Psalms 73:20

The closing insight of Psalm 73's extended struggle with the prosperity of the wicked — 'as a dream when one awaketh, so, O Lord, when thou awakest, thou shalt despise their image' — resolves the psalm's theodicy question by appealing to eschatological perspective. The wicked's prosperity is compared to a dream whose substance dissolves upon waking — YHWH's 'waking' (the eschatological moment of divine judgment) reveals the ontological insubstantiality of what seemed so solid to the envious psalmist. The verse belongs to the sanctuary-insight of verse 17 ('until I went into the sanctuary of God; then I understood their end'), where liturgical practice becomes the epistemological location for perceiving divine truth about the moral order. The psalm is important for theodicy discussions and for understanding how Israelite worship functioned as a counter-narrative to empirical evidence of injustice.