph, the honest doubter, "entered the sanctuary of God” and came to understand the "final destiny" of the wicked.
What Asaph observed was "the prosperity of the wicked" which defies our expectation that virtue should be rewarded and wickedness punished. But that is only one side of the problem and probably the least important. Asaph's real problem, as he acknowledges, was that he had become envious of the wicked, and it was as a result of this that he had "almost slipped." In other words, his problem was that he compared their health, wealth and prosperity with his lack of prosperity and was resentful that God would allow such a state to continue.
Psalm 73 is an example of faith honestly doubting what it does in fact believe. So it is not that kind of boastful doubting we so often hear in the conversation of proud people. Some people think it is clever to be able to raise questions the people of God have trouble answering, but that is not what the psalmist is doing. The proof of this is in the point from which he starts out in verse 1: “Surely God is good to Israel, to those who are pure in heart.”
There are lots of buzzwords in the English language today. In fact, “buzzword” is one of them. But there are others, words like “online,” “down time,” “market driven,” “politically correct,” and others. One of my favorites is “paradigm shift.” A paradigm is a fully worked out conjugation of a verb or declension of a noun, showing the word in all its forms. It is a complete framework. So a paradigm shift is a radical change from one system or way of looking at something to another. In other words, it is a change in a person's world or life view. Asaph had such a paradigm shift, and Psalm 73 is his record of it.
