SERIES - THE PSALMS OF KORAH – PSALM 88 PART 3
THE GLOOMIEST CHAPTER IN THE BIBLE – PSALM 88 – PASSING THROUGH STORMY SEAS – PART 3
VERSE 13 Psalm 88:13 But I, O LORD, have cried out to You for help, and in the morning my prayer comes before You.
The previous verses comprise four questions all beginning with “Will” - Psalm 88:10 Will You perform wonders for the dead? Will the departed spirits rise and praise You? Selah. Psa 88:11 Will Your loving-kindness be declared in the grave, Your faithfulness in Abaddon? Psa 88:12 Will Your wonders be made known in the darkness and Your righteousness in the land of forgetfulness? These were negative questions that all had the answer “No”, for as we saw last time, this psalmist considered death the end of it all. His thoughts were common for his era. The hope of the resurrection has sprung to life with our Firstfruits, with Jesus Christ Himself, who died and rose again. Yes, that son of Korah is in heaven today. He was one of God’s own and God keeps His own in perfect security.
The glorious hope of the Lord’s coming for His own, and the accompanying resurrection of the bodies of all the dead saints is the mighty achievement of the Saviour who rose triumphantly over sin and death. The body of this writer of Psalm 88 still lies in the grave, and will hear that powerful summons at the Rapture when corruptible will put on incorruption.
Verse 13 begins with a “But” in the NASB. In spite of all that has preceded this verse when all was only gloom and misery without a ray of sunshine, the psalmist chooses a “But”, meaning, in spite of all the failure, all the black ceiling of a silent God, all the hopeless despair he has written of, he will not depart from his resolve to continue to seek God.
This “But” is a great division and tells us he is not going to throw it all away, or walk in the opposite direction, or give up on God. God is absent, does not answer, seems not to give the psalmist hope of His presence, but that will not be a cause of departure for him. Even in the gloom and misery there is a lesson for all. Do not give up on God, for God has not given up on you. Jellyfish have no resolve; they drift aimlessly in whatever direction the tides of time and circumstance may take them. We have too many jellyfish Christians, or if you like, “fairweather Christians” who go along with the crowd, but have not the fortitude to stand when adversity comes. Do not be one of them.
All the versions I checked begin verse 13 with “But” and rightly so. Take a look at verse 13 and choose what you think are three key words in the verse. There is no correct answer here but I chose cried, help, and prayer. There is no one else to cry out to. In our very worst extreme of pain, despair, feeling of abandonment, tragedy, crisis, even in God’s deafness, there is no other avenue for us, no other resource we have. Our faith may be tested and savaged by doubt and hopelessness, but it must remain faith with its centre and focus in the Lord Jesus Christ. The psalmist prayed to God, he cried out to God.
My next word is “help”. Other help have I none. Help of the helpless, our God is the Rock of our support. God is a very present help in time of need. Human emotions are flimsy and often misleading. What we feel may not be the true reality. There used to be a statement people made in this matter of faith, even blind faith. “God said it, and I believe it.” Just don’t mouth words, really believe that God is your help. The psalmist knew that even though the skies above him were black. It does not seem much use to have God as your help when all is rosy and calm. It is in the storm you need that assurance.
The third word I chose and you should have also, is prayer. Prayer is not the last resort but an ongoing one-on-One communion with the Lord God. Prayer does not have to be spoken in an attitude of prayer. I find I think things partly then reflecting of God. That is prayer. It is communion and it does not have to be formal. Think for a moment to the time when the Lord was here and walking with His disciples. They would have a lot of casual times and would just commune as you would with friends. They might ask, question, share ideas and thoughts – all that, as I can see, can come under the umbrella of prayer.
You may have chosen the word “morning”. A lot of Christians start the day with bible reading and prayer, in the morning. I used to but not now. No reason for that but the consciousness of it is there. My writing seems to take up a lot of my time when I do it and as I think, so I write and think of the Lord in doing that. However we will move on.
VERSE 14. Psalm 88:14 O LORD, why do You reject my soul? Why do You hide Your face from me?
Prayer now takes the form of questioning. There are two questions in this verse. In the first he asks why the Lord has rejected him (his “soul” meaning his person). The second question wants to know why God hides his face from him. In other words, why is God so meaningless and distant, so distant even, there is not a glimmer of Him. This is a very practical situation for people and also for Christians. More than half the population does not think God exists in any case, so a distant God is not problem for those, but for the Christian in great distress and hurt and turmoil and desperate for answers, the appearance and feeling about a god who does not answer can be overwhelming. The hurting Christian may well cry out, “Why do you hide Your face from me?”
That would not be an experience unique to the son of Korah. What about David? Psalm 102:2 Do not hide Your face from me in the day of my distress. Incline Your ear to me. In the day when I call answer me quickly, and Psalm 143:7 Answer me quickly, O LORD - my spirit fails. Do not hide Your face from me lest I become like those who go down to the pit. And Psalm 13:1 How long, O LORD? Will You forget me forever? How long will You hide Your face from me?
Psalm 13:2 How long shall I take counsel in my soul, having sorrow in my heart all the day? How long will my enemy be exalted over me? And a son of korah again - Psalm 44:24 Why do You hide Your face and forget our affliction and our oppression?
All those passages have one situation in common. They were all expressed in need when it seemed God was not near. He is always near, even when silence shouts out at us.
VERSES 15 AND 16. Psalm 88:15 I was afflicted and about to die from my youth on. I suffer Your terrors. I am overcome.
Psalm 88:16 Your burning anger has passed over me. Your terrors have destroyed me.
Now the psalmist gets personal. He lays the blame at the feet of God; it is all God’s doing that he is in this state and is rejected and all alone. He attributes pretty strong judgement to God that has caused him to know burning anger and terrors. When and if you go through fierce trial, not a few petty problems, but real, deep trial, it can feel that God is nowhere to be found. He has not thundered from His heavens or beaten up the oppressor, and you are overcome. The psalmist describes his pain as God destroying him.
Verse 15 tells us just how bad things were for this man and it was not some recent event. Alfred Barnes expressed it this way – “From my youth up - That is, for a long time; so long, that the remembrance of it seems to go back to my very childhood. My whole life has been a life of trouble and sorrow, and I have not strength to bear it longer. It may have been literally true that the author of the psalm had been a man always afflicted; or, this may be the language of strong emotion, meaning that his sufferings had been of so long continuance that they seemed to him to have begun in his very boyhood.”
Verse 16 just amplifies the problem. To use the colloquial, “he has been done over.” Keil and Delitzsch Biblical Commentary on the Old Testament expressed it this way, “He who complains thus without knowing any comfort, and yet without despairing, gathers himself up afresh for prayer. He contrasts himself with the dead who are separated from God's manifestation of love. Being still in life, although under wrath that apparently has no end, he strains every nerve to struggle through in prayer until he shall reach God's love. His complaints are petitions, for they are complaints that are poured forth before God.”
We all feel terrors in different ways and we all try to cope in different ways. For the psalmist the very end of verse 16 means “extinguish, terminate him”. So terminal did these terrors seem to him.
VERSE 17 Verse 17. Psalm 88:17 They have surrounded me like water all day long. They have encompassed me altogether.
Now come two statements in this verse and in the next. The one here is a complaint about how the terrors of the Lord in the previous verse are too encompassing for him. He makes the comparison with being surrounded by water but I don’t think this is like being in a boat on the surface of water. This is more like the Jonah experience as he describes it - Jonah 2:3-5 for You had cast me into the deep, into the heart of the seas, and the current engulfed me. All Your breakers and billows passed over me, so I said, ‘I have been expelled from Your sight. Nevertheless I will look again toward Your holy temple.’ Water encompassed me to the point of death. The great deep engulfed me. Weeds were wrapped around my head.
The terrors of the Lord have locked him in a prison and torment him. Now I want to say I don’t think this has come from God at all. I don’t believe God is tormenting him whatsoever. He perceives all the horrors that seem to be his lot in life tormenting him, and attributes them to God. The fact that he can’t get an answer from God or some relief, in his mind, it means God is doing that to him.
Verse 18 Psalm 88:18 You have removed lover and friend far from me. My acquaintances are in darkness.
This second statement is also a complaint against God. What has God done this time? Well, He has taken away all his friends, acquaintances and lovers. A parallel example of this is that of Job and he had his complaints against God at times through his ordeal.
Job 14: 13-15 He has removed my brothers from me; my acquaintances have abandoned me.? My relatives stop coming by, and my close friends have forgotten me. My house guest and female servants regard me as a stranger; I am a foreigner in their sight.
Job 16: 20-21 My friends scoff at me as I weep before God. I wish that someone might arbitrate between a man and God.
Matthew henry - Here is a doleful representation of Job's grievances. What reason we have to bless God, that we are not making such complaints! Even good men, when in great troubles, have much ado not to entertain hard thoughts of God.
In verse 18, lover means those who love one another, not the sexual sense of the word today. The bible commands us to love one another, even the one with warts! The one we avoid. We love Him because He first loved us and as a result we love each other in the love of Christ. When a brother or sister has fallen into sin or terrible calamity or is dealing with the harsh problems like the psalmist was, we do not forsake that one.
The friends and the close ones who should have loved the psalmist have gone away from him like the disciples who fled when the Lord was in His trial. To make it worse for this son of Korah, the wording is, “far from me” so they wanted to get as far as possible away. If they saw this afflicted man coming up the street, they would shut the house and pretend they were not home.
In distress have you ever hoped for friends, or comfort, or even for God to intervene, yet all of them can’t be found. The place is empty. They are all in darkness. That is what verse 18 is saying.
CONCLUSIONS
From verse 1 of this psalm to verse 18, all is gloom and hopelessness, and not one positive item of hope or encouragement can be found. That is why this is the gloomiest chapter in the bible, yet we have looked at it all and have drawn positives from it. I now want us to try, just for now, to put ourselves in that writer’s situation to see the travail and terror of his heart. Then I want to add some extras.
We might consider if there was something this psalmist had done wrong or what he could have done in place of what was done. The first thing I would say about him is that he is persistent. Year after year he had these afflictions like terrors coming to him yet he did not throw in the towel. He persevered in trial. Perseverance is not a well known word these days among professing Christians, and as we are in the Laodicean period of Church history, then anything goes. Before the Rapture, if God allows severe persecution to hit Australia, then we, or others shall see what true perseverance is, for many will fall away. To his credit, the psalmist prayed and sought the Lord each morning.
I find nothing in the psalm to indicate the writer had failed. It is easy and dismissive to say, “It is one of those things,” or as a young lady in a curtain shop said to me when I was speaking of the decline of freedom today compared with freedom we all had as young people in the past before socialism tightened the screws on society, “It is what it is.” For the psalmist, it was what God allowed.
Why is it that some Christians seem to have an easier life than others? Some, in fact, have very difficult lives leading to cruel deaths at the hands of enemies of the gospel. I can not answer that. It lies in the secret regions of God’s divine will. Nor is it the fatalistic approach Islam has when any disaster is dismissed with, “It is the will of Allah,” so that absolves them from helping people in distress.
That having been said, how do we handle the situation when, and if, we are in a similar position to the psalmist? For those of us who have never been there looking at a dark sky day after day and not sensing God in any closeness, it is hard to give reason to those in need, and to explain the absence of God.
It has been said that feelings and emotions are the carriage that follows the engine. The engine is faith, the powerhouse. Feelings are secondary and sometimes unreliable because we are emotional creatures and emotions go up and down. Faith does not do that but is fixed and steadfast. Therefore in times of gloom, depression and unresolved tension, it is not the carriage that will make the difference. It is the engine that makes things work.
What are we saying? Well, that faith overrides emotions and feelings. In our Psalm 88, the writer was overcome by feelings and emotions. Where was his faith? I don’t know. Maybe his faith was strong and he was giving expression to the way he was feeling. We all do it. What we must take from this is that faith in the Rock of Ages is essential, especially in deep loss and trials and grief and feelings of desertion. The Rock of Ages never moves so we can anchor up securely knowing we will never be moved. The storms may sweep over us and the winds of depression howl, but faith is anchored to the unmovable Rock.
To close I will list some small practical matters that can support when you are down or feel the way the psalmist did in Psalm 88.
The psalmist knew the place of prayer for prayer is more than speaking. It is the continued connection with God even if it might seem prayers bounce back from the ceiling. Do not break that connection.
The word of God must not be neglected. The irony is that when a believer is in a dark place and all that confronts you is a gloomy outlook, then the natural tendency is to shy away from godly things and you don’t feel like reading the bible or meditation on God. If we followed our natural tendencies then we would continue not to seek God or read His word. That is dangerous because it will lead to a weakness in spiritual life and even a departure from God. Even if you don’t feel like it, when miserable and in a world of gloom, read the word, and may I suggest the Psalms because they cover every possible emotion the human being has.
When in that gloomy state some people don’t want to be with other Christians. That means not meeting in fellowship or attending church or just being with another Christians in case someone might ask a sensitive question of you, or you feel like a black sheep. Do not neglect Christian fellowship.
Try to find positives and focus on the positives of the bible such as, “I will never leave you nor forsake you.” Recall the way the Lord has brought you so far through life. If you have fallen into a hole there is still light above even if it is not at your feet.
Lastly, do not lose sight of the Lord’s coming for you in the Rapture. If you will be alive when He comes we will be caught up. If we have already passed to be with Jesus our Saviour, we come back with Him. Keep the hope of the Rapture ever before you.
This is one stanza in a poem of mine called, HAS WARMTH OF NEARNESS CHANGED TO COOLNESS ? that deals with a situation similar to Psalm 88. The poem deals with the problem and this now it the step out of it.
God commands His lovingkindness to the distraught soul;
Bathes him in refreshing mercy; calls him to be whole.
Songs of praise there will arise, as songs sung in the night.
Burdens lifted from the heart; priorities set right;
Steps regain their joyful vigour in the pilgrim walk;
Blesséd things of God will occupy his time and talk.
His gentle hand helps you to stand;
To rise again from failure’s pain.
Joy’s song you’ll sing; the night will ring;
New peace arrived - a walk revived.
