THE GLOOMIEST CHAPTER IN THE BIBLE – PSALM 88 – PASSING THROUGH STORMY SEAS – PART 1
PSALMS OF THE SONS OF KORAH – PSALM 88 Part 1
Psalm 88 A Song. A Psalm of the sons of Korah. For the choir director - according to Mahalath Leannoth. A Maskil of Heman the Ezrahite.
Firstly we will look at the title which is a longer one.
Upon Mahalath - either an instrument, such as a lute, to be used as an accompaniment (Leannoth, "for singing") or, as others think, an mysterious title denoting the subject. The subject is "sickness or disease, for humbling," the idea of spiritual maladies being often represented by disease, in the sense that if you have deep spiritual problems, then you are quite sick. Heman and Ethan were David's singers of the family of Kohath. Though called a song, which usually implies joy (Psalm 83:1), both the style and matter of this Psalm are very despondent; yet the appeals to God evince faith, and we may suppose that the word "song" might be extended to such compositions.
A study of the psalms shows a very wide range of subject matter. We have looked at some wonderful things in these psalms of Korah, but through the psalms you fine great praise and adoration; the stating of matters relating to Israel and also its restoration; prayers to God from a troubled heart often seeking deliverance and help; prophetic psalms such as 22; psalms of protection and comfort; and a whole lot more.
Psalm 88 v 1-3 O LORD, the God of my salvation, I have cried out by day and in the night before You. Psa 88:2 Let my prayer come before You. Incline Your ear to my cry Psa 88:3 for my soul has had enough troubles and my life has drawn near to Sheol.
This is an unusual psalm, gloomy and emotional. I think I have mentioned later on that this psalm is considered the gloomiest chapter in the bible. For the critical person who says we should not look at subjects that are not joyful, I say this, “You have never been there in the midst of pain or distress in that same position the psalmist was.” The person who has never had great trauma in his or her life will never understand. Great suffering often brings great trust and reliance on a trustworthy God. The Lord may allow difficult trials and storms to bring us through to the still waters of Psalm 23.
Have you considered Psalms 22 and 69 carefully? You could say the same things about those Psalms, that they are gloomy and you don’t like reading them. Both psalms come from the anguish and suffering of the Lord on the cross and are His prayers from the cross. I think the deeper you enter into the suffering of the Lord for our sin, then the closer you will connect those psalms with their proper relevance. What we say here is that Psalm 88 is best understood by one who is passing through very stormy seas, and great conflicts in his or her life. Of course it can also apply to the backward look if you have been in the same position in the past as the psalmist was who wrote this song.
We will look at the first three verses. I might mention that in most of scripture and I think mainly in the psalms the opening verse is a sort of summary of the chapter or passage. Verse 1 is a bit awkward in translation in some versions, but what it says is that this writer was crying out to the Lord through the day, and at night, that pleading continued. That can only come from a very troubled spirit, one passing through great anguish. Let us remind ourselves how it was with the Lord - Psalm 22 v 2 “O my God, I cry by day but You do not answer, and by night, but I have no rest.” The deeper the pain and anxiety, the more frequent the crying out to God will be.
There is something of special note here. The psalmist was not crying out in an empty despair, speaking to the wind and groaning about his problems, but to the Lord. That must always be our centre whether in joy or in distress. Other comfort, there is none. Other helpers, there are none. It is to the Lord we must go and not delay, when troubles come upon us.
What are these troubles? Physical sickness, great spiritual battles against wickedness, anything which troubles the soul, failure in the Christian life or a wakeup in sin, troubles in the family, disappointment, depression in one’s spirit, and may I add, news of impending death from a doctor.
Verse 2 is a common device used in the psalms where God is then implored to listen. It is not disrespectful, but it is the pleading of a troubled soul, and requests that God hears and takes action. Can the same be said about the centurion - Matthew 8 v 5-8 When He had entered Capernaum, a centurion came to Him entreating Him, and saying, “Lord, my servant is lying paralysed at home suffering great pain,” and He said to him, “I will come and heal him.” But the centurion answered and said, “Lord, I am not worthy for You to come under my roof, but just say the word and my servant will be healed.
Asking God to hear means the request is genuine and springs from deep trouble. It is also a recognition that we have no other avenue of help. Never treat God like the last resort. He knows your problem before it begins. It was similar in Psalm 22 again - Psalm 22 v 19 “But You, O LORD, be not far off. O You my help, hasten to my assistance.” Again the Lord Jesus in Psalm 69 said, Psalm 69 v 17 “Do not hide Your face from Your servant, for I am in distress. Answer me quickly.” These examples show that the earnest desire of the soul is for the Lord to hear and to act. “Hear our prayer, O Lord”. That has become a ritualistic chant in some churches but it is not from the soul in trouble.
Verse 3 is “for my soul has had enough troubles and my life has drawn near to Sheol.” Have you had enough troubles in life to carry? There are some people who have great burdens to bear. Their lives are miserable and very hard to endure. I have just been reading one of the most heart-rending accounts in the historical writings of Eusebius about a Christian woman called Blandina who under Emperor Marcus Aurelius suffered unimaginable tortures for days, but constantly praised God. She lived in Lyons, France which was the Roman capital of Gaul at the time. These satanic demons of men and the crowds that kept cheering at every new torture, are in hell and God will give to them many times what they did to Christians. Trials that are severe and difficult can be the case for Christian and non-Christian alike. It is all the result of sin. I don’t think the Lord goes around making it harder for some and easy for others. What God is, is a Rock of defence and a well of comfort for those who are in that situation. That is what makes the burdens bearable. The One who is the Comforter is with His children to stand beside him and her in trouble. There is so much pain in the world, and in Australia, we do not know even a little, the distress that Christians, say now in Afghanistan are going through.
Sheol is both hell and grave. It can also mean death. In the Jewish mind they understood all those meanings for the word “sheol”. Mostly the word is translated as hell because in the Old Testament days, everyone who died went to the grave, into death and into hell. Even Jesus went into hell in this next quote that is from a Messianic Psalm. Psalm 16 v 10 “for You will not abandon My soul to Sheol. Neither will You allow Your Holy One to undergo decay.” Hell was in two compartments, Paradise and hell itself. Jesus of course was in Paradise and I do believe He was waiting for the penitent thief on the cross to whom He said, “Today you will be with Me in paradise.” The true account of Lazarus and the rich man explores that further but we have not the time for that now.
However in verse 3 we are considering sheol there as best understood by death. Some sorrows are so great that it seem like the person is going to die in sorrow. There is an expression I don’t know if it is true or not – one died of a broken heart. One saint of the Old Testament said, “Take my life. Let me die.” David, in one period of great distress and sorrow said, Psalm 18 v 5-6 “The cords of Sheol surrounded me. The snares of death confronted me. In my distress I called upon the LORD and cried to my God for help.” This is the same condition as we have in verse 3. It could be said that no saint in the Old Testament suffered like Job did. He was in so much stress that he uttered these words:-
Job 3 v 1-3 Afterward Job opened his mouth and cursed the day of his birth. And Job said, “Let the day perish on which I was to be born, and the night which said, ‘A boy is conceived.’
Job 3 v 11 “Why did I not die at birth, come forth from the womb and expire?”
Job 3 v 20-21 “Why is light given to him who suffers, and life to the bitter of soul, who long for death, but there is none, and dig for it more than for hidden treasures.”
Just saying that we all suffer stress and have so many troubles that we don’t want to live any more, or we just want to give up, and not do anything about it, is not good enough. The picture is incomplete. In the next part I want to examine that particular aspect more fully.
Verses 4,5,6
Psalm 88 v 4 I am reckoned among those who go down to the pit. I have become like a man without strength, Psa 88:5 forsaken among the dead, like the slain who lie in the grave whom You remember no more, and they are cut off from Your hand. Psa 88:6 You have put me in the lowest pit, in dark places, in the depths.
How isolated can the human soul feel? How distant from reality can you get when great burdens are weighing you down? How can you not feel separated from all around and just so occupied with your own problems that you can’t rise above them? The psalmist here is expressing the depths of despair a person can have. This is one of the reasons for suicide in society. People just can’t cope and see life as only a meaningless struggle every day, with no purpose whatever. They try to relieve that with pills and drugs including alcohol, but they make the situation worse.
Those verses are so systematic of our own society. Too many people see their lives as meaningless and society as having no future. Why is this? The very simple answer is that society has not only dismissed God, but now is opposing any Christian expression. We have open hostility to the Christian faith from the Australian tax funded ABC. Godless people want to take others down to hell. Godly Christians are being attacked. Men and women in high places are attacked for having a link to Christianity. If one was an atheist or Moslem, nothing would be said negatively and he would be praised. These vile people and organisations are only going to get worse. Meanwhile our nation will progress for bad to worse with more vile legislation being passed and more freedoms removed from Christians.
I am not a prophet because there are no prophets today, but God has given us discernment, and His word, as an examination of the human condition. This is what I believe will happen to society in the days ahead because God has been unseated by Godless men who proceed from bad to worse: (1). Lawlessness will increase because man no longer accepts biblical standards of God and has placed himself in Satan’s camp and Satan is the lawless one. (2). We will see more and more chaos descending on us through world events and political unrest and civil unrest because politicians have “lost it” because God has given them over to their own corrupted resources. Romans tells us that. (3). People will become more hostile against God and therefore against God’s people because Satan’s power and influence is increasing. (4). People will become more displaced in their reasoning, in their minds, and in proper logical thinking and they will be more isolated, introverted, and more addicted to substances and social media. None of that can ever help the despair that comes into people’s lives because of the God-shaped vacuum each one has that only God can fill.
Verses 4,5,6 are among the gloomiest in the bible. It is a dark place to be in. Look at some of the expressions used and these are from the NASB – pit (death/hell; a synonym); forsaken among the dead (no better than a corpse thrown over the city wall); another body that lies with all those slain/killed (in other words, nothingness, worthlessness); cut off from God (this is never the case, but for many it feels like that all the time); the lowest pit (in the lowest place of hell with the sense that he will never rise to be happy in life again). Just to emphasise that position in hell, he adds “in the depths.”
The sons of Korah were the singers and choir people of the Tabernacle/Temple but Tabernacle in this Psalm because Heman was of David’s time. Because of the similarities in many of David’s psalms with this one, I think this is a psalm of David’s experiences given to the Korahites to form into a song. David was often in fear of his life when Saul and David’s own son Absalom tried to hunt him down to kill him. David was in a dark place.
Who wrote Psalm 23 the great Shepherd Psalm? Well, David. Who wrote Psalm 56? Well, David. Listen to a few verses from that psalm - Psalm 56 v 1-4 “Be gracious to me, O God, for man has trampled upon me. Fighting all day long he oppresses me. My foes have trampled upon me all day long for they are many who fight proudly against me. When I am afraid, I will put my trust in You. In God, whose word I praise, in God I have put my trust. I shall not be afraid. What can mere man do to me?” To reinforce that point this is what follows in verse 11 - Psalm 56 v 11 “In God I have put my trust. I shall not be afraid. What can man do to me?”
There is an interesting point that comes out of all this. We see it right through David’s psalms. If you asked him after writing Psalm 23, “David, would you be ever battered in life because you know the Lord is your Shepherd?” he would reply. “No.” However in psalms written after that, in many of them, he expresses great fear for his life and feels forgotten or forsaken by God. How can these two positions be reconciled? I want you to recall an incident in John 6 when the disciples were on the water and a storm arose and they were possessed by great fear and thought the end was near. All at once they saw Jesus walking on the water and were more greatly afraid. Now earlier in the chapter Jesus promised He would come to them as John records, “It had already become dark, and Jesus had not yet come to them.” Yet it seemed to them Jesus had forgotten them if not even abandoned them.
This even followed a fantastic miracle, the feeding of how many thousands. John 6 v 10 Jesus said, “Have the people sit down.” Now there was much grass in the place so the men sat down, in number about five thousand. The word for men near the end of the verse is ??d?e? (andres) but the word for “people” earlier in the verse from the NASB is ?????p??? (anthropous). So there were a lot more than 5000.
The disciples saw this great miracle and saw many other miracles and possibly before this, saw Jesus still the storm. Luke records an event early in Jesus’ ministry - Luke 8 v 22-25 Now it came about on one of those days, that He and His disciples got into a boat and He said to them, “Let us go over to the other side of the lake,” and they launched out, but as they were sailing along He fell asleep and a fierce gale of wind descended upon the lake, and they began to be swamped and to be in danger. They came to Him and woke Him up saying, “Master, Master, we are perishing!” and being aroused, He rebuked the wind and the surging waves and they stopped, and it became calm. He said to them, “Where is your faith?” and they were fearful and amazed, saying to one another, “Who then is this, that He commands even the winds and the water, and they obey Him?”
Now that had all happened, yet when put in the melting pot they forgot all about what their minds of faith should have told them and turned to their rational minds and failed. Here lies a spiritual application, to appropriate the known facts to let them grow up into faith.
In those three verses (4,5,6 of Psalm 88) “You” is used twice, three times if counting “Your”. The psalmist says that God has done all that to him. That raises a point that concerns some Christians, and we are in a tricky area here. In the troubles of life that we encounter, and the bad things that may happen to us, sometimes, really bad things, how much is of our doing; how much is from God allowing it; how much is it from God’s correction of a wayward servant? That is difficult to answer and I am not sure if I can provide you will much help in deciding that. However the great fact that must stay before your eyes is that in all circumstances, God is in control. And He is faithful. He will shine a light in the gloom.
Psalm 88 is the psalm of the curlew. Mournful and no aural happiness comes from it. It entered the gloom from the start of verse 1 and stays in the gloom right to the very last word.
There will be 3 Parts. Two are to follow.
God bless each one and may we know the comfort of the Comforter whom Jesus sent to us.
Possible hymns - WHAT A FRIEND WE HAVE IN JESUS; TELL ME THE OLD OLD STORY
