Songs in the Night

Songs in the Night

Psalm 88

Main Idea: It is possible to be greatly shaken and yet still trust in God.

Psalms is a book filled with the kind of singing that prepares us for living in a real world with an unshakable hope in God. We’ll see today that unshakable hope doesn’t always feel unshakable. This psalm lets us in on what it sounds like to be greatly shaken and yet still trust God.

The late pastor and Bible commentator James Montgomery Boice said, “It is good that we have a psalm like this, but it is also good that we have just one” (“Monday: Dark Night of the Soul”). Thankfully, the experience underneath Psalm 88 isn’t your everyday, garden-variety trial. But if you find yourself in the cellar of affliction, it’s good to know there’s stuff like this down there. This is the darkest psalm in the Bible. Literally, the last word in the original Hebrew is darkness.

A subtle version of the prosperity gospel lives in churches that are otherwise quick to denounce the error. We may rightly point out that real believers might be poor and might get sick; faith doesn’t guarantee those things. But then we might add, “Still, they’re never depressed. Believers by definition never feel hopeless. Even when they face severe trials, they always have this unexplainable peace and calm.” Psalm 88 wants a word because not only does that position reflect a selective reading of the Bible that edits out chapters like this one, but saying things like that is a great way to create a church where everybody acts happy even if they’re falling apart.

Theologian Robert Dabney knew pain. Born in 1820, his father died when he was thirteen. As chief of staff to General Stonewall Jackson, he witnessed the carnage of the Civil War. On the home front he was beset by illness most of his life and lost his sight toward the end. He had six sons. Three of them died before they were old enough to leave the house. Two of them passed away within a month of each other. He describes that month this way: “When my Jimmy died, the grief was painfully sharp, but the actings of faith, the embracing of consolation, and all the cheering truths which ministered comfort to me were just as vivid” (Dabney, as quoted in Piper and Taylor, Suffering and the Sovereignty of God, 179). Those are the stories we like to hear. However, he goes on to say something that we, for some reason, are more reluctant to quote:

But when the stroke was repeated, and thereby doubled, I seem to be paralyzed and stunned. I know that my loss is doubled, and I know also that the same cheering truths apply to the second as to the first, but I remain numb, downcast, almost without hope or interest. (Ibid.)

Have you ever felt that things you knew about God were failing to leverage their soul-stabilizing effect in your actual experience? In other words, your pain eclipsed, or outran, your theology for a day, or a month, or longer? What do you do from that place of darkness? How do you sing your pain in the presence of God? How do you sing when you’ve lost a child? When depression grabs your mind with both hands to where you wake up in the morning and you don’t have the energy to get dressed? How do you sing when the enemy of your soul reminds you of things you keep trying to forget? If Christian faith doesn’t speak to these places, the hard realities of life in this world, then we shouldn’t be surprised when the world says, “No thanks.” And even as a local church, we can’t just speak upbeat truths to upbeat people. Why? Because on any given Sunday there are people in that sanctuary who are barely hanging on, and if our worship pretends everything is awesome, it’s painting a false picture of reality. When we do this, we leave embattled Christians with no resources to help them endure. The truth of Psalm 88 is that God gives his people songs in the night. Songs they can sing, we can sing, when darkness closes in.

The author of this psalm loves the Lord. He was a worship leader in Israel, appointed by King David himself to train and direct a guild of 288 skillful musicians who served at the temple. This is not the journal of a cynic. Cynicism pulls away from God. The psalmist is not running from God; he’s running to God. He’s not backing away. If anything, he’s in God’s face.

As a matter of fact, the passage opens up when you notice this little, recurring refrain—in verses 1, 9, and 13—”I cry out” or “I call to you.” This brings us to the first movement in this passage.

Desperation: I Have Had Enough Troubles

Psalm 88:1-8

“I cry out, I cry out, I call.” He doesn’t have time for pious pleasantries and cliché prayers. The gist of Psalm 88 is, “Lord, you have to answer to me. And it has to be today.” Do you ever pray like this? Do you ever bring your sorrows to God without dressing them up in church clothes? Here’s the sad truth about so much of evangelical piety in the modern church. We’ve learned to pray presentable prayers rather than real ones. By contrast, notice the language of feeling here.

I cry out (v. 1)

I have had enough (v. 3)

going down . . . without strength (v. 4)

abandoned . . . lying in the grave, . . . cut off from your care (v. 5)

darkest places (v. 6)

weighs heavily . . . overwhelmed (v. 7)

distanced . . . shut in (v. 8)

worn out . . . I cry out . . . I spread out my hands (v. 9)

I call (v. 13)

I have been suffering, . . . I am desperate (v. 15)

They surround me . . . they close in on me (v. 17)

distanced . . . darkness (v. 18)

Having grown up in New Orleans, I can’t tell you how many times we’ve tuned in to the Weather Channel during hurricane season. And there’s Jim Cantore with the rain jacket leaning against the wind, screaming in the mic. Sheets of corrugated metal flying past. A small horse. They always seemed to send Cantore into the eye of the storm. He’s not in the studio, crisp shirt, full Windsor, witty banter with colleagues. He’s giving a live report on location while trying to not die.

Same here. This isn’t Heman the Ezrahite on a podcast with The Gospel Coalition, every hair in place. “Heman, glad to have you in the studio today. So tell us about hardship and the songwriting process.” No, this is a live report from landfall. Sideways rain. Screaming into the mic. And this is where the psalm starts to get real—these I/you descriptions, mainly in verses 3-8: “I have had enough” (v. 3); “I am . . . going down” (v. 4); “I am like a man without strength” (v. 4); “I am . . . abandoned . . . lying in the grave” (v. 5). And you: “You no longer remember [me favorably . . . I am] cut off from your care” (v. 5); “You have put me in the lowest part of the Pit” (v. 6); “Your wrath weighs heavily on me; you have overwhelmed me with all your waves” (v. 7); “You have distanced my friends from me; you have made me repulsive to them” (v. 8).

Christian friend, God doesn’t run in to make sure all your statements in prayer are theologically tidy and properly nuanced. God is not put off by your desperation.

This psalm doesn’t give us enough information to determine whether he is actually experiencing the wrath of God, whether God is actively pushing Heman’s friends away, and so on. That’s not the point. He’s not writing a seminary thesis. He’s telling God how he feels.

Psalm 88 isn’t a license to spit bitter accusations at God. This is a man wrestling with the tension between what he knows and what he feels. What he knows he expresses in the first five words of the psalm: “Lord, God of my salvation.” That’s the tidiest theology in the whole psalm. But his feelings aren’t buying it. In other words, “I know you are the God of my salvation, but my experience is telling me there won’t be any saving today.”

Christian friend, it is possible to have faith yet feel cut off from God’s favor and blessing. Some of the greatest heroes of the faith have felt that. The great hymn writer, William Cowper, author of “There Is a Fountain Filled with Blood.” Luther, Bunyan, Spurgeon. Many others.

The great preacher Charles Spurgeon experienced tremendous hardship. Nine years into his marriage to Susannah, she became virtually homebound. They couldn’t figure out what was wrong. For the next twenty-seven years, she hardly ever heard him preach. Spurgeon himself was greatly afflicted with all kinds of trials. For the last twenty-two years of his ministry, one-third of it was out of the pulpit, sick or recovering. He writes of one Sunday when he preached Psalm 22—“My God, my God, why have you abandoned me?” (v. 1). He said, “Though I did not say so, yet I preached my own experience. I heard my own chains clank while I tried to preach to my fellow prisoners in the dark” (Spurgeon, An All-Round Ministry, 221–22).

The psalmist is desperate, and there’s no reason to hide that in the presence of God. The text then changes direction to argument.

Disputation: Do You Work Wonders for the Dead?

Psalm 88:9-12

The psalmist stockpiles questions that, to the Old Testament way of thinking, demand the answer no, and then he calls for action to remedy the situation.

Now we need to bear in mind that when it comes to what happens after death, the Old Testament saints were largely in the dark. The blessed hope (if you will) of the Old Testament patriarchs wasn’t to “die and go to heaven.” It was to live to see your children’s children. To live out your days in the promised land. And they didn’t mean the one up there. They meant the one they were standing on.

Yes, there are hints of resurrection or life after death in Psalm 16, two verses in Isaiah, and a few other places. However, we shouldn’t force Old Testament saints to pass New Testament exams. Being an inspired biblical writer didn’t mean you had this “matrix plug” with a full download of future names, places, and events, so that somewhere in 750 BC you wake up and tell your friends, “The tomb is empty,” and you quote words Paul will write much later: “Jesus has brought life and immortality to light through the gospel!” (see 2 Tim 1:10). Awesome! So it shouldn’t surprise us when we don’t hear Old Testament saints say, “To live is Christ and to die is gain” (Phil 1:21).

Even in the New Testament, it shouldn’t surprise us when we read Mark 9. Jesus is coming from the Mount of Transfiguration event with Peter, James, and John, and he orders them to tell no one what they had seen “until the Son of Man had risen from the dead.” Then the text says, “They kept this word to themselves, questioning what ‘rising from the dead’ meant” (Mark 9:9-10). So again, let’s not require pre-resurrection believers to pass post-resurrection exams.

That said, even though the New Testament sheds new light on this, there is still truth tucked into these questions—namely, that God gets unique glory and praise when he rescues his people in this life, in the sight of the nations. The psalmist asks, “Will your wonders be known in the darkness?” (v. 12).

Think about the great rescuing act of God in the Old Testament. What if it never happened? What if Israel never left Egypt? Never crossed the Red Sea? Instead, they died in captivity. What becomes of that great outburst of praise on the far side of the Red Sea? It never happens. The Song of Moses never gets written. Miriam’s tambourine never gets played. Church, we do well to remember, God receives glory when he saves us from death, not just through it. When he takes away ashes and gives us garments of praise here. When he rescues a marriage and writes a new story.

In that way the psalmist may lack a full understanding of the doctrine of resurrection as it comes into focus in the New Testament. But in another way he’s onto something important. God gets glory when he rescues his people not just “then and there” but “here and now.”

This brings us to the third refrain.

Isolation: Why Do You Hide Your Face from Me?

Psalm 88:13-18

This is the deepest pain a believer can experience—the pain of feeling God is absent. We don’t know exactly what kind of experience he is facing. Is it mental anguish? Is it spiritual attack? Is it primarily physical? Maybe it’s all of it mixed in together. Whatever it is, the final straw, the specific thing that makes life unlivable is that he’s alone. He’s dying. Heaven is painfully silent. And he’s alone.

I don’t know where all of you are right now, what you’re going through, but Psalm 88 has welcome realism should you find yourself in a place of deep spiritual darkness. Friend, it’s possible to have faith and feel burdened beyond your strength. It’s possible to have faith and feel like God is hiding from you. It’s possible to have faith and wrestle with hard questions. It’s possible to have faith, and yet every day with Jesus isn’t sweeter than the day before. It’s possible to know him as the God of your salvation and yet feel convinced there will be “no saving today.” It’s possible to have a right knowledge of God and yet for that knowledge to not yield its full, soul-stabilizing effect at every point of your life.

You ask, “Where is faith in the most misery-laden song in the Bible?” Don’t forget the little chorus he sings three times: “I cry out, I cry out, I call.” Consider it. What keeps this man talking to God when his experience tells him no one is listening? What keeps him asking for help? What makes him want to declare God’s praise when his prayers still go unanswered? Don’t miss what we’re seeing here. We see someone calling and crying out to God in the midst of total devastation, and the Bible has a word for that: faith.

That’s the end of Psalm 88, but Psalm 88 isn’t the end of the story.

Restoration: How the Story Ends and How We Help One Another

The 150 psalms are divided up into five books or mini-hymnals. Flip the page and look at Psalm 90, which begins Book IV. They’re not organized chronologically; Psalm 90 is a Psalm of Moses. They’re arranged to tell the story of the pilgrimage through which God is taking his people, a pilgrimage from suffering to glory. We’re coming to the end of Book III. Beginning in Book IV, the tone begins to change. It even bears out statistically. In Books I through III (Pss 1–89) lament psalms outnumber hymns of praise by more than two to one. In Books IV and V (Pss 90–150) the proportion is reversed plus some (Kidd, With One Voice, 29).

What does this mean? As this big, sweeping story of God and his people comes full circle, we discover that what begins in personal anguish ends in global praise (Ps 150). That whole story pivots on Jesus Christ coming into the world. He took up (fully) the anguish of Psalm 88. He was the only truly God-forsaken person who ever lived. When he hung on the cross, God’s wrath truly swept over him. He said, “Why have you abandoned me?” (Matt 27:46). And because we’ve read the New Testament, we know why. He was forsaken so that we who trust in him would never be forsaken. He was abandoned by his friends so that we could know unbroken friendship with God.

A happy ending awaits all who have trusted in Christ. We have confidence in future grace. But we still need Psalm 88 because this world hasn’t become any more like heaven in the three thousand years since this psalm was composed. We still need songs in the night, and God gives them to us.

Reflect and Discuss

1. Why is there often a disconnect between what we know about God and how we feel and act?
2. Consider the psalmist’s exchanges with God—the “I/you” statements. How do these statements reveal what is happening in the writer’s soul? If you were to make a list of “I/you” statements, what would they be during this season of your life? During a dark season of your life?
3. What does it look like to “sing your pain” to God from the perspective of the cross?
4. How was the deafening silence of God making life unsustainable for the psalmist?
5. Is it possible to have faith and feel that God is hiding his face from you? Why? Does right knowledge about God always yield sustaining belief? What makes the psalmist keep asking when his prayers were going unanswered?
6. What happens when we use our feelings (instead of our knowledge of God through his Word) as an indicator of our faith and trust in God?
7. How have you seen your feelings deceive you?
8. When you feel like God has hidden himself from you, what choices are in front of you? Why should you choose to turn to him in prayer even though you may feel like he is not listening?
9. If your faith is weak right now, how does the truth that Jesus was forsaken so you never will be forsaken encourage you to pray? Is there someone with whom you can share what you’re going through so that he or she can pray with you over your suffering? When will you share your struggles with them?