Psalms 88

Before the darkness is named, the God to whom it is brought is named. O LORD God of my salvation, I have cried day and night before thee. It is worth pausing on that opening, because everything in the psalm depends on it. The singer does not begin by describing his despair; he begins by addressing God - and not as a distant judge but as the God of my salvation, the one he still belongs to, still expects rescue from, still cries out to day and night. Hold that line in your mind, because it is the last clearly hopeful thing the psalm will say. Everything after it is trouble. But the trouble is spoken into the ear of this God, the one the singer has already called his salvation - and that direction of address, more than any feeling, is what makes this a prayer and not merely a cry of pain.

The description, when it comes, holds nothing back. For my soul is full of troubles: and my life draweth nigh unto the grave. This is not a soul with troubles in it; it is a soul full of them, with no room left for anything else - and a life that is no longer merely hard but sliding, drawing near to the edge of the grave itself. The singer feels himself dying, not in some distant future but now, his life ebbing toward the place of the dead. What makes the line so honest is its refusal of proportion: he does not say his troubles are manageable, or that better days are surely coming. He says he is full, and he is sinking. There are seasons that feel exactly like this, and the psalm does not scold them or rush them. It writes them down.

The geography of the singer's despair grows more specific and more terrible: Thou hast laid me in the lowest pit, in darkness, in the deeps. Notice who he says put him there - thou hast laid me. He does not experience his suffering as an accident or as God's absence; he experiences it, harder still, as God's own doing. And the place is the lowest pit, the dark places where no light comes, the deeps where a sinking thing is lost. Thy wrath lieth hard upon me, and thou hast afflicted me with all thy waves (v. 7) - wave after wave, with no gap between them to catch a breath. We should not soften this. The singer believes God has done this to him, and he says so to God's face. What he does not do is turn away. He keeps the complaint inside the relationship, addressed to the very One he holds responsible - which is its own kind of faith, harder and more stubborn than the easy kind.

After God, the people. Thou hast put away mine acquaintance far from me; thou hast made me an abomination unto them: I am shut up, and I cannot come forth. The suffering has emptied the room. Those who knew him have drawn back; he has become, in their eyes, something to avoid - an abomination, a thing they recoil from - and he is shut up, walled in, unable to come out to them or call them back. This is the particular cruelty of long affliction: it isolates. Sickness, grief, depression, disgrace - they have a way of clearing the people out of a life, until the sufferer is left not only in pain but alone in it. And again he lays it at God's feet: thou hast put away mine acquaintance. Even his abandonment, he believes, is somehow from the hand of God. Yet still - verse 9 - he keeps stretching out his hands: I have called daily upon thee, I have stretched out my hands unto thee. The gesture of a man reaching for someone he cannot see, and reaching still.

Now the singer does something unexpected: he argues with God, and the argument is strangely tender. Wilt thou shew wonders to the dead? shall the dead arise and praise thee?… Shall thy lovingkindness be declared in the grave? or thy faithfulness in destruction? Shall thy wonders be known in the dark? (vv. 10-12). The logic runs like this: God, You love to do wonders, to be praised, to have Your lovingkindness and faithfulness declared - but the dead cannot do any of that. If You let me go down to the grave, You lose a worshipper; the dust cannot tell of Your goodness. It is, underneath the gloom, a backhanded appeal to God's own glory - keep me alive, for Your praise. The psalm is working only with what it can see, and from where the singer sits the grave looks like the end of all praise, the silence past which no song reaches. We will read these verses in the light of an empty tomb in a moment; the singer cannot yet. But notice that even his bleakest question is still pointed at God, still assuming that God's wonders and lovingkindness are the things most worth keeping. He has lost almost everything but his sense of what God is worth.

It is easy to miss, under the weight of the questions, what verse 9 quietly establishes about the man asking them: LORD, I have called daily upon thee, I have stretched out my hands unto thee. Daily. Not once, in a burst of grief, but day after day, with no answer, he has gone on calling and reaching. The hands stretched out are the posture of prayer and of pleading - the gesture of a child reaching up to be lifted. And he makes it toward a God who, by every feeling he reports, has put him in the pit and emptied his life of friends. This is the costliest kind of faith there is: not the prayer that is quickly answered, but the prayer repeated into silence, the hands stretched out again this morning to the same God who did not come yesterday. The psalm honors that persistence by simply recording it, without promising it will be rewarded by the final verse. Sometimes faithfulness looks like nothing more, and nothing less, than calling again today.

The final movement opens, against all the gloom, with a stubborn turning back to prayer: But unto thee have I cried, O LORD; and in the morning shall my prayer prevent thee. To prevent here is the old sense of the word - to go before, to come to meet, to arrive early. The singer is saying that his prayer will be there waiting at first light, that he will meet God at the dawn with his cry already on his lips. After everything - the pit, the wrath, the emptied room, the unanswered questions - he resolves to pray again in the morning. It is one of the quiet glories of this dark psalm: the trouble has not produced silence or rebellion but a determination to keep showing up. But unto thee. Whatever else fails, the direction holds. He will bring the same dark, one more dawn, to the same God.

And then the great unanswered question, the one the psalm will never resolve: LORD, why castest thou off my soul? why hidest thou thy face from me? (v. 14). It is the cry of every sufferer who cannot square the God he believes in with the abandonment he feels - why? The singer presses it further into the rawest autobiography in the psalm: I am afflicted and ready to die from my youth up (v. 15) - this is not a recent wound but a lifelong one, suffering as far back as he can remember. The terrors of God go over him; they have cut me off; they surround him daily like water, closing in from every side. And the psalm does not answer the why. No voice comes from heaven to explain. The question is allowed to stand open, exactly as it so often stands open in a real life. Scripture does not always hand us the reason; sometimes it hands us only the permission to ask, and the God to ask it of.

It is important not to flinch from how this psalm ends. There is no but I will trust, no yet the LORD will deliver, no morning light breaking over the last verse. The song closes in the dark and stays there. And the Bible - this is the wonder of it - lets it. Inscribed in the very book of praise, set among the songs Israel sang in worship, is one song that does not resolve, one prayer for the night that does not lift. That tells us something the cheerful psalms alone could not: that faith is not the same as feeling better, that a believer can be in unrelieved darkness and still be praying, still be heard, still belong to God. If your own season does not resolve on schedule - if the comfort has not come by the time the day is over - you are not outside the life of faith. You are inside a psalm. And the One who is the God of your salvation has been all the way to the bottom of it, and will, in His own time and not a moment before you can bear it, bring you out the far side.