God’s silence is perturbing. In philosophy of religion, it is often cited as evidence that God does not really exist, or at the very least, He does not seem to want to make Himself known. After all, if He really wanted to reveal Himself to us, couldn’t He simply appear to everyone? Or at least speak directly to each individual in an unmistakable act of communication?
But our psalm today goes deeper than these theoretical musings. Our psalm today sees God’s silence as a far deeper experiential problem. It brings us into the heart of Christian lamentation for the many moments that God’s presence scarcely seems felt, and then it models for us faithful Christian responses to what seems like God’s deafening silence.
And then it calls us to address the larger theological problem for Christian: If God is a good and loving Father, what good and loving Father seems silent in the face of His children’s suffering?
(A) Three types of lamentations: faithful responses to the absence of God’s dwelling (Ps 13:1-3)
“How long, O LORD?”
This lamentation finds resonance with Christian experiences across the ages, and we see patterns of such lamentation across Scripture. Interestingly, many of these lamentations that adopt the same phraseology in the Bible are lamentations that bewail apparent injustice and call for God to swiftly mete justice upon evildoers (cf. Hab 1:2-3, Rev 6:9-10). These are all faithful models of lamentation, but we see in this psalm that David’s focus is uniquely turned inward. Rather than beginning with an outward-focus for justice to be served, David mourns his inward experience of missing the LORD’s favour and presence. Put simply, David laments the absence of intimacy and communion with God.
David also assigns some form of agency to God’s absence - it is God who ‘forgets’ David, and it is God who ‘hides His face’ - and it is important that we do not miss David’s big idea! David is not chastising God’s ability to remember things rightly, or show favour as He has promised. Rather, David draws on the poetic language of lamentation to bring to mind the simple truth that our experience of God is entirely dependent on God! Mankind can not reach up to God in an attempt at Babel 2.0 - God must choose to reveal Himself to us and make His presence felt. Note also, that God’s sovereignty in making His presence known does not restrict David to fatalistic despair. Inasmuch as David acknowledges that his experience of God is utterly dependent on God, David is also active in bringing his lamentation before God, and this is a picture of what it looks like to pursue God in faith.
It is important that we do not miss out on the significance of intimacy and communion with God. Ps 13:1c helps us to see that this absence goes beyond the mere companionship that we experience with our human friends, for this absence concerns God ‘hiding’ His face. Perhaps the best way to understand what it means for God to hide His face is through the inverse experience of God showing His face (cf. Exo 33:17-20). For God to let the light of His face shine upon us (cf. Num 6:25) is for God to let His glory dwell amongst His people, and for them to witness a foretaste of His divine glory. Friends, God’s absence has cosmic significance. Where God is absent, His glory is hidden from our experience. To witness God’s glory is to witness His transcendence breaking into our immanence, where the eternal weight of His God-ness enters into our now-ness. To miss out on such glory is definitely reason for lamentation.
What does this mean for us today, especially when this pandemic has really disrupted our lives? I’m not sure about you, but this ‘new normal’ has brought with it a supernormal lethargy. There are mornings when I feel far closer to my digital screens than I do to God, and mornings when the weight of inertia seems to outpace any forward motion that I can muster within myself towards God. In this psalm, we have a companion with David. These feelings of separation are not meant to be masked over by Netflix, boutique coffee, or more productivity. These feelings of separation are meant to be brought before God!
Another significant touchpoint where I have personally felt an absence of intimacy with God is through the disruptions to our weekly church assemblies. 1 John 4:16 tells us that God abides in us as we abide in love for one another, and there is nothing quite like the love that we can exercise and experience through our physical gatherings for gospel purposes. Jean Valjean of Les Miserables almost got it right: to love another person in holy christian love is to see the face of God. The church is the glorious blood-bought body of Christ that comprises of a diversity of peoples, all of whom witness to God’s tender mercies and grace through their lives and experience. Why wouldn’t we lament missing out on this precious God-ordained opportunity to know His presence and His glory?
In sum, David’s lamentation begins with his agonising desire to experience again God’s personal presence and glory. We should desire the same, and we should lament our inability to gather as local bodies to experience its fullness.
Consequently, David raises two more lamentations: sorrow at his lack of godly counsel, and sadness at the triumph his enemies enjoy. The fact that David laments “taking counsel in (his) soul” is slightly at odds with the dominant theme of self-help in our culture. We live in an age where it is a boastful matter to be able to ‘make it on your own’, or provide an abundance of ‘self-love’, ‘self-actualisation’, and ‘self-help’. But this point of lamentation would have been intuitive to David’s day, which was wiser to the fact that we are deeply relational creatures. It is a horrific thing to be alone when the skies of your heart are overcast, dark thunderclouds rolling in and peals of lightning crackling at you.
A brother recently noted that our daily usage of video-call applications made him realise how much more concerned he is with how people sees him, as opposed to focusing on them, that he might see them, know them, and love them. And he’s absolutely right! It is a tragic thing for both ourselves and our communities when we are our own counsellors. If our earthly communities are capable of providing such wisdom and comfort, how much more the wisdom and comfort that comes from our Creator? David laments in Ps 13 from the deep throes of his depressive experience and is teaches us that we can share in this lamentation too.
In lamenting the triumph his enemies experience over him, David laments not just the threat on his life, but also the fact that God’s enemies are exultant. David was Israel’s king, which wasn’t just his job. It means that he represents the nation, and therefore represents God’s rule before a watching world. It is this sense of oppression and defeat despite his godly ambition and rule that David brings before God, which brings us to a three crucial applicative points.
First, if Israel’s king - God’s representative before the nations on earth - experienced affliction at the hands of God’s enemies, we should expect the same. Most of us reading this only know the saying that “the blood of the martyrs is the seed of the church” from a distance, for we live in relatively comfort and peace. But the truth of our station is that we will all suffer and be persecuted insofar as we stand for the gospel. Friends, bring these lamentations before God! David, Habakkuk, and the souls of those who had been slain for the word of God are our predecessors, and there is ample space for us to join them in lamentation.
Second, let us be extremely clear: David is lamenting opposition to God’s holy rule, and not mere creaturely discomforts and tensions. This is not to downplay the severity of workplace conflicts or familial tension, nor does it undermine the many real tragedies that besiege many of us at every turn. While we can and should lament ordinary conflict before God, satanic opposition is the focus here. The COVID-19 situation has wreaked massive disruptions on many of our lives, and some of us have felt the brunt of its damage more so than others. But might we consider that this pandemic has allowed us to empathise, in some measure, with the fear and threat to physical safety that the persecuted church around the world knows in times of ‘normalcy’? Friends, there is definitely space for us to join in with the global church to lament the sufferings of our brothers and sisters in hostile regions. We lament with them.
Finally, Scripture also informs us that there is more to satanic opposition than physical turmoil. Sin remains our greatest enemy still, for it is unrepentant sin that sends our souls to hell. If you are reading this and you are exhausted from the war against sin, bring your despair to God. Sin’s grip on our hearts often feels ironclad - old sins spring up with new fervour with a surprising nimbleness, and we are often left feeling hopeless at the wretchedness of our condition. Lament these experiences before God! There is space for such lamentation too.
Before we move on to join David in his faith-filled petitions amidst lamentation, let us bring to bear two facts:
First, David’s grief is profoundly theocentric. The sorrow bearing down on David’s chest is sorrow at God-related matters. It is often in our deepest grief that we realise what our greatest treasure is. God is David’s greatest treasure, and it is the way of wisdom to consider the consistent theme of our own lamentations. Would our treasures be discovered to lie elsewhere?
Second, David shows us that bringing our lamentations to God is itself an act of faith. We are often tempted to think of faith in triumphalist modes, where faith is about declaring ‘supernatural favor’ on dire circumstances, or a trust-fall where we summon up all the optimism we can to proclaim that God is going to change our circumstances. We are to rightly hold on to God’s promises and hope in God, but we need to also realise that such attitudes often veer too far into Christian triumphalism, which sucks out all the oxygen in the room, leaving little space for thinking of our lamentations to God as an act of faith. Here, David shows us that we can also bring our lamentations to God as an act of faith!
(B) Two holistic petitions: One man’s cry for God’s redemption and provision (Ps 13:3-4)
Thankfully, David’s response does not leave us at lamentation, but brings us to petition. Since God is David’s greatest treasure, David’s first petition is for God’s ‘consideration’. This act of ‘consideration’ is radically different from our human considerations of new telephone plans, or when friends suggest activities we feel ambivalent about and we tell them we will ‘consider’ them. God’s consideration of Israel as a nation-group is the very reason for their genesis. In Exo 2:23-25, we see that Israel’s delivery from slavery to nationhood was precipitated by God hearing, remembering, seeing, and knowing them - God’s redemptive act of consideration! This was followed up by Moses’ commission to declare the personal name of God - YAHWEH, or ‘LORD’ in our Bibles - to the people of Israel, the same personal name of God that David uses in his address.
When David asks God to ‘consider and answer him’, he is not asking God to do a new trick or put on a new song and dance. Instead, David is calling on God to act mightily for His people’s redemption as He had done in the past. This is comforting for us today because frankly, our petitions are not too different. In the darkness of our lamentation, remember that our petitions to God are made against the glorious backdrop of His faithful redemption and care over His church that has stretched over millenniums! For thousands of years, the LORD has proven Himself faithful to His people, and as uncertain as our present circumstances might seem, we can rest in the knowledge that it is the same unchanging God whom we petition to act with that same efficacy of redemptive power for our sake.
David’s second petition for God to “light up (his) eyes” (Ps 13:3b) requires some contextualisation, because we are more likely to have said this to our Lasik surgeon than to God in prayer. From Ps 13:3b-4, it seems clear that David’s second petition is constituted by physical rescue and sustenance. We also see this in other Old Testament narratives, as in the case of Jonathan in 1 Sam 14:27 and Ezra’s prayer in Ezra 9:8, where the enlightening of their eyes was directly bound up in the revitalisation of their physical wellbeing and safety.
But there is more to this. David himself writes in Psalm 19 that the pure commandments of God enlighten the eyes, and Paul writes most emphatically in Eph 1:18-20 that the Holy Spirit has enlightened “the eyes of (our) hearts” that we might trust in our glorious heaven-bound hope and experience His great power and favour towards us. Pulling these two strands together, we see that David’s second petition is something we really should be incorporating more in our own prayer lives! As it is with a Lasik surgery, there is an immediate material need to be met, but the point of material provision is that we would experientially know God’s wisdom and favor! David goes beyond petitioning for mere life to petitioning for an abundant life in God’s ways. He does not simply pray for physical sustenance without spiritual nourishing; neither does he pivot to the other extreme by petitioning for spiritual enlightenment without present material help! There are no such dichotomies in David’s experience of God, for we need life to experience God, but life that is set on things apart from our eternal hope is not true life at all!
Some us who struggle to pray rightly about material circumstances, whether for ourselves or for another. One reason could be that unlike David, we have forgotten that we are embodied-souls. Will you consider petitioning God in faith to give light to your eyes and the eyes of those around you?
It is also rather apparent that David’s petitions match his lamentations. Where the intimacy, glory, and triumph that comes with God’s presence is absent, there David petitions that God would return and act mightily for His people’s redemption, that they would know live under His counsel and favour, the sum of which being an exaltation of His glory. And it is to this theme of God’s glory that we turn next.
(C) One steadfast hope: Trusting in our God of covenantal faithfulness and salvation (Ps 13:5-6)
We started this study by looking at how David brings His lamentations to God in faith, and these two concluding verses complete the picture by playing the robust tenor of any faithful prayer.
Against the backdrop of David’s dire circumstance and desperate petitions, the conjunction ‘but’ at the beginning of Ps 13:4 is the cliffhanger on which this narrative turns - What spurs David on in his misery? What will David choose to do in the midst of adversity? What anchors David’s hope of redemption?
Note first what David does not say. David does not say that he will dig deep and focus on the positives. David does not choose to enact a mission plan with his mighty plan. David does not anchor his petition on the strength of his devotion to God. Rather, David does what every single faithful Christian across every generation has done - he sets his hope on God’s steadfast love (Ps 13:5a).
We engaged this theme of God bringing about salvation according to His steadfast love in the first study of this series. There, Moses prayed in Psalm 90 for God’s people to be satisfied with God’s steadfast love. Consider the following picture of Israel’s experience in petitioning God for His steadfast love:
God’s people are asking Him to bring about a morning to end the long and difficult night and satisfy them with His everlasting love. They are asking God outside time to come into time and save them. This is salvation according to His steadfast love, a plea according to the covenant of God that connects God and His people. Zechariah picks up on this imagery in Luke 1:68-79. When God shows His steadfast love, it will be like the morning after a long night of waiting. Here in Ps 90, Moses is praying from his lifetime to the future, the day when God’s covenantal love will rescue His people.
All this time that our hearts have been aching, give us this time of joy, prays the psalmist (Ps 90:15). He is asking God to work out His plan in our fleeting days so that in the grand covenant story, He will bring about salvation. God is working out a bigger plan than Moses can imagine. We all want to see the whole story in our lifetime right now. We cannot fast forward our lives like we do on Netflix. When we ask God to intervene in our life, He will stretch our patience. Things may not happen in our lifetime or according to our timeline. But we can be assured that the God outside of time will bring to pass in His right time.”
We’ve referred to Ps 90 so that we might be reminded that God’s steadfast love is steadfast. It has persisted through the generations. It has been tried and tested. It has been found sure and secure - we can set our hopes on it. And we have this assurance because covenant making means that God associates His Person with His people, His name with their name, and His glory with their ultimate triumph. Do you see how this is both incredible grace and unshakable assurance? The fact that God associates Himself with us means that we are now on His team. What a glorious thought it is! Our covenant keeping God has chosen to associate His glory with His people, and His glory will shine through radiant as the midday sun. We can trust in the salvation of His steadfast love.
David concludes this psalm of lamentation by looking back at God’s faithfulness, which stirs him to praise God even as he suffers. This act of faith is the answer to the question we posed in the beginning - how can we trust that God is good when He seems silent in our suffering? Or to put it more crudely, what kind of Good Father seems silent in the face of His children’s deepest anguish?
The honest answer is that there is no earthly analogy that could help us understand David’s experience. The only way that David’s heart remained steadfast was because he had experienced God’s divine-disclosing, circumstance-defying, and mercy-manifesting goodness.
Until you taste and see His goodness for yourself, you will always struggle to trust that God is good when He seems silent in our suffering. But here’s the best part for us today. Regardless of how long we have been Christians, or whether we have been Christians at all, we can all look back and see God’s divine-disclosing, circumstance-defying, and mercy-manifesting goodness.
The truth of the matter is that none of us deserve God’s goodness. In our sin, we have not only disregarded Him, but have rebelled and despised Him. In this present moment, we can all look back some 2000 years in history to ponder anew that glorious moment when God proved Himself to be working for our greatest good, in the excruciating moments of His agonising silence to Jesus on the Cross. That’s how seriously God takes His covenant. That’s the extent to which God had chosen to associate Himself with us. On the Cross, Jesus fully-God and fully-man, bore the most agonising throes of silence that anyone has ever experienced as He bore our sins. This is how we can look back and trust that God is good to us even when He seems silent. For we know that He was working for our greatest good precisely in those moments when He seemed silent to Christ on the Cross.
The words of a wonderful 21st century hymn ring true:
“What truth can calm the troubled soul? God is good, God is good
Where is his grace and goodness known? In our great Redeemer’s blood
Who holds our faith when fears arise?
Who stands above the stormy trial?
Who sends the waves that bring us nigh
Unto the shore, the rock of Christ?”
(Christ Our Hope in Life and Death)