Psalm 73 is ascribed to Asaph, one of David's chief musicians and the head of a Levitical guild that led temple worship. The psalm is a confession written from the other side of a crisis. Asaph nearly lost his footing watching the wicked prosper (vv. 2-3); he could not square it with the goodness of God until he went into the sanctuary (v. 17). Verses 25-26 are what came out of his mouth on the way home. The audience is Israel at worship — people who, like Asaph, have been doing the math of envy and need a worship leader honest enough to admit he almost quit.

From the writers we read together

Augustine of Hippo

bishop of Hippo, theologian (354-430)

Augustine spent the first half of his life trying to be satisfied by things that were not God — rhetoric, ambition, women, philosophy — and the Confessions is the long, embarrassed account of why none of it held. His diagnosis is exactly Asaph's. The human heart is built with a shape, and only one thing fits the shape. Everything else, no matter how good, leaves the soul rattling around inside its own desire. Psalm 73:25 is what a heart sounds like when it has finally stopped trying other shapes.

Notice that Asaph does not say his flesh and heart have failed; he says they may fail — and he is fine with that. Augustine would call this the rightly ordered love: God first, and then everything else loved truly because it is no longer being asked to be God. The wicked in verses 3-12 looked enviable because Asaph had been measuring life by what could be lost. Once God himself is the portion, the math changes. There is still pain, still failing flesh, but the ground under your feet is not for sale.