From the Pastor's Study
From the Pastor’s Study
A Good Reward
Sept 14, 2022
Psalm 73:3-5 gives us these words: “I envied the arrogant when I saw the prosperity of the wicked. They have no struggles; their bodies are healthy and strong. They are free from common human ills.” The psalmist, a man named Asaph, has been contemplating life, and he has discovered that things don’t quite work as we would want them to. It would seem fair that people who do harm to others, who get rich on the backs of the poor, who look after only themselves – these people should suffer for their lack of caring of their fellow human beings. Bad things should happen to bad people, we assume, and good things should happen to good people. That sounds fair, and life should be like that. Unfortunately, that is not the case. There are some pretty bad people, people who use others for their own gain, who get to live pretty good lives. They are rich and healthy and are never lonely. And there are some people who try hard to do good who have fairly difficult lives. Increasingly in the western world we are adopting the concept of karma in which bad things will happen to bad people and good things will happen to good people. But karma is not always sure. As Asaph the psalmist discovered, sometimes bad people have it very good. We also know that some very good people struggle their whole lives.
Asaph talks about his struggles with what he sees and experiences, and in verse 2 of that same psalm, he says that he had almost come to the point that he would stop trying to do what is right. “My feet almost slipped,” he says. “I had nearly lost my foothold.” He had nearly become disillusioned with life. It’s not fair when those who try really hard to what is right fail to be rewarded and those who commit violent acts of evil have whatever they want. Realistically, while we may be able to cite incidents where karma seems to be at play, there are plenty of times when we realize that bad things happen to good people and good things happen to bad people.
The psalmist almost gave up and he would have except that at some point he decided to go to the sanctuary of God (verse 17), which in his time would have been the temple. Perhaps he went to God’s sanctuary to confront God about the injustice he saw all around him. We can almost hear him saying to God, “It’s unfair, and you should do something about the injustice. Why don’t bad people get what is coming to them and why don’t you reward those who do good?” It was while he was in God’s presence that he got his answer: there is more to life than what happens between birth and physical death. Life doesn’t end when we die. Life continues. Asaph then understood that God would make things right in the end. Those who do evil will be punished for their sins, he comes to understand. They are going to have to take what is coming to them at some point.
It almost sounds like the psalmist is saying that karma is still in play, but instead of considering karma to operate only when we are living in this world, we need to think of karma as extending beyond the grave. It almost sounds like Asaph is saying that we will all get what is coming to us: the good will receive their reward, and those who do evil will be punished somehow in what lies beyond the grave. It almost sounds like that, but there is a little problem.
I don’t know if we all take time to evaluate how we live. Most of us try to do the best we can, but we all know that we could do more. For example, there are plenty of people in our communities who do not have enough money to make ends meet each month, and they must rely on the food bank to support them. Sadly, the demand at food banks has gone up, and donations are not meeting the needs, at least not fully. Many of us, in spite of the fact that there are hungry people around us, decided to take fairly extravagant vacations in our rather nice cottages and RVs. It’s not that those vacations are wrong, but they do seem to be quite selfish if we don’t first take care of those with needs. Or, as another example, much of what we buy is made overseas, and while we might argue that those who make what we consume are doing better than they would be if foreign companies had not established factories in their counties, the reality is that we would not want to live on the small wage they receive, and we certainly would not want our children working in often poor and unhealthy situations such as they do. When we think about what more we could do, we must admit that we don’t deserve to be rewarded with a good life. Our choices and decisions are not always as much for the benefit of others as they are for ourselves.
The Bible, in Romans 3:23, says that “all have sinned and have fallen short of the glory of God.” What that means is this: if we are going to depend on the idea of karma to get us into a better place when we die, we are going to be disappointed. The good we do is not good enough to end up in the kind of reward we would hope to gain. If we are entirely honest with ourselves, we have to admit that we don’t really deserve to be rewarded as much as we might like to be.
Romans 3:23 doesn’t end there, however. The verse goes on to say that we have “been justified freely by God’s grace.” That is simply another way of saying that God, who knows our hearts and knows that we aren’t as good as we should be, decided to make it possible for us to be rewarded anyway. Instead of asking us to take what is coming to us (a negative outcome for bad behaviour), Jesus took all our failings on himself, and he made it so that we can be justified, which is another way of saying, “made righteous.” A righteous person is someone who has done what is right and will be rewarded. The message of the Bible is this: while no one does what is good enough to be rewarded with good, God offers to us the opportunity to be made good by being forgiven and justified. This happens in the very simple act of admitting that we can’t do enough good to be rewarded as we would like to be and trust that God takes our sins (our bad actions and attitudes and thoughts) away and makes us good and right because Jesus gave his life for us. When we believe in Jesus, our reward is good.
I think if Asaph the psalmist looked at my life, he might wonder why I have it so good. I am far from perfect. He might also say that I should expect to be punished after my death for the evil I commit today. But I don’t expect that. I know that although I am not as good as I could be, because of Jesus, I have been forgiven and in God’s eyes, I will receive a reward, not because of what I have done but because of what Jesus did for me.
Pastor Gary
