Good morning. If you have your Bibles, please open up to Psalm 13:1. As you may know if you were here last week, we are looking at the Psalms through the summer. We are not going to cover all 150 Psalms. We are going to cover about 12 of them. The thing that is nice about the Psalms is that they lend themselves to topical study. As we talked about last week, the Psalms can be classified by different categories. Last week we looked at Psalm 1 which was considered a Wisdom Psalm. Today we are going to look at Psalm 13, which is considered a Psalm of Lament, a Psalm of Sorrow. This Psalm, Psalm 13, was written by King David. Some of you know who King David was, some of you don’t. King David was a man who had very humble beginnings. He was a shepherd boy. You might the story back in 1 Samuel where David had to confront the giant Goliath and was able to knock him down and kill him with a sling shot. We know that following that David went on to really the height of authority. He captured Jerusalem. He set up the capital of Jerusalem. He set up the temple. He unified the people and basically developed a kingdom that expanded all through the Middle East. That was King David. We also know that King David found time to do other things. He was a very skilled musician. He was a warrior. He led his people into battle. We know that he was a politician. He was an administrator who administered the temple but also he was a poet. The guy could write. In fact, 73 of the 150 Psalms are attributed to King David, 73 of the 150 Psalms. What we also know that is most important is that David was a man who loved God. I forget where it says it. It says “David was a man after God’s own heart.” He just loved God and we see that especially in the Old Testament. We see that in the early books of the Old Testament. We see that intense love of God, but we really see it in the book of Psalms. We see it especially in what is known as the Praise Psalms, those high and lofty prayers in the book of Psalms where David is just singing praises to his God, his creator. But we also see it in the Lament Psalms. We see it in those Psalms where David is in some sort of a pit. He is feeling pretty bad. It might have to do with his own sin. It might have to do with the sin of others or as we see in today’s reading out of Psalm 13, we might see that it just has to do with some unknown enemy out there. We are going to read all the way through the Psalm starting at verse 1 down to verse 6. Psalm 13:1-6. (Scripture read here.)
This, once again, is a Psalm of Lament. It is a Psalm of Sorrow. What is nice about this particular Psalm is that it is easily broken down into three key parts that seem to represent all the other Lament Psalms. The first part is what I would call the complaint. The second part of the Psalm is what I would call the request. The third part is what I would call the trust. Complaint, request, and trust. We are going to look at this Psalm in the context of that particular framework.
First of all, we want to think about the idea of complaint. That would be the first two verses that say “How long, oh Lord? Will you forget me forever? How long will you hide your face from me? How long must I wrestle with my thoughts and every day have sorrow in my heart? How long will my enemy triumph over me?” We look at this and think what is the complaint here. I think the complaint is that King David is feeling alienated. He is feeling ignored by God. He is feeling forgotten by God. We see this in the repetition of those two words: How long? Four times in the first two verses he asks the question how long. It is like if you have children you know when you go on a long vacation the kids sit in the car saying how long before we get there? How long before we get there? How long before we get there? How long before we get there? That is really what is going on here. It is constantly. How long must I deal with this? Really it almost sounds a little bit blasphemous. King David is getting a little bit demanding. He asks the question how long, oh Lord? He doesn’t even wait for an answer. He says will you forget me forever? It is a little bit sarcastic to God. That gives us a clue that this particular Psalm is not like some of those more flowery, sentimental Psalms like Psalm 23 walking through the valley of the shadow of death. Those comforting Psalms. No this is a raw Psalm of emotion. This is a guy who is basically just venting up to God because he is feeling neglected. He is feeling alienated. In fact, when he asks how long will you hide your face from me; in the Old Testament the idea of God hiding his face has the meaning behind it of alienation. You don’t want God turning his face on you. David is feeling alienated. He is feeling frustrated. He is feeling ignored by God. Not only that, he has some inner turmoil. You can just sense the inner turmoil because he goes on to say “How long must I wrestle with my thoughts?” The literal meaning behind this is how long must I carry on this conversation with myself within the depths of my soul? How long must I have this wrestling match going on inside of me? How long do I have to put up with that? Every day I have sorrow in my heart? What that means is King David was severely depressed. He was in a spiritual and emotional funk. He probably didn’t feel like getting out of bed. He was downright depressed. Then he goes on to say “How long will my enemy triumph over me?” The other interesting thing here is that that word triumph can be replaced with the word exalt. “How long will my enemy exalt over me?” Which gives a clue of how bad things have gotten. David knew that the word exalt was limited to God. What he is saying is if this thing doesn’t get solved what is going to happen is this enemy out there is going to take your exalted place. That is a bad thing. The first two verses are the complaint.
Then we go on to what I would call the request. The request has three things. He says “Look on me and answer, oh Lord my God. Give light to my eyes, or I will sleep in death, and my enemy will say, ‘I have overcome him,’ and my foes will rejoice when I fall.” He is asking for three things. He says look at me, answer me, give light to my eyes. Let’s think about this idea of look to me. If looking away from him is alienation, it is believed that looking to him is blessing. If God looks at you and shines his face upon you that is a good thing. That is the place you want to be. There is a benediction we give that comes out of the book of Numbers 6 which says “The Lord bless you and keep you. The Lord make his face shine upon you and be gracious to you. The Lord turn his face towards you and give you peace.” God turning his face towards you is a good thing. It means blessing. It means peace. It means safety. It means security. He is saying look at me. Turn your face back around me. Then he goes on to say answer me. “Answer me, oh Lord.” I need to hear from you. I need you to speak whether it is audibly or through a friend or circumstances or a letter or whatever it is. I need to hear from you. Quit ignoring me. Answer me. He adds to that. He says “Give light to my eyes.” The idea here is that the belief is the eyes are the window to the soul. So when you have light of God coming in that is going to make its way down to your soul and it is the soul level where you get revelation from God. Give me that light. I need that revelation. I think it is in Ephesians 1:18 where Paul says “I pray that the eyes of your heart would be enlightened so that you may know the hope that is in you.” Paul praying a similar prayer. He is praying saying look at me, answer me, give me the revelation I need. He goes on to say because if not, I am going to die. He is basically saying I am dying here. I am going to sleep in death. We don’t know if he is talking about a physical death. He could be talking about a spiritual death. He could be talking about death of confidence. He could be talking death of faith. He could be talking about a lot of deaths that we just don’t know, but the bottom line is we see a man that is at the point of some sort of death and so he says do something about it God or I am going to go to sleep and I am going to die here. Then he goes on to say and if that happens, then my enemies will say we have overcome him. We have won. He says “My foes will rejoice when I fall.” In other words, there will be a party throughout the land because they know King David is dead. They know King David has failed. But the worst thing is they know that God has failed. The God who was the God of promise from the very beginning is a God now that is not a promise keeper but a promise breaker. That is not a good thing. What we have here in these first four verses we have a picture of an isolated, desperate, depressed, frustrated man. That is the picture that we have in these four verses.
Then something really strange happens because there is a shift occurring. Out of the blue, David looks like he gets some sort of a revelation or a glimmer of hope. He goes on to say “But I trust in your unfailing love; my heart rejoices in your salvation. I will sing to the Lord, for he has been good to me.” Where did that come from? It is just such a shift so quickly. If you have suffered with depression, if you have suffered with anxiety, if you have had some severe life trials, it is very difficult to go from this depth, dark night of the soul, this despair to all of a sudden say but I trust in you. I trust in your unfailing love. We don’t know what happened here. We really don’t know what happened. What we do know is that maybe David did get that revelation. Maybe in the midst of that sorrow, dark night of the soul, something God revealed to him and maybe something in his past. Maybe some sort of activity in the past. Maybe all the times God was there and he decided he wasn’t going to trust in himself anymore. He was going to trust in God’s unfailing love. The unchangeable love. The love everlasting. If there is a key theme in the Bible, it is all about God’s unfailing love. From the very beginning of Genesis all the way to Revelation it is one long story of God’s faithfulness and God’s unfailing love. David knew no matter how bad things got, no matter how ugly the situation he was in, nothing could separate him from the love of God. He knew that even though it might not come right away, he knew at some point that God, in the greatness of his heart and the compassion of his heart, was going to open up that heart and the floodgates are going to come out and grace and mercy and justice and kindness are just going to pour on out to the situation. He was trusting that was going to happen. That is why he could rejoice. He could rejoice in his salvation.
As a side note, when we think about salvation we think about getting saved and we think about avoiding the fires of hell. That is not how he thought of it. They thought of salvation as complete healing of everything. The nation, the country, the world, the lives. Everything was going to be brought back to the place it was before the fall. That is the salvation that David was going to rejoice in. He goes on to say not only will I rejoice, I will sing to the Lord. As a side note, this is a King singing. There are men in this church and churches across America that say I am not going to sing because they think that makes them less manly. David was a king and he sung. I tell you the truth that when you sing you are more manly. When you sing praises to God, you are expressing your manhood in the way God desired you to do it. You are expressing your love of God and that is okay. If a king could do it you can do it. He says I will sing to the Lord for he has been good to me. In other words what he is seeing is a pattern in his life. He looks back and sees the pattern of goodness. He knows it is going to come in the present and he knows even though he can’t figure it out right now that goodness is going to flow right on down. All the way through his life. After he is gone it is going to keep on flowing.
That is really the Psalm. We looked at the complaint, we looked at the request, and we looked at the trust. It is a good Psalm, but we are left with a couple questions. The obvious question is what was the circumstance that was going on here with David? Who or what is the enemy out there? The bad news, at least for scholars, is they don’t know. This is a Psalm that is very weird because it is kind of generic. They don’t know what was going on. Was there an enemy out there trying to kill him? Was there a family member that was trying to destroy his reputation? Was there a sickness he was dealing with? They don’t know. Although that is bad news for the scholars that is good news for all of us. Because what that means is we can take this Psalm and allow it to become a template that we can apply to any situation in our lives. It is free. It is a template. You don’t have to go to Microsoft or anything else. You can get it right here. A template that you can use in any situation. It is so easy to paraphrase. Some of you are in the dark nights right now. Some of you are going through your challenges. Some of you can identify with David. You are thinking how long oh Lord? How long am I going to be in this spot? Have you forgotten me? How long am I going to have to wrestle in my brain with these thoughts that keep me awake all night long over and over that occupy my mind at work or wherever? How long is this going to be? How long are you going to keep me in this depressed state? How long is this enemy out there, this relationship, this financial thing, whatever it is, how long is that enemy going to rule over me and triumph over me? How long Lord?
Then you can shift from the complaint to the request. Lord look at me. I am here. Lord. Hey Lord I am still here. I need an answer. I need to hear from you. I don’t care where it comes from. I don’t care if it comes from the pastor. I don’t care if it comes from a friend. I don’t care where it comes from, but I need to hear from you in some way. Then you could go on to say give me some light here. Shed some light on this situation. I will take anything. Give me some revelation so I have a clue as to how this thing is going to turn out. How is it going to proceed. Do you see how those verses can serve as a template for most any situation in your life? It is awesome. We can see that the Psalm can be used as a template, but it also teaches us some other things.
The first thing I think that is key is that God can deal with our honest prayers. There is a place for semi-honest prayers. When you are in a small group somewhere in a home group and we are all saying a nice prayer about what we need, but we really don’t want to be too honest because they will think what is going on in their life. So we have to cover it up a little bit. God says when it is just you and I, go for it. Let it go. Unleash. Vent. I can handle it. You are thinking, God I just don’t feel comfortable. I have all this chaos going in my brain and I feel like I have to settle down and get into some sort of meditative quiet state before you will hear me. He says no. I can handle the chaos. Bring me into the chaos and I will sort it out for you because you are not going to get to that place of quietness until you let me in and let me help you through the spirit of God work through all those things. I am going to need you to do that. Just invite me in. We learn that it is okay to be honest in our prayer. God can handle it. But I think the key thing we learn, and this is so applicable that I think we miss out on it and really I didn’t even get it until this week, is that in the Christian reality, I am talking about people that claim to be Christians, walk the Christian life, go through trying to serve God in whatever way, there is a reality out there and a reality that is a paradox. A paradox is two things that are seemingly contradictory but actually contain an element of truth. What is that we see in this particular Psalm? We see that a Christian can and often experiences total isolation from God. Total abandonment from God. At the same time and often the same time, he or she can feel that the arms of God are surrounding that person. Like the Psalmist talks about sitting under the shadow of his wings. Although I feel isolated, I still feel God loves me. That is a paradox. People don’t get that. An unbeliever doesn’t get that. How can you feel one minute God is nowhere in sight and the next minute he has his arms wrapped around you? The only explanation is the gospel. It is the only explanation because basically the explanation is found in the cross of Christ. The most terrible thing that could have happened was for God himself to die on the cross. Remember in Jesus’ words “My God, My God why have you forsaken me?” We have this forsakenness, this alienation that was experienced by Christ but the same way on that cross we see the complete love of God as poured out to his children to reconcile them back home. The paradox that we experience in life is the paradox that we experience on the cross. When we experience the bad things, the good things, the agonies, the cries against the Lord, and the praises of God, we realize it is all part of the package of being a Christian. Do you get that?
The Christian life is not about avoiding bad things. It is about walking through life and taking these things in and processing them a little bit different than the nonbeliever all the while knowing you are going to have the agony of the cross and you are going to have the ecstasy of the resurrection. That is the tension we live in as Christians. When we do go into the world, we go into the world really like nonbelievers, like non-Christians. We go into the world pretty much on equal terms generally speaking because God is not a respecter of persons. God will allow the good and the bad, to shine, the rain to come on the righteous and the poor and the unrighteous. He is just going to say you are both in the world. It is how we process that world. When things happen in the world like accidents and broken relationships and justice issues and financial issues, we process them a little bit differently. The unbeliever says this bad thing happened to me so I am going to take it wherever their sanctuary might be. I don’t know. They are probably just thinking it through their day but probably not going into a prayer room or a prayer closet or going before God. They are just going into the process mode. Getting out the pen. Thinking it out. Trying to work out the numbers. Thinking what is going on here? Trying to reason through it. Which is good and sometimes it actually works. A lot of the basic challenge in life is just simply figuring it out and taking the steps necessary to fix something. But it is the problems that come into our life that make absolutely no sense whatsoever. After 20 years your spouse leaves you. You lost a child in a car accident. A tornado sweeps through an area and wipes out an entire town. You can’t reason that. What you realize in this isolation is that you are alone and you don’t know what to do with it. What do you do? You rely on what the ancients would call cruel fate. Fate is there might be some sort of a purpose out there. I don’t know what. Maybe there is some gigantic force or some gods and goddesses out there that are directing things. Unfortunately, those gods and goddesses and fate are not always on your side. They were terrified of this idea of fate because they know that the outcome was subject to the whims of the particular gods. They knew that depending on what kind of day they were having it could be a good outcome or a bad outcome so they were basically just rolling the dice and saying that is fate or that is destiny and please be on our side today.
But the Christian gets the same problems. They get the same issues. They go into their arena of wrestling. They go in there and wrestle with their thoughts. They go in there and cry out to the Lord. They go out there and get depressed. Yes a Christian can be depressed. I suffer with depression. Not extreme depression. I can get out of bed but there are times when I don’t feel like getting out of bed. Years ago I was on Zoloft. So I know those dark nights of the soul. I know what they are like. Depression is something that is very difficult to deal with but the reality is that even Christians can be depressed. When you are in that dark night of the soul, the difference is that you are going to see it not just as a bad thing. You are going to see it kind of like a schoolroom. Kind of an instruction area. You know that if you go in there and you open your life up, you open your heart up, and you open your soul up to God, which we will talk about in a few weeks when we look at King David and the story of his sin with Bathsheba, when you open up your heart and ask God to purify your heart, he is going to shine that light on you and show you stuff that you might like and he is going to show you stuff you don’t like. He is going to search your soul and say I got you here. Let’s not waste this time. Let’s purify you. He might even show you that the enemy you think is the enemy is really not the enemy at all. The enemy is not the ex-spouse. The enemy is not the government. The enemy is not the parent that didn’t take care of you as a child. The enemy is not the addiction that you have. You may find that the enemy is inside. There is something inside of you that you haven’t dealt with. Things like pride, fear, arrogance, lust, worry, doubt, and all that kind of stuff. Those are the enemies. It is not all these things in the world. God is saying while I got you here, I am going to show you this. What happens is you end up in the classroom where the instructor is someone that is the leader of the dark night of the soul. Someone standing up there and saying while I have you here I am going to demonstrate this. I am going to show you the areas that you need to work on. If you are open to it, it can become a phenomenal place of learning.
There is a passage I think out of Ecclesiastes that says “Better to be in a house of mourning than a house of feasting because death is the destiny of every man or woman.” That really spoke to me when I was going through my grief when I lost my wife, Dana, 15 years ago. Who would want to be in a house of mourning? You are talking about a funeral home. I would rather pick a party. But he is saying you don’t learn much at a party. You get to meet some nice people. But spend some night in a house of death in a funeral home and you learn a lot of things listening to a eulogy. It is not about the dead, it is about the living. It points back to the living. It becomes a classroom. If you are willing to take the time and enter into this wrestling arena with God open to the spirit of God to come in and talk to you and move you and teach you, you too will come to a place where you will probably see some light. You will come to a place and start putting things in perspective. Maybe I shouldn’t have been worrying about this. I am giving this person too much credit. I am giving this situation too much credit. What I need to do is start trusting the unfailing love of God. Unfailing, unchangeable, permanent, love. The only thing in a changing world with changing people and changing weather and everything else, the only thing that is stable is the unfailing love of God. When you get to that point, you rise up. It is like God will take you and lift you up out of your circumstances and set you on a firm place. He will put you on a firm place. He might not totally remove your circumstances because he is saying you haven’t learned it all yet. I have more for you to learn. He might keep you there your whole life, but he will give you that solid place so you can continue to move forward. Because of his unfailing love, you know that at some point the floodgates of his heart will open, grace and mercy will pour out. It will begin to flood through the areas of your life and create redemption and resurrection in ways that you weren’t even thinking about. When that happens and you receive it and it begins to happen and you begin to see it manifest in your life and the lives of others and the life of your family what happens at the same time is the enemies are defeated and the proper one, the Lord, is reestablished on his throne. He is back to the exalted place of God. He is back to the position that he is supposed to have and all those other things are laid low. Do you see how that works? That is awesome.
That is why you, like David, can actually get to a place where you rejoice in your salvation. I don’t see many people rejoicing in their salvation and I think the problem is they don’t process things rightly. Unfortunately, most Christians are not happy so why would somebody want to be a Christian. Rejoice in your salvation. Do you believe this stuff to be true? Do you believe that when Christ came down, he didn’t just come to get you a ticket into heaven. He came to heal everything. The oppressed, the poor, the financial burdens, the family burdens, everything, and ultimately death. That is what he came to do. You can rejoice in that. Not only that, you can sing. You can sing and you don’t have to worry about who is listening. I sing down in my basement and it drives Debbie nuts because I don’t sing in tune at all. She was scared I was going to wake the neighbors one day. I put on the headphones and I just sing. I tell you what if you are somebody who suffers with depression, you cannot praise God and be depressed. Don’t go saying I have this depression. I say put on your headphones, put on a CD, and praise God and he will get you out of that funk. I am a living witness to it. You cannot praise God and at the same time be depressed. When you get to that point, God is going to give you a new song. It might not be in tune but it is going to be a new song. You are going to sing of his love forever. Why? Because as it says in this last line here “Because he has been good to me.” You know you can look back on your past and see the good works of God. You know it is going to happen at some point in the present and it may be happening even in your sleep and it is going to happen in the future because that is the idea of the unfailing love, the continuous stream of good works that started in Genesis and going all the way down to Revelation. As you do that, he will set your feet upon a rock. He will give you that firm place to stand. He will put a new song in your heart. Those words are summarized in Psalm 40. I love this Psalm. This is David crying out again. “I waited patiently for the Lord. He turned to me and heard my cry. He lifted me out of the slimy pit, out of the mud and the mire. He set my feet on a rock and gave me a firm place to stand. He put a new song in my mouth. A hymn of praise to our God.” Let us pray.
