The first verse of this Psalm is its conclusion. Asaph states the universal premise for the believer: God is good. The Psalm begins on a note of certainty, a statement of fact which defines the believer. But this also is the crux of the problem.

This axiom, that God is good, is borne out in our language even more than the Hebrew text as the derivation of God comes from the Saxon term for "the good." While we will never fully grasp all the mysteries of the universe, this must form the foundation for all else we believe. If this is lost, then we have nothing. God by definition must be all powerful, but for the Christian He is also good and does good to His people.

He is good to Israel: the starting point is the covenant of grace. God’s goodness is not random, but specific, geared toward those who are His.

He is good to those who are pure in heart. The purity of the heart is key to the Psalm. Unfortunately, we conceive purity as just being clean minded, though it certainly includes that. "Purity" in Hebrew implies the act of cleansing, of being purified, of rough areas smoothed out. God’s goodness is seen by the one who views the world with a proper perspective.

This premise forms the basis of the problem. If God exists, and He is good and rewards the righteous, and He is all-powerful, totally in control of His creation, then why is it that in God’s world the wicked seem to be doing better than the righteous? Aren’t the facts inconsistent with Asaph’s faith? How can God be good to the pure in heart if observation convinces us that sinners succeed and saints suffer? This is a serious spiritual issue and one that has precipitated widely diverging explanations.

The atheist answers by explaining that there is no God. The cynic says that there is a God, but denies that He is good. Life is just one of God’s cruel jokes. The liberal believes that there is a God who is loving, good, and kind. He explains suffering by denying the sovereignty of God. God is all-good, but not all-powerful. This is a common position today evidenced by the popularity of Rabbi Kushner’s book, Why Bad Things Happen to Good People.

Biblical faith does not permit us to deny any of the attributes of God. We maintain not only that God exists, but also that He is good and great, a rewarder of the righteous and a judge of the wicked. How, then, do we explain the problem of the suffering of the saints and the success of sinners?

When what we believe comes in conflict with what we see, when our experience and our faith conflict, trouble will ensue. Something has to be jettisoned, but often we toss what is more theoretical. We are too pragmatic to doubt our experience. Asaph was ready to cash in his chips and trash his faith. He found himself on a slippery slope descending down from a position of biblical faith. He was losing his grip.

Why? Because of the way he viewed the arrogant and wicked

The word arrogant (translated "foolish" in KJV) comes from a root word that means a loud and clear noise. The implication is someone who toots his own horn real loud. It is also used of the braying of a jackass. The word "wicked" in the second part of the verse means actively bad or at least someone whose life does not have God as his reference.

What he saw was colored by envy. It was not so much he liked their sinful choices, their lifestyles, but his faith was shattered because if God is good to those who are pure in heart then why do bad people do well?

There is nothing more gut wrenching than trying to explain why the drunk kills a four year old but walks away without a scratch. How do we handle the man who cared for his wife and family, who watched what he ate and drank but dies of a massive coronary at 41 while some wretch of humanity who abuses himself and others lives to see 80? Asaph says he envied them. He was not distressed so much by the sin of the successful as he was by the success of the sinful.

What offended him was their prosperity.

"Prosperity" hardly conveys the original term - shalom. This is a term pregnant with religious significance. The root meaning of shalom was "completion" or "fulfillment." Quite often the term was used of "peace" in the sense of a cessation of war or hostility. Shalom implied wholeness and harmony, not only a mere absence of hostility. It was thus used to describe harmonious relationships, used of physical well-being, that is, of good health. In other words, the arrogant, the wicked had everything God promised to His covenant people.

I don’t know what the response is in your house, but my kids have something to say about this problem: "That’s not fair!"

Their prosperity was borne out; God’s peace was seen in their lives in that they have no struggles.

This refers primarily to their death - they have a quiet death; gliding into eternity without a struggle. For the Hebrew, peace in death was a sign of God’s blessing. The wicked person was to die in chains; they were to die untimely deaths; they shouldn’t be allowed to hang on and enjoy their grandkids. He expects their true colors will show when face to face with the grim reaper.

Vito and Michael Correlone in the Godfather - violent men who die in a ripe old age.

Not only that, they’re healthy. Literally, they’re fat. In a place and time when drought and famine were common, the sign of wealth and blessing was the privilege to carry around a few extra pounds. But for Asaph, it is inconceivable such nefarious sorts should have extra food.

They don't contract diseases. They abuse themselves and spit on the image of God they bear, but seem to never suffer ill effects. They can live in the fast lane and yet still bear healthy babies. They can eat bacon and eggs every day and live to be 90! Their death is painless; they die in their sleep. Life seems to be trouble-free for them.

The psalmist nearly slipped into envy of the godless, and for good reason. The psalmist wasn’t blind. In verses 4-5, he lays out how good the life of the godless hedonists, the arrogant and prosperous, looks: It appears painless. They run around with those sleek, muscled bodies that actually look good in Spandex! They seem to go from victory to good fortune to wonderful circumstances — their cars never break down on I94; their flights don’t get canceled in Cleveland; their kids don’t end up at Ethan Allen School for Boys.

Oh, no! Instead, they get away with murder and never seem to get in trouble. They cheat and lie and stab people in the back and snub old friends — and then turn around and get ahead, making money hand over fist. It’s not fair! As verse 12 sums it up: "Such are the wicked; always at ease, they increase in riches." Their life absolutely glitters. It looks good.

Like the wealthy who wear their affluence around their neck or on their fingers, whose cars and clothes scream success, the peaceful debased sorts are decked out with pride and violence. Like the mobster wearing the Rolex or the crooked businessman driving the Lexus, they have no reason for being inconspicuous with their wealth.

The combination of these two are a one-two punch. They are so enamored with themselves they think they can harm and use others to their own advantage. Their self-centered attitude sees that all others exist for their benefit. With overblown self-esteem, they can not conceive of serving others, but only being served by others. What they have they got by fraud and they keep and increase by the same wicked methods. It is of little concern that others are injured or violence is used.

Then, as now, the mentality was, "if you’ve got it, flaunt it." If these well-to-do wicked did not take their prosperity to be a sign of divine blessing, at least they interpreted their success in life as an evidence God either did not know or did not care about their sinful means of gaining wealth. Perhaps they reasoned that He was not able to do anything about it.

What is amazing is that for all their disinterest in others, for all their self-centered activities, others flock to them. We struggle trying to explain the Gospel, the good news with those we know, only to have them shake their heads in disbelief, all the while the wicked are walking billboards for sin and people want to know more about them.

The thought appears to be that such individuals develop a following, and worse than seeing sin not punished, is seeing sin praised and paid for! How do I stand the fact that the some immoral people in this world will make more in one year than I will make in a lifetime? Do you ever get frustrated that the 'truth' seems to attract so few people? But some stupid TV show can attract millions?

The wicked who prospered gathered others about themselves who had also tasted the "good life" (they had "drunk waters in abundance," verse 10) and wished to imitate the wicked both in principle and practice. Thus, they went so far as to say, "How can God know? Does the Most High have knowledge?"(verse 11). Since their lives appear to justify the belief that God is not good to the righteous and judges the wicked, they further conclude that He just doesn’t know what’s happening.

Ah, but there’s a fly in the ointment. Verses 6 through 11 quickly reveal the psalmist’s negative take on these people: They’re prideful. Violence is a way of life for them. Greed and self-gain appear to rule their lives. Vanity and self-deception cloud their thinking. They work power plays with the people around them and can quickly become oppressive. And how soon this kind of rebelliousness turns against God! The psalmist says, "They set their mouths against heaven…." The problem is that self-satisfaction leads inevitably to self-destruction. In fact, those persons who worship themselves are bound to reap the harvest of a mightily deficient god!

The eventual destination of such a spiritual free-fall is that God becomes mocked. When humanity lauds itself, it must arrogantly mock God. Think about it: How many times a day do you hear a mindless, "Oh my gawwwd!"? Or someone, without any trace of devotion, saying, "I swear to god…"? Or, "God strike me dead if I’m wrong…"? People play with the holy! People trifle with God! "And they say, ‘How can God know? Is there knowledge in the Most High?’"

George Gordon Liddy, Watergate conspirator when released from prison said: "I have found within myself all I need and all I ever shall need. I am a man of great faith, but my faith is in George Gordon Liddy. I have never failed me."

As Asaph tried to make sense out of his world given the information at hand, examining how those who hate God seem to do just fine without Him, he flunked his test of faith. If God gave good things to those whose hearts were pure, why were those whose hearts were darkened by God so prosperous, so trouble-free? They could eat, drink, sleep and play, they could live and die without any trouble. Asaph concluded that it was hardly worth his while persevering in his faith if he was getting nowhere with it, and making no headway by it. He might as well give up the struggle of living as a Christian. He wasted his time being moral if the immoral get to enjoy their sin and seem to prosper even more than he.

Asaph felt himself under the continual frowns of Providence, while the wicked were sunning themselves in its smiles. "What have I gotten out of being good? Nothing but more troubles!"

Have you ever tried to do the right thing but that only made the matter worse?

This is a problem faced from our teen years as we see friends make wrong choices, but seem to get ahead. It will bother us in our 20’s when career decisions will be hampered by our faith. In our 30’s and 40’s others will sacrifice family for success and succeed in doing so. All the while we will ask ourselves, is the Christian life worth all this?

While Asaph struggles with the inequity of life, with the confusion over the conflict of his faith and experience, he recognized one thing: It is best to keep his mouth shut at a time like this. It is one thing to think evil, another to speak it, to sanction the evil by giving it consent of the spoken word and thereby infect others who listen.

Where we have any suspicion of being wrong, it is better to be silent; it can do no harm to be quiet, and it may do serious damage to spread abroad our hastily formed opinions. To grieve the children of God by being a traitor and betraying the truth, is a heinous sin. Expressions which convey the impression that the Lord acts unjustly or unkindly, especially if they fall from the lips of men of known character and experience, are as dangerous as a lit match next to a gas tank.

First, it is obvious as we read through this first half of the psalm that Asaph’s vantage point is limited. He can never know the full story. The problem when biblical faith collides with experience is a problem we create. We create the problem by holding our perceptions, our expectations, our experiences over what God has clearly stated in His Word.

Like Linda Burnett who spent hours paralyzed with her misperceptions. She lacked all the facts and assumed the worst. Asaph knew there is a fuller picture, but he sought to understand his world with blinders on; he could not look to the right or left to see life from God’s perspective.

What is God’s perspective? You’ll have to come back next week for that, because the answer is found in the second half of the psalm. But let’s take a glimpse ahead and see what the answer is when our faith and our experience collide.

As long as Asaph tried to understand this perplexing problem, as long as he tried to find his answers based on his own, very limited experience - verse 16 - "it was oppressive to me," he said, "till I entered the sanctuary of God; then I understood their final destiny."

The problem with Asaph, the problem you and I face is a problem of perspective. We think we can understand with only partial information. What the sanctuary did for Asaph, what answers are found in worship is what gives us the full picture.

It was in the sanctuary Asaph could understand the precarious predicament of the wicked as well as his own standing before God. It is in worship that we see what grace means, that we are undeserving of what we have, so that others seem to get so much more should not unravel us to such an extent that we act like idiots idolizing the success of the wicked.

When we think God’s goodness is predicated on our goodness we turn cynical and hard. We too will give up the quest for holiness. When we establish the guidelines as to what is fair and right, when we focus on the sin of others, rather than God’s grace to us, we will fail. But when we see God’s goodness from the perspective of grace, then our desire for purity will grow.

But when it comes to suffering, there is another perspective we must not forget. What ii is that helps us understand this problem may well best be summarized by Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who said:

"The figure of the Crucified invalidates all thought which takes success for its standard."