Until I Entered the Sanctuary

Opening tension

The psalm tells you its conclusion in the first line and then spends twenty-seven verses admitting how close its author came to abandoning it.

“Surely God is good to Israel, to those who are pure in heart.” That is the orthodox sentence, the one everybody in the congregation would sign. The very next line is “But as for me, my feet had almost stumbled.”

Asaph does not begin with his doubt and work toward faith. He begins with the creed and then tells you what it cost him to keep it. That order matters for the sermon. The people in your pews already know the right answer. What most of them have never been given is permission to say how hard it has been to believe it.

Where this sits in the Psalter

Preach this psalm with its neighbours in view, because its position is part of what it says.

Psalm 72 is a prayer for the king, full of the hope that his reign will bring peace to the people and that the righteous will flourish. It ends with a note from whoever arranged the collection: “Thus conclude the prayers of David son of Jesse.” Then Psalm 73 opens the third book of the Psalter.

Book III runs from Psalm 73 to Psalm 89, and it is the darkest of the five. It includes laments over a destroyed sanctuary (Psalm 74) and a ruined Jerusalem (Psalm 79), and it closes with Psalm 89, which asks outright what has become of God’s covenant with David. Gerald Wilson’s work on the editing of the Psalter made this shaping widely noticed: the collection seems to have been arranged so that the confident royal hopes of Books I and II pass through a book of crisis.

Psalm 73 stands at the door of that book. There is one small verbal link worth showing. The word the BSB renders “peace” in 72:3 and “prosperity” in 72:7 is the Hebrew shalom, and it returns in 73:3: “the prosperity of the wicked.” Psalm 72 prays for shalom to come through a righteous king. Psalm 73 opens by watching shalom settle on the wrong people.

Walter Brueggemann argued that Psalm 73 sits at the theological centre of the whole Psalter, the point where the simple confidence of Psalm 1, that the righteous flourish and the wicked perish, meets real experience and survives it on the way to the praise of Psalm 150. You need not adopt his whole scheme to see the psalm doing that work. Psalm 1:6 says “the way of the wicked will perish.” Psalm 73:27 says “those far from You will surely perish,” with the same Hebrew verb. Asaph arrives at Psalm 1’s conclusion, but by a road Psalm 1 never describes.

The voice, and how little we know about it

The heading reads “A Psalm of Asaph.” Be restrained here.

Chronicles names an Asaph, a Levite, among the musicians David appointed (1 Chronicles 6:39; 25:1–2), and describes his sons prophesying with lyres and cymbals. In Hezekiah’s time the Levites praise God “in the words of David and of Asaph the seer” (2 Chronicles 29:30). After the exile, 128 “descendants of Asaph” return as singers (Ezra 2:41). So Asaph is both a person and a guild that carried his name for centuries. Twelve psalms bear the heading: Psalm 50 and Psalms 73 to 83.

The Hebrew preposition in the heading can mean “by”, “for”, or “belonging to”. It may mark authorship, or membership in the Asaph collection. Nothing inside the psalm dates it, and nothing names an occasion. I will call the speaker Asaph throughout for convenience, and you may do the same from the pulpit, but do not tell your congregation what year it was or what happened to him. The psalm withholds that on purpose, and the result is that every reader can stand where he stood.

The sanctuary

Verse 17 is the hinge: “until I entered God’s sanctuary; then I discerned their end.”

The Hebrew noun is plural, literally “the sanctuaries of God”. Most interpreters take it as the temple precincts, the plural pointing to the holy complex as a whole, and the Portuguese Bíblia Livre keeps the plural. A minority read it as “the holy things of God”, meaning his hidden purposes. The more natural reading, and the one the psalm’s own language of drawing near in verse 28 supports, is that he went to the place of worship.

What he did there, the psalm does not say. There is no vision, no oracle, no priest who explains things. That silence is useful: it tells you only that his perspective changed in the place where God was worshipped. Do not embellish it.

On geography and archaeology: if the psalm comes from the monarchy, the sanctuary is presumably Solomon’s temple in Jerusalem. The Temple Mount has never been open to excavation, and no remains of that building have been securely identified. If it is later, it could be the second temple. We do not know which, and nothing in the sermon depends on it.

How the psalm is built

This is a psalm to preach in the order it was written. Three structural markers carry it, and all three survive in both English and Portuguese translation.

The word “surely”. The Hebrew particle ‘ak opens verse 1, verse 13 and verse 18. It can mean “surely” or “only”, a word of emphatic assertion. The BSB renders it “Surely” all three times; the Bíblia Livre renders it “certamente” all three times. That lets you show your congregation the skeleton of the psalm in their own Bibles:

• “Surely God is good to Israel” (v. 1): the creed.
• “Surely in vain I have kept my heart pure” (v. 13): the creed’s opposite, said with the same confidence.
• “Surely You set them on slick ground” (v. 18): the creed recovered, now with eyes open.

Three times Asaph is certain. The first and third certainties agree. The middle one nearly won.

The words “but as for me”. The Hebrew wa’ani, “and I”, marks verses 2, 22, 23 and 28. “But as for me, my feet had almost stumbled” (v. 2). “I was senseless and ignorant” (v. 22). “Yet I am always with You” (v. 23). “But as for me, it is good to draw near to God” (v. 28). The psalm moves from God’s goodness in general to what happened to this one man, and it keeps returning to him.

The heart. The word appears six times: the pure in heart (v. 1), the imaginations of the wicked heart (v. 7), “I have kept my heart pure” (v. 13), “my heart was grieved” (v. 21), and twice in verse 26: “My flesh and my heart may fail, but God is the strength of my heart.” Martin Buber wrote an essay on this psalm titled “The Heart Determines”, and whatever you make of his reading, the title is a fair summary of the text. The whole drama is interior.

Language notes

Four observations, all checkable, none requiring you to say “the Hebrew really means”.

Trouble (vv. 5 and 16). Verse 5 says the wicked “are free of the burdens others carry.” The word is ‘amal, toil or trouble. In verse 16, when Asaph tries to make sense of it all, “it was troublesome in my sight”, and the word is ‘amal again. The wicked had no trouble. Understanding them was nothing but trouble. That is a small, true irony, and a congregation will feel it.

Their end, and my afterward (vv. 17 and 24). In verse 17 he discerns “their end”, ‘acharitam. In verse 24 God will “later receive me in glory”, and “later” is ‘achar, from the same root. The wicked have an ending. The psalmist has an afterward. The BSB’s “end” and “later” and the Bíblia Livre’s “fim” and “depois” both keep the contrast visible, though neither can keep the shared root.

With You (vv. 22, 23, 25). Verse 22 ends “I was a brute beast before You.” Verse 23 begins “Yet I am always with You.” Verse 25 continues “on earth I desire no one besides You.” In Hebrew all three rely on the same small preposition, ‘im, “with”. At his most animal, stupid and bitter, he was still “with” God. The next sentence does not say he returned to God’s presence. It says he had never left it. The Portuguese reader has it more plainly than the English one, because the Bíblia Livre renders all three with “contigo”.

Portion (v. 26). “God is the strength of my heart and my portion forever.” The word cheleq, portion or share, is the language of the land allotment. When the land was divided, the tribe of Levi received none, and the Lord said to Aaron: “I am your portion and your inheritance among the Israelites” (Numbers 18:20). If the Chronicles tradition of Asaph as a Levite stands behind this psalm, then verse 26 is a Levite remembering what his tribe had always been told: you do not get land; you get God. The phrase recurs in Psalm 16:5, Psalm 142:5 and Lamentations 3:24. Offer the Levitical link as possible background, not certainty. The word itself is certain.

One textual note, so that you are not caught out. In verse 7 the BSB reads “From their prosperity proceeds iniquity”, which follows the ancient Greek and Syriac. The traditional Hebrew text reads, roughly, “their eyes bulge from fat”, and the Bíblia Livre follows that: “Seus olhos incham de gordura”. Verses 4, 7 and 10 are among the harder lines in the Psalter, and translations differ; the commentaries by Tate and by Hossfeld and Zenger set out the options in detail. Do not hang anything on these lines.

What most readers miss

He kept quiet for the sake of others. Verse 15 is the most overlooked line in the psalm: “If I had said, ‘I will speak this way,’ then I would have betrayed Your children.” He reached the conclusion of verse 13 and did not preach it. He was aware that his words would carry, that there was a generation of God’s children listening, and that he had no right to hand them a despair he had not finished thinking through. That is not hypocrisy. It is responsibility. He tells you now, after the turn, when the whole story can be told.

Envy comes before arrogance. Verse 3 names the psalmist’s problem before it describes anyone else’s: “I envied the arrogant.” Verses 4 to 12 are not an objective survey of the wicked. They are what envy sees. The psalm is candid that the long portrait of other people’s sin is the view from inside his own resentment.

The slipping comes back. In verse 2 his steps “had nearly slipped”. In verse 18 God sets the wicked “on slick ground”. The Hebrew words differ, but the picture returns deliberately: the man who nearly fell learns who is actually standing on ice. The Bíblia Livre happens to use the same verb in both places, “escorregarem”, which makes the echo audible in Portuguese.

God is doing the holding. Verse 23 does not say “I held on to You.” It says “You hold my right hand.” The only grip that kept him from falling in verse 2 was not his.

The psalm never answers the question. Nobody explains why the wicked prosper. What changes is not the data but the vantage point and, finally, the desire. By verse 25 he no longer wants what they have.

Why this matters: the conclusion he almost reached

Verse 13 is not a cry of pain. It is a verdict. “Surely in vain I have kept my heart pure; in innocence I have washed my hands.” It is said with the same confident particle as the creed in verse 1.

That is what makes the psalm dangerous and useful. Most of the believers in your congregation who drift from faith do not do it in a crisis. They do it after a long period of comparison, when they quietly conclude that the people who never bothered with God are doing as well or better, and that the cost of faithfulness has not been repaid.

Asaph shows the whole road: the envy, the long look at other people, the verdict, the decision not to say it yet, the exhausting effort to think it through alone, and then the place where it turned. He also admits that his own mind was part of the problem, which few sermons give a congregation permission to do without despair.

Movements

Follow the psalm. It falls into nine units, and each one gives you a move. Group some of them if you must, but do not reorder them.

1. The creed (v. 1). Start with what everyone believes. Say it plainly and let it stand for a moment, because the psalm is about to test it.

2. The near fall (vv. 2–3). He says it twice, “almost” and “nearly”. Name envy as the cause, and name it as his. The problem begins in his seeing: “when I saw the prosperity of the wicked.”

3. The view from envy (vv. 4–12). Read this section with some pace. Let the congregation recognise the portrait: healthy, untroubled, arrogant, dismissive of God, and apparently rewarded for it.

4. The verdict, withheld (vv. 13–16). The turn of the first half. “Surely in vain.” Then the restraint of verse 15, and the exhaustion of verse 16. This is where you describe what it is like to carry a conclusion you cannot say and cannot solve.

5. The sanctuary (v. 17). One verse, and the shortest movement. Slow down. He did not think his way out. He went to the place where God is worshipped, and there he saw the end of the story.

6. The end of the story (vv. 18–20). What he saw: slick ground, sudden ruin, a dream that dissolves when the sleeper wakes. The prosperity that looked permanent was a dream God wakes from.

7. The confession (vv. 21–22). He turns the light on himself. Bitter, pierced within, stupid, an animal. Do not rush this. Confession of our own foolishness is part of the healing, not an unfortunate detour.

8. The discovery (vv. 23–26). “Yet I am always with You.” The holding hand, the guiding counsel, the glory afterward, and then the peak of the psalm: “Whom have I in heaven but You?” Then flesh and heart fail, and God remains the portion.

9. The two ways (vv. 27–28). Psalm 1 returns, now earned. Distance from God ends in perishing. Nearness to God is good. And the psalm ends with the reason he is telling you all this: “that I may proclaim all Your works.”

From study to pulpit

On verse 13. Possible way to explain this to the congregation: “Notice that he says this with the same word he used for the creed. ‘Surely God is good.’ ‘Surely it was all for nothing.’ He was just as certain of the second as the first. Some of you know exactly what that feels like. You are not less of a believer for having thought it. You are in the Bible.”

On verse 15. Possible way to explain this to the congregation: “He did not post it. He did not preach it. He thought about the children in the congregation, and he kept it to himself until he had walked all the way through it. There is a kind of silence that is lying. This was not that. This was a man who knew his words had weight.”

On the sanctuary. Possible way to explain this to the congregation: “The psalm does not tell you what happened when he went in. No voice, no vision. He went to the place where God’s people worshipped, and he saw things differently. Sometimes the most important thing you can do with a doubt you cannot solve is to bring it into the room where God is praised, and stand there with it.”

On “with You”. Possible way to explain this to the congregation: “Listen to verse 22 and 23 together. ‘I was a brute beast before You. Yet I am always with You.’ He was acting like an animal, and he was acting like an animal in God’s presence. God did not wait for him to become sensible before holding his hand. He was holding it the whole time.”

Theological implications

First, the goodness of God is not audited by visible outcomes. The psalm never retracts verse 1. It redefines what “good” looks like: “it is good to draw near to God” (v. 28). The good God gives, in the end, is himself.

Second, perception is moral. What Asaph saw in verses 4 to 12 was true as far as it went, but it was seen through envy and cut off at the wrong point in the story. Worship did not change the facts. It changed where he stood to see them.

Third, the psalm moves toward hope beyond death without spelling it out. The wicked have an end. The psalmist has an afterward, a God who will “receive” him, a portion “forever”, and a relationship that holds when “my flesh and my heart may fail.” The verb in verse 24 is the one used when God took Enoch (Genesis 5:24) and in Psalm 49:15, “He will surely take me to Himself.” Interpreters differ on how much Asaph saw. It is fair to say this is one of the places in the Old Testament that reaches furthest in that direction, and unfair to say either that it teaches a full doctrine of heaven or that it says nothing about it.

Christological connection

Name the kind of connection, and resist the temptation to force one. The New Testament never cites Psalm 73 with a formula.

Canonical echo. “Pure in heart” in verse 1 belongs to the vocabulary of the Psalms (compare “a pure heart” in Psalm 24:4), and Jesus uses the phrase in the Beatitudes: “Blessed are the pure in heart, for they will see God” (Matthew 5:8). Present it as shared biblical language, not as a quotation of this psalm. Verse 1 promises that God is good to such people; Jesus promises they will see him.

Theological. Asaph’s turn came when he entered the sanctuary, and the psalm ends with “it is good to draw near to God.” Hebrews says that believers now “have confidence to enter the Most Holy Place by the blood of Jesus”, and so it urges, “let us draw near with a sincere heart” (Hebrews 10:19, 22). The access the psalmist had to a building, Christians have through a person. That is a theological connection, built from the whole canon, and should be preached as one.

Resonance, labelled as such. “You hold my right hand” sits naturally beside Jesus’ words about his sheep: “No one can snatch them out of My hand” (John 10:28). And the confidence of verse 26, that neither failing flesh nor failing heart ends the relationship, is where Paul’s list in Romans 8:38–39 ends up. Offer both as resonance. Neither author cites the psalm.

Not warranted. Making Asaph a type of Christ, or reading the “glory” of verse 24 as a prediction of the ascension. The psalm is a believer’s testimony, and it is most useful to your people when it stays one.

Contemporary application

Aim at two kinds of people who will be in the room.

For those who have been where verse 13 is: give them the psalm’s permission and its path. The thought “it was all for nothing” is not the end of faith; it is a place a faithful person can stand. The psalm’s instruction, by example, is to be careful where you say it, and to bring it into worship before you settle it.

For those who lead others, including parents, small group leaders and pastors: verse 15 is for you. Your unfinished doubts land on people who trust you. That does not mean pretending. Asaph eventually tells the whole story. It means waiting until you can tell it truthfully to the end.

And for everyone: verse 25 is the real test. The question is not whether God has given you as much as the people you envy. It is whether, if everything God gives were taken away, you would still want him. It took Asaph a near fall, a long silence and a confession to get there.

Illustration possibilities

Use the psalm’s own images first: feet on a slope, slick ground, the dream that is gone when you wake, the beast in God’s presence, a hand held by someone stronger.

If you reach outside the text, keep it verifiable and label an analogy as an analogy. Anyone who has walked on ice and been held up by the arm of someone steadier knows verse 23. Scrolling through other people’s photographs and coming away sour is a widely shared modern version of verses 3 to 12, and you can describe it without inventing a person. Do not tell the story of a wealthy unbeliever who came to a bad end. The psalm itself warns that envy writes those stories for us, and it never tells one.

Sermon dynamics

Congregational reading. Have the room read verse 1 aloud together at the start, and again at the very end with verses 25 and 26. The same creed, said twice, will sound different the second time.

Intentional silence. After verse 16, “it was troublesome in my sight”, stop. Let ten or fifteen seconds pass before you read verse 17. The psalm has a turn in it, and silence is how a congregation hears one.

Congregational question. “Whom have I in heaven but You?” Ask it as a question, and do not answer it for them.

Closing direction

End at verse 28, not verse 25.

Verse 25 is the summit, and it is tempting to finish there. But Asaph does not stay on the summit. He comes down with a reason to speak: “I have made the Lord GOD my refuge, that I may proclaim all Your works.” The man who refused to speak in verse 15 now has something he can say to the children of God without betraying them. The psalm itself is that speech.

If an appeal fits your setting, make it verse 28: “it is good to draw near to God.” Not good because it pays better. Good because God is there, and he has been holding your hand longer than you knew.