It has almost become cliché to speak about how frequently children who were raised in church grow up to reject the faith of their parents, at least for a time if not permanently, once they move away from home. But clichés are clichés for a reason. I don’t know exactly what reliable statistics say about this issue, but I can think of a number of people that I knew growing up who professed faith in Christ but who are either no longer walking in obedience to him, or have even openly rejected the Christian faith. My sense is that we will see an increasing trend in this direction as Western culture in general becomes more and more a post-Christian culture.
I’m sure there are many things we could point to as possible causes of the defection of many young people from the faith, and the fact that no two people are alike would make it a very complex issue to discuss. However, my guess is that we can attribute much of this problem to the fact that when young people go off to college and begin to experience more of the world for themselves, they begin to feel that the Christian faith they grew up with in their evangelical churches was strikingly one-dimensional. They look back on their experience and see an evangelical subculture that is little more than a fantasyland divorced from life in the real world. Church camp and youth group meetings were infused with juvenile silliness and sappy religious devotion that catered to adolescence. Christian radio stations marketed themselves with adjectives such as “safe” and “positive.” Christian paintings that hung on their parents’ walls did not depict reality as they knew it but rather a sanitized, cartoonish version of reality. On Sunday mornings they heard from their pastors a lot of good advice about marriage and finances (two things that are quite distant from the experiences of young people), but very little substantive engagement with the Word of God. When they move away from this evangelical subculture and into a complicated world, full of danger, brokenness, pain, and death, they often conclude that what they heard growing up was nice for children, like a belief in Santa Claus, but now it is time to leave it all behind and live in reality.
If I am right about this, then the blame for it does not fall on the Bible. That is for certain. Wherever this safe, sanitized evangelical subculture has come from, it has not been nourished in the whole counsel of God. The Bible is not a safe book. It does not seek to scrub the messiness out of life. On the contrary, there are numerous places where the Bible grabs us by the collar and forces us to stare at the darkness and messiness of reality in ways we have never done before. Psalm 88 is one such place. This lament of Heman the Ezrahite has been called the darkest portion of the Psalter. This morning we are going to face the darkness that is here because God has given us this word for our good.
Like all the laments in the book of Psalms, this one teaches us that we must lament to the Lord in our sufferings. True as that is, it is too simplistic for this psalm. Probe a little deeper, and you will find a surprising exhortation for us. But we will come to that in due time. For now, let us look into the experience of Heman the Ezrahite—whom I have named “the Godforsaken” for reasons that should become apparent—by dividing this psalm into two sections: the sufferings of the Godforsaken and the prayers of the Godforsaken.
Notice first
The psalmist depicts his sufferings in two cycles, both of which lay out the same three troubles in the same order. The first cycle is in verses 3-9a, and the second cycle is in verses 15-18. Both times the psalmist tells us, first, that he is close to death, second, that he is oppressed by God, and third, that he is utterly alone.
First, he is close to death, according to verses 3-5 and 15a. In verses 3-5 there seems to be a progression. He starts by saying that his soul is full, that is, saturated, with troubles. Why? Verse 3b tells us, “My life draws near to Sheol.” Sheol is the realm of the dead in the Old Testament. Heman is saying that he is at the point of death. This would seem to indicate that he is seriously ill, and my guess is that some form of leprosy has taken over his body, for reasons that should become clear later. But in verse 4 he ratchets up his lament, saying, “I am counted among those who go down to the pit,” that is, “I am as good as dead already. You can enlist my name among the dead.” In verse 4b he describes himself as a “man who has no strength.” The Hebrew word for “man” there is a word that customarily refers to a man as opposed to a woman, and quite often it refers to a man as a strong warrior. Yet this “man” has been sapped of his strength. His illness has utterly conquered him, so that he is, according to verse 5, “like one set loose among the dead.” The word translated “set loose” is often translated “free.” What is interesting is that the same word is used in 2 Kings 15:5 to describe the “separate house” that King Azariah lived in after he became a leper. It appears, then, that what Heman is saying is that he has been “set free” from the normal experiences of life and placed in the realm of death. In fact, he is “like the slain that lie in the grave,” or like a fallen warrior thrown into a mass grave and denied an honorable burial. But the climax of this section comes at the end of verse 5: “like those whom you remember no more, for they are cut off from your hand.” To be “remembered” by God does not mean to be present to God’s consciousness. It means to experience the goodness of God through the blessings that he gives. After describing the floodwaters that covered the earth in Genesis 7, Moses tells us in Genesis 8:1, “But God remembered Noah…” That does not mean that God suddenly realized Noah was there! It means that God acted in fulfillment of his promise to do good to Noah. The psalmist laments here that he is already as good as dead, and thus he is already like one who has been cut off from the Lord’s blessings, cut off from the promised land and the temple and the assembly of God’s people.
When the second cycle begins in verse 15, the psalmist makes a similar point about being close to death: “Afflicted and close to death from my youth up.” The sufferings have drawn on so long that he feels as if he has been on the brink of death since childhood. He does not even remember a time when he had relief from this misery. If anything, these verses demonstrate that believers are not immune from suffering, even horrendous suffering. But we are just getting started.
It is one thing to be under the weight of such suffering. But at least the psalmist could know the nearness of God in such an experience, right? Wrong. The psalmist is not only close to death, but second, he is oppressed by God, according to verses 6-7 and 15b-17. Notice how often the psalmist attributes his sufferings to God in these verses: “You have put me in the depths of the pit” (v. 6); “Your wrath likes heavy upon me, and you overwhelm me with all your waves” (v. 7). “I suffer your terrors; I am helpless” (v. 15b); “Your wrath has swept over me; your dreadful assaults destroy me.” We also see the same pronouns appearing in verses 8, 14, and 18. Repeatedly, the psalmist attributes his horrific sufferings to the hand of God, speaking in such a way as to communicate that God stands against him.
I think our natural instinct, at least in the modern world, is to put great distance between God and suffering. We do not naturally speak the way the psalmist speaks here, because we have a hard time seeing how God could be good if he is the one who afflicts us. Modern people tend to be more comfortable with a view of God as sympathetic but ultimately powerless to prevent our pain. His powerlessness may be due to the fact that he simply is not all-powerful. This is the view put forth in the famous book from a number of years ago entitled When Bad Things Happen to Good People. Some theologians today, known as “open theists,” argue that God is all-powerful, but he has freely chosen to limit his power to make room for the freedom of his creatures, and thus there are many things that happen to us that he simply could not have prevented. By divesting God of his sovereignty, these theologians believe they can get him off the hook for all the bad things that happen in our lives.
But the psalmist is not eager to do that. He inhabits a God-centered universe, where God does not have to justify himself to man. And he faces the hard truth squarely in the face, that what he suffers, he suffers at the hand of God. In fact, he goes so far as to say that God’s “wrath” (vv. 7, 16), “terrors” (v. 15), and “dreadful assaults” (v. 16) have closed in on him and overwhelmed him. Does this mean that we are reading the lament of someone who has committed some grievous sin that has provoked the Lord to anger? I don’t see any evidence for that. Nowhere does the psalmist hint that he has brought this upon himself with some specific action. Nowhere does he confess sin to the Lord in this psalm. We should view his sufferings, then, not as traceable to some specific sin, but rather as one of the effects of living as a sinner in a world that is under the divine curse. Why he should suffer these things instead of someone else remains a mystery hidden in the divine will. And the same is true for you, if you are experiencing the darkness of God’s oppression right now. Don’t try to justify God by distancing him from your sufferings. He is not going to explain himself to you. Instead, trust him through the darkness. Trust that, when all is said and done, God will justify himself.
So we have seen the utter horror of the psalmist’s condition, and the greater horror of experiencing his sufferings as divine oppression. At the very least, he might find some comfort in the company of sympathetic friends. But no, he does not even enjoy that comfort. We see, third, that the psalmist is utterly alone. At the end of both cycles, we see this in verses 8-9a and 18. In verse 8 he cries, “You have caused my companions to shun me; you have made me a horror to them.” That word for “horror” means “abomination,” or something hateful, and it is used elsewhere to refer to idols and sinful practices that the Israelites were to avoid like the plague. This is why I believe the specific illness in view here is leprosy, because it would have made him unclean before the Law and thus would have made him an abomination to the community. Even his friends had to withdraw from him for fear of being contaminated. Verse 18 makes the same point: “You have caused my beloved and my friend to shun me; my companions have become darkness.” So what is the result? Look back up to verses 8b-9a: “I am shut in so that I cannot escape; my eye grows dim through sorrow.” Not only is he suffering terribly, but he is utterly alone in his sufferings. Like Job, whose children were dead, whose wife had given up hope, and whose comforters were miserable comforters, Heman finds himself facing the darkness with no support at all.
These are the sufferings of Heman the Ezrahite. And I think we can sum up what we have seen here with the word “Godforsaken.” Is there anything edifying to us that we can draw from his experience and example? Indeed there is. That brings us to the other section of the psalm:
Here we will be focusing on the remaining verses, verses 1-2 and 9b-14. What can we say about his prayers based on the teachings of these verses? Four things.
First, they originate from the knowledge of God. And when I say “knowledge,” I mean relational, experiential knowledge, not merely intellectual knowledge. Heman prays like a man who knows God. Look at verse 1: “O LORD, God of my salvation.” There is a personal dimension here that indicates that the faith by which he prays has deep roots in his own experience. He cries out, not merely to the God who saves, but to the God of my salvation, the God whose grace and mercy I trust to be available for me. Longing for deliverance, he cries out to the God whom he knows can deliver him. As an Israelite whose identity was stamped by that great act of deliverance, the exodus from Egypt, Heman calls out to the God he knows to be his God.
Second, these prayers are oriented to the glory of God. Here we turn our attention to the perplexing questions in verses 10-12. Let us read these verses again: “Do you work wonders for the dead? Do the departed rise up to praise you? Is your steadfast love declared in the grave, or your faithfulness in Abaddon? Are your wonders known in the darkness, or your righteousness in the land of forgetfulness?” Again, note how well the psalmist knows God: he speaks of his “wonders,” the great acts of deliverance that God has wrought for his people. He speaks of his “steadfast love” (hesed) and “faithfulness,” the two attributes that God revealed to Moses (Exodus 34:5-7) as the essence of his name, indicating God’s free, sovereign grace to the undeserving and his unfailing commitment to keep his word to his covenant people. He also mentions the “righteousness” of God by which God acts to set things right in his creation, judging oppressors and delivering those who are oppressed, so that in the Old Testament “righteousness” is closely linked to the Lord’s acts of salvation for his people. But while the psalmist clearly knows God based on the way he describes him, it is important to note here the purpose of these questions: to press God to act for his own glory. The implied answer to every question here is “No.” God does not work wonders for the dead. The departed do not rise up to praise him. His steadfast love is not declared in the grave. His faithfulness is not declared in Abaddon (the “place of destruction,” another name for Sheol). His wonders are not known in the darkness, and his righteousness is not known in the land of forgetfulness. When we read a passage such as this from the Old Testament, and then we flip over to the New Testament and see Paul saying in Philippians 1:21 that to die is gain because it means departing to be with Christ, we may wonder how both statements could be in the same Bible. How can we fit these things together?
I think there are two things we can say in answer to that question. The first is that we need to understand that this passage is written from the perspective of this world as the stage of God’s redeeming activity. To be pulled away from the stage is, therefore, to be drawn away from the action and to have your voice silenced in the drama. From the perspective of this world, the dead do not rise up to praise the Lord or declare his steadfast love and faithfulness. That’s because the dead do not do anything. They have been silenced. And the psalmist is pleading with the Lord here as a way of saying, “If you let me die, that will be one less voice to declare your saving acts in this world. For the sake of your glory in this world, deliver me so that I may go on praising you!” And so his prayer is oriented to the glory of God, because his whole life is oriented to the same. Can you pray the same prayer? If you were suddenly to die today, would the result be less praise to God in this world? Would a mouth that had formerly delighted to declare his goodness be silenced? Could you pray with integrity the same prayer if you were on the brink of death?
But something else we can say in answer to the question about how the Old Testament and New Testament perspectives on death cohere is to recognize that there is a redemptive-historical shift that has occurred from the Old to the New. Christ has been raised from the dead, defeating death, and thus death’s sting has been taken away. That means that we, who are new covenant believers, experience death as a falling asleep, an anticipation of the day when we will awake through resurrection to be with Christ forever. The psalmist here rightly views death as an enemy, a curse that has intruded into God’s good world. For us who are new covenant believers, death is still an enemy, but it is a defeated enemy. At Christian funerals, we rightly rejoice that our loved ones are with Christ, but we should never, ever celebrate death itself. We should see it for what it is: an oppressor for whom the clock is ticking.
And so the psalmist prays from a personal knowledge of God, and he prays in a way that is oriented to the glory of God. We notice, third, from these verses that his prayers are constantly before God. He cries out “day and night” according to verse 1. He cries out “Every day” according to verse 9, spreading out his hands to the Lord in petition. In verse 13 he cries to the Lord “in the morning,” the time to expect help from the Lord, as in Psalm 46:5: “God is in the midst of her [Zion]; she shall not be moved; God will help her when morning dawns.” The psalmist prays without giving up.
And that is what makes the next truth so surprising. For we have seen that his prayers originate from the knowledge of God, are oriented to the glory of God, and are constantly before God. But they are also, fourth, still unanswered by God. Read verses 13-14 together: “But I, O LORD, cry to you; in the morning my prayer comes before you. O LORD, why do you cast my soul away? Why do you hide your face from me?” In verse 14, he is not speaking in general of the sufferings he is enduring. He is speaking specifically of the fact that he has called out to the Lord in his sufferings, and the Lord has not answered. To this point, God remains hidden from him.
And this is the surprise that I mentioned earlier about this lament. Psalm 88 teaches us not merely to cry out to God in times of distress. It teaches us to keep crying out to God even when God has forsaken us. It tells us to persevere through what St. John of the Cross called “the dark night of the soul,” the time when God deliberately hides his face and leaves us under the darkness. Psalm 88 was written at such a time. You see, most laments have some kind of a happy ending. They declare either that God has already acted to deliver, or the certainty that he will shortly. But psalm 88 has no happy ending. The last word in this psalm, both in English and in Hebrew, is “darkness.” And that is where it leaves us.
But this is exactly what we need sometimes, because when we endure, alone, an experience that can be likened to traveling slowly through a dark tunnel, we may plod along for miles without seeing where that tunnel ends. Some of you are facing illnesses, either in your own body or in your family, that have left you with uncertainty about the future. Some of you are worried sick about the salvation of your children. Some of you may be devastated by the painful experience of not being able to have children. Some of you are suffering the effects of a difficult, or even a broken, marriage. Some of you do not have a clue about how you are going to make ends meet financially over the long haul. And the most painful thing about your experience is the uncertainty of where it will lead.
I cannot tell you where the tunnel ends. God won’t tell you either. But he has given you an example in Psalm 88 of a man whose darkness was as overwhelming as anything imaginable, and yet who was still driven to cry out to the God who had forsaken him. Psalm 88 is a dark lament, but the mere fact that it is here is testimony enough that its author trusted in the Lord. Why else would he cry out to him? And in crying out to him, Heman became God’s agent to instruct us on how to respond to the dark night of the soul. It is not easy to do. I know that in my own life, if I feel the darkness of depression settling in, my instinct is to turn inward, away from God, and to retreat into my own feelings of self-pity. Calling out to him does not come naturally to me at those times. And so, my ability to call out to God must itself be a gift of God’s grace. As Oswald Bayer writes, “Distress does not always teach us to pray. It can push us into unlamenting resignation, or despair, or autonomous attempts to overcome it. It does not necessarily lead to lament in the presence of God. The Word must come first, to empower us. ‘To you, O my heart, he has said, ‘seek my face!’ [Psalm 27:8]. Lament and petitionary prayer are possible only on the basis of the promise. ‘Call upon me in the day of trouble; I will deliver you’ [Psalm 50:15]. God is he who addresses and hears us, and he has answered even before we call upon him. ‘Before they call I will answer.’ [Isaiah 65:24].”
And so our God is God, even of the Godforsaken. But don’t take it from me. Take it from Jesus Christ, who, hanging on a plank of wood under the darkness of a bizarre Friday afternoon, cried out to the Father, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” And then he died, utterly alone. But his lament was not the last word. For on the following Sunday, the God of the Godforsaken raised him from the dead, and at that moment a new world began.
If you have not looked to this Godforsaken man in faith and sought the forgiveness of sins in his name, then go to him now. If you reject him, then on the day of judgment you will be forsaken by God forever. But if you receive him, then with him you too will rise from the dead into the blessings of the age to come. Come to him in faith, and join yourself to his death and resurrection through baptism.
If you are a believer in good standing with a church, come and celebrate with us at the Lord’s table this morning. Celebrate the death and resurrection that assures you that your dark night of the soul, your Godforsakenness, is only temporary. Like the psalmist, you may feel as though you belong in a tomb to be counted among the dead. Come to this table and remember that Sunday morning is right around the corner.