“When I tried to understand all this, it was oppressive to me till I entered the sanctuary of God; then I understood their final destiny.” Psalm 73:16, 17
This psalm starts off talking about an “almost” event. The psalmist says he “almost slipped.” Can you relate? Can you look back on your life and see times when you almost turned away from God? Usually we can see in retrospect what the life circumstances were that caused this “almost” slipping. In the case of the psalmist, it was because he began looking around and comparing himself to others. That’s always a dangerous thing to do! That practice almost always ends in either self-condemnation or pride. In this case, it led him to doubt God. What he saw in the rest of the world was people who didn’t follow God and yet seemed to have it all. They had prosperity, health, and freedom from caring about others. Of course, we can only say those things were true by looking in from the outside. For example, in verse 12 he says that the wicked are carefree. What it should say is that they act carefree. We don’t really know if anyone is carefree or not because we’re not inside their skin. But this psalmist made that judgement and determined that if the wicked were carefree, what was the point of following God?
Then we get to these two verses. They start with the statement that trying to understand this was oppressive. When he says he tried to understand, that’s a deep understanding, more than just a mental realization of the situation. He was seeking an understanding that went deeper, a knowing down in his soul. So let’s get this picture. This man who was following God and was doing everything right was working hard to make sense of the ways of the world. But more than that, he was wanting this understanding of the ways of the world to bring peace to his soul. Of course, that didn’t happen. It just became more oppressive. The oppression only lifted when he entered into God’s presence. That changed everything. Now it all made sense because he began to see things through a different lens. This lens changed his perspective in two ways: he saw the world the way God sees it, and he saw events through the lens of eternity.
What are you struggling with right now? What is something that is in danger of becoming oppressive to you? What questions do you have, what parts of life don’t make sense? Don’t let these situations and questions start to pull you away from God. Rather, bring them to Him. Come into His holy presence and lay these questions out before Him. It’s okay to ask Him to change the situation, as long as we’re asking, not demanding. He may change the situation, or He may give us new glasses that will help us to see the situation as He does, and to see it in the light of eternity. That’s when we can rest in Him and allow His peace to flood our soul.