Doubts can be a significant dampener on the fire of our spiritual lives. They can make us uncertain about whether the Bible and the Gospel are TRUE. Is it wishful thinking? Isn’t it impossible? Can we trust it?

It is not wrong to question and consider these things. It’s not helpful to repress them or ignore them. But someone wisely once said: “Believe your beliefs and doubt your doubts; do not make the mistake of doubting your beliefs and believing your doubts”. Or as someone once asked Jesus: “I believe, help my unbelief”. As some of the greatest Christian minds have said through the centuries (Augustine, Anselm, Aquinas): “we have a faith seeking understanding”

We should not be made insecure about our belief in God by some of the hard questions asked by sceptics. Even God’s people wrestled with these things: “When I speak to college students, I challenge them to find a single argument against God in the older agnostics (Bertrand Russell, Voltaire, David Hume) or the newer ones (Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, Sam Harris) that is not already included in books like Psalms, Job, Habakkuk, and Lamentations” (Yancey).  People in the Bible ask hard questions about God too…

We’re going to meet someone tonight who struggled with doubts. His name is Asaph, he was one of the main worship-leaders at the Temple. He was the Chris Tomlin or Matt Redman of his day!

He writes a Psalm placed at the start of Book 3 – the time when Israel is in decline due to sin and idolatry. It is a Wisdom Psalm that is asking the big questions about life. In the Bible, the Wisdom Literature reflects on how God the creator has ordered this world in a certain way:

• the wise person will be blessed as they stay close to God and obey His order;
• the wicked person will perish apart from God and by disobeying His order.

Sounds good… but it’s not that simple…As Christians we say we believe that God is all powerful and completely good, and yet we live in a disordered world that doesn’t look that way! How are we to face that reality? Asaph wants to help us!

Bible Study:

• Walk through Asaph’s journey in this Psalm by completing the flow-diagram: what main-steps does he take in his thinking? (Watch out for some key connecting words, like “For”, “But”, “Therefore”)
• Why is Asaph struggling (v.3-12)? What would be the equivalent doubts today?
  • Why do bad things happen to God’s people? Suffering and evil
• Where does Asaph find an answer to his question (v.15-20)? Why is that significant for us?
  • The Sanctuary or Temple of God is where God lives among His people
  • Brings his doubts and struggles to God. Like Job, the only help is found in God’s presence!
  • Turns from speculation to WORSHIP!
  • Involves God in the conversation in his mind and shares his doubts and struggles with Him
• What new perspectives does A reach that answers his question (v.20-28)? How can that help us today as we look at issues in our world/lives?
  • Gets an eternal God-perspective on things: the contrasting final destinies of the righteous and wicked. While the wicked prosper and the righteous suffer for a time, eternity puts everything into perspective.
  • *OBJECT ILLUSTRATION OF OUR LIVES AS A BALL OF STRING: we should not live only with the moment in mind, but eternity
• As a Christian, how can we read this Psalm in the light of the gospel of Jesus?

Teaching: Structure of the Psalm

Part of the beauty of Hebrew poetry is not just in what it says but how it says it. Often the structure of the Psalm will help us better understand the message of the Psalm. For Hebrew people they often liked to put the climax or important idea not at the end of their writing, but right in the middle. You see that kind of turning point in the Psalm

v.1: God is good!

v.2-14: Poor me!

v.15-20: New eternal perspective from God

v.21-27: Rich me!

v.28: God is good!

Teaching: Structure of the Psalter and Bible

This structure that we have found in Psalm 73 is also important for the whole book of Psalms. There are 150 Psalms and at almost the exact centre of them is Psalm 73 – it is the hinge on which the whole book turns to some extent. One commentator puts it supremely well:

“Where Psalm 1 says that if we walk in God’s way God will be good to us, the psalms that follow in Books 1 and 2 repeatedly complain that such an idea is far too simple. Life is not like that. Yet as we go on through the Psalter we find, equally often, a sense that, in spite of all, God will be good to his people; till the final psalms come to a climax of unalloyed praise. It is obvious that Psalm 73 follows just this pattern….This understanding of the Psalter and of our present psalm within it, is clearly a matter of orientation. Those who look at the world with what seems to them the simple, innocent perspective of Psalm 1 (and of Psalm 73:1) will be disorientated by the hard experiences of real life, which seem to contradict it. They need then to be re-orientated – to be turned so as to see these confusing facts from a different point of view. That new orientation will bring them ultimately to Psalm 150 (and to Psalm 73:27-28) and to the recognition that in a deeper sense than they had realised: God surely is good to Israel” (Wilcock)

Challenges to our faith in the midst of suffering are real. However, the Bible is very real about the sufferings of God’s people (go read Job, Habakkuk, Jeremiah, even Jesus Himself intensely suffered throughout His life) and it gives both reasons for the reality of pain and hope for fixing things:

“Is not this the pattern of the entire Bible story? Psalm 1 and Psalm 73:1 reflect the first two chapters of Genesis… but that is not how things work out; and a world disorientated by sin needs re-orientated before it has any hope of rediscovering Eden…The glories of Psalm 73:24-26 and Psalm 150 and the last two chapters of Revelation are the glorifies of Paradise restored. You can get there only by way of Psalm 73:17, which in New Testament terms is the encounter with God in Christ at Calvary” (Wilcock)

Use Psalm 73:23-28 and Romans 8:28-30,37-39 as basis for extended time of prayer:

• Adoring God for who He is
• Confessing to God our doubts and struggles
• Thanking God for what we have in Christ that cannot be taken from us
• Supplication: asking God for help to have this perspective on life

Two resources to help you thoughtfully doubt your doubts and strengthen why you believe your beliefs…

• www.bethinking.org
• Michael Ots “What Kind Of God?”