Psalms 73:23–26

Psalms 73:23 — "Nevertheless, I am continually with you"

The Hebrew ʾănî tāmîd ʿimmāk ("I am always with you") begins with an adversative — "but" or "nevertheless" — that carries enormous weight. The entire first half of Psalm 73 rehearsed Asaph's near-collapse into envy and doubt as he watched the arrogant thrive. Now, after his sanctuary experience (v. 17), the fog clears. The tāmîd ("continually," "always") is the psalm's pivot word: it is not intermittent presence but ceaseless communion. The reversal is stunning: Asaph had thought himself abandoned, but he now confesses it was he who held onto God, or rather — and this is the deeper truth — God who never let go of him. The imagery is of a child held by a parent's hand; the phrase "you hold my right hand" appears in the very next half-verse (v. 23b), making the mutual clinging explicit.

Psalms 73:24 — "You will guide me with your counsel"

The Hebrew ʿēṣāh ("counsel") denotes not merely advice but providential wisdom — the same word used of God's unassailable plans in Isaiah 46:10. The psalmist moves from presence (v. 23) to guidance (v. 24a): God is not a static companion but an active shepherd of the soul. The second half of Psalms 73:24 — "and afterward you will take me to glory" (kābôd) — is theologically decisive. Kābôd can mean "honor" or "glory," but the syntax ("afterward" — i.e., after death) and the context of the whole psalm, where bodily prosperity has been relativized, push strongly toward an eschatological sense. The Septuagint renders it eis doxan — "into glory" — and patristic tradition universally reads this as a reference to beatific life after death. This makes Psalm 73:24 one of the Old Testament's clearest anticipations of the resurrection hope.

Psalms 73:25 — "Whom do I have in heaven? And besides you, I desire nothing on earth"

This is among the most total declarations of exclusive love for God in all of Scripture. The rhetorical question "whom do I have in heaven?" implies that angels, intermediaries, and even earthly blessings — everything the psalmist had previously envied (vv. 4–12) — count for nothing in comparison. The parallel line, "I desire nothing on earth beside you" (ḥāpaṣtî: "I delight in," "I am pleased with"), is not ascetic renunciation for its own sake but the natural overflow of having found the supreme good. Augustine's cor nostrum inquietum ("our heart is restless") finds its resolution here: once the heart is seized by God, all other objects of desire find their right proportion.

Psalms 73:26 — "My flesh and my heart fails; but God is the strength of my heart and my portion forever"

The verse begins in radical anthropological honesty: shĕʾēr (flesh, the physical frame) and lēbāb (heart, the inner person, the will) — the totality of the human being — can and will fail. Age, illness, grief, sin: all erode what we are in ourselves. But the confession pivots immediately: "God is the rock (ṣûr) of my heart and my portion (ḥēleq) forever." Ḥēleq is the word for the Levitical priest's inheritance: unlike the other tribes who received land, Levi's portion was the Lord himself (Num 18:20). Asaph, though a Levite musician, claims for all Israel — and by extension all believers — what the priests alone possessed structurally: God as one's ultimate inheritance. The word forever (ʿôlām) anchors the entire declaration in eternity, transcending the fleeting material prosperity whose absence had so wounded the psalmist at the psalm's opening.

Catholic tradition identifies these four verses as a locus classicus for the theology of divine friendship and beatitude. St. Augustine, commenting on this psalm in his Enarrationes in Psalmos, reads verse 25 as the cry of the soul that has tasted God: "What have I in heaven? Nothing but you. For even the angels, even the archangels, are not my good — you are my good." He explicitly connects the "afterward into glory" of verse 24 to the resurrection of the body and the life of the world to come.

St. Thomas Aquinas, in the Summa Theologiae (I-II, q. 2–3), argues that the ultimate end of human beings is not any created good but God himself seen face-to-face — a thesis this psalm embodies experientially. The psalmist has not arrived at this through philosophical argument but through suffering and sanctuary prayer, which Aquinas would recognize as the affective knowledge of God proper to sapientia (wisdom as taste).

The Catechism of the Catholic Church teaches that "God himself is the fulfillment of all our desires" (CCC §1718) and that the Beatitudes "respond to the natural desire for happiness" (CCC §1718), a desire only God can satisfy — precisely the movement of Psalm 73:25–26. Furthermore, the Catholic doctrine of the Beatific Vision — that the redeemed will see God per essentiam (by his very essence) defined at the Council of Florence (1439) and echoed in Lumen Gentium §49 — receives its Old Testament poetic anticipation in the "glory" of verse 24 and the "forever" of verse 26. St. John of the Cross, in The Ascent of Mount Carmel, used the logic of verse 25 to explain the stripping of all attachments: not nihilism, but the clearing of space for the one sufficient Good.

Contemporary Catholics live amid the same scandal Asaph faced: the prosperous, the powerful, and the morally indifferent often seem to flourish while the faithful suffer. These verses do not offer a theodicy that explains suffering away; they offer something harder and better — a reorientation of desire. Verse 25's question, "Whom do I have in heaven?", is a practical examination of conscience for our distracted age: What am I actually pursuing? What do I treat as my portion, my share of life's goods — my financial security, my reputation, my health? When these begin to fail (v. 26), what remains? Concretely, these verses invite the Catholic to return to Eucharistic adoration, silent prayer, and Lectio Divina not as productivity strategies but as acts of re-habituation — learning, slowly, to find God genuinely sufficient. They also speak powerfully to those accompanying the dying: the failing of "flesh and heart" (v. 26) is not the final word; God as portion forever is. This psalm can be prayed at a bedside, in a hospital, or in the dark night of spiritual aridity as an act of defiant, hope-filled trust.