This series has been titled “Psalms: Anatomy of the Soul” and this particular description of the psalms was coined by John Calvin, who said that “there is not an emotion of which anyone can be conscious that is not here [that is, in the psalms] represented as a mirror”.
Why do we need a mirror for our own emotions? Emotions are a tricky business. Have you ever just felt off? Or even if you know you feel a certain emotion, have you ever struggled to know how to pray about it? Strangely, even though what we feel is inside us, we may not understand it. And even when do know what we feel, we often don’t know how to pray about it.
So the psalms reveal to us our own emotions and give us the framework and vocabulary to understand, makes sense of, and express them. Psalm 88 will teach us about about despair.
(A) When Life is Full of Troubles: Remember God’s faithfulness & cry out (Ps 88:1-9a)
The Psalmist calls God “LORD” at the beginning of the psalm (Ps 88:1a). Wrapped up in this name is something specific and special about God. He is the God who saved the people from Egypt. In Exodus 3:15-17, God told Moses how he can introduce and teach the people of Israel about God. He is the God of their fathers and He has heard the people’s cries. He promised to deliver them from Egypt and bring them to the Promised Land. This is who the covenantal God is.
The psalmist also calls God the “God of my salvation” (Ps 88:1b). He remembers God’s past faithfulness and acknowledges His sovereignty and power to save. He appeals to this same God here, and situates his own experience in this larger narrative.
Last week, we explored the issue of worry and what are our default processes when we worry? How do we address sadness? What do we turn to when we despair? Do we turn to shows or friends? Do we resolve to work harder? The psalmist shows us another way. Psalm 88 teaches us that how we respond to despair is ultimately decided by who our view of God. The psalmist’s cry to God immediately follows His declaration of who God is! He prays to God because he thinks of God as the LORD, the God of his salvation.
How do you think of God tonight? If we think of God as distant and unwilling to save, then prayer is a waste of time. But if we know that God is the LORD, if He sovereignly makes and keeps covenant, then prayer is our only hope.
How, then, do we cultivate such a view of God? We must, like the psalmist, retrace the LORD's faithfulness through the generations -- both to our forefathers in the faith and to us personally. Friends, in times of trouble, let’s turn to our Bibles, for we know that as we pore over the repeated accounts of God’s steadfast love, we will grow in trusting that God really is the LORD, the God of our salvation.
At the same time, we must be wary of over-simplifying what it means to trust God in despair. As we shall see, Psalm 88 does not present a white-washed picture of the emotional response to difficult times.
In Psalm 88:3-9, there is a list of the troubles the psalmist faced and his corresponding feelings. The psalmist described his soul as “full of troubles” (Ps 88:3-6), meaning there is no space for any other emotion in his life. He felt that he is in so much trouble that he is going to die. People also think he’s going to die. He loses energy. He’s basically a zombie. He feels forgotten by God and detached from God’s care
The psalmist goes on to write that he feels that God’s wrath lies against him for his sins (Ps 88:7).It is described as a sense of drowning and being unable to function anymore. If you’ve ever felt a strong wave hit you, there is that immediate realization that there is nothing you could do to fight it and the psalmist likens his emotions to this feeling.
He also feels lonely, abandoned by those who were once close to him (Ps 88:8). He feels trapped and unable to escape. He has also been crying so much that his eyes fail him (Ps 88:9).
Yet, the psalmist attributes his experiences to God. God put him in the depths of the pit (Ps 88:6) and God’s wrath lies heavy (Ps 88:7). The central problem is that these things are happening to him because God is against him. Despair can make it hard for us to do things, but also make it feel like God is against us. In the dark night of the soul, we might ask, “Can God be for me? Did He really forgive my sins?” Do you feel like your life is full of troubles, and you feel like you have no energy to do anything — get up, go to work, serve in church? Despite repenting and turning to Christ, you can’t shake off this feeling like God’s wrath is against you? Often, when we share our sorrows, we end off with purses like “it’s not big deal” or “I will trust that God is doing this for our good”, but deep down, we don’t believe this. Maybe we believe that Christians need to be cheery people, or when we’ve previously confided in someone, they’ve chided us, and we think that despair is sin.
Ps 88 presents us with a raw depiction of despair. This psalm has been inspired by God, and it must mean that we can be honest and don’t need to hide what we feel. There is a space for lament in the Christian’s life, and He understands. How comforting it is to know that God understands! He does not reject and despise those who face despair. He not only gives us space to lament, He gives us the vocabulary to do so in a way that is rooted in trusting Him but allows for honest expression of emotions.
This psalm should also show us how to encourage those who despair. If someone’s sadness is too intense or sustained, we may judge and distance ourselves from them. Do we give hurting believers less space to lament than God does? How should we encourage the despairing? Now this is a psalm of the sons of choirmaster, addressed to the choirmaster. The congregational singing of such a psalm flips our pattern of comforting people on its head. It is an application of Rom 12:15, to weep with those who weep, to join them in the expression of deep and heartfelt sorrow. Too often do we shove platitudes down people’s throats when Scripture calls us to weep with them.
(B) When Life is Full of Troubles: Appeal based on God’s character & wait (Ps 88:9b-18)
The psalmist asked 3 questions in Psalm 88:10-12, and he seems to be saying things in a roundabout way and he appears to be revealing what he knows about God in his questions. He knows that God works wonders and shows steadfast love and faithfulness (Ps 88:10-11). God’s wonders deserve to be known in the darkness and His righteousness in the land of forgetfulness. David says something similar in Psalm 6:5.
The psalmist is struggling with the tension between these truths he knows about God and his emotional experience of the preceding verses and of being cast away and ignored by God (Ps 88:14-15).
Notice how he is not saying save me because I do not want to die. Rather, he is saying, saving me so that I can praise you and show your wonders. The psalmist is zealous for God’s glory even in despair. It is a beautiful picture of faith in difficult times. We know that God is sovereign and faithful and shows steadfast love. Yet we also suffer and struggle. Both these two things can be true, and the former doesn't have to be abandoned. The psalmist wrestles and holds both things true before God. Even in the depths of despair, the psalmist is zealous for God’s glory!
Far from being faithless, the psalmist’s response is a beautiful picture of faith. On the one hand, we all know God as the LORD, the God of our salvation. We hear these grand promises of God in the Bible — His steadfast love, His faithfulness, His wonders. On the other hand, we experience suffering: a sense of distance from God, loneliness. The psalmist demonstrates how we can struggle with these 2 sets of truths in tension without abandoning the former or suppressing the latter. We do so by laying these tensions before Him and appealing that He would act in accordance with His character.
This is also the best way we can pray to God! How often are our prayers weak and timid because we come to him only with how we feel, and not what we know about His character and promises? If we know that God is sovereign but do not know that He is faithful, we may not dare ask, or give up after a season of silence. If we know He is faithful but not able to work wonders, we may ask only for small things. If we do not know His steadfast love, we may fear to ask forgiveness. But if we come to Him knowing His character and pray in accordance with His promises to us, we will pray boldly and incessantly.
As the psalm ends, the end of the psalm is not more hopeful than the middle (Ps 88:15-18). It feels hopeless and he seems overwhelmed. There is a sense that the end of the psalm speeds up and it is more punctuated. His problems remain and he still has no answer from God. This is why this psalm is described as one of the saddest psalms in the psalter. There is no turn and no hope. He still believes that God has rejected him.
The way this Psalm 88 ends is why it is often described as the saddest psalm. Although the psalmist maintains his trust in God, there is no turn to hope within the psalm. The psalmist still believes God has rejected him.
The way this psalm ends means that God does not demand that we immediately “feel better” after prayer. Yet, at the same time, He does not mean for us never to turn to hope. That is because, for the Christian, the despair we so deeply feel will never correspond to objective reality. If God really were against us, we would be beyond hope and would remain in the despair of Psalm 88. But that is not true for the Christian. We may feel abandoned by God, we may feel like His wrath is upon us, but we know that God will not leave nor forsake us, that our sins are forgiven, that there is life beyond the grave. So there is our emotional reality – how we feel; and then there is our objective reality – what Scripture promises us. In this disconnect between the two realities, there is hope.
But I wonder if we know that this disconnect between emotional and objective reality is only true for us because it was not true for someone else. For one person in the history of all who have wholeheartedly trusted God, the emotional reality of despair corresponded to what was actually happening to him. This person is Jesus Christ.
On the night before Jesus’ crucifixion, He went to pray at the garden, knowing the horror and despair that He would soon undergo. Scripture describes his “Ps 88:3” experience: His soul was very sorrowful, even to the point of death (Mark 14:34).
When the crowd came to seize Jesus, He experienced Ps 88:8 – instead of standing by Him, His closest companions, the ones he had cared for and taught, to whom He had explained parables, whose feet He had washed, shunned him: Judas betrayed Him. And the rest of His disciples, without exception, left Him and fled (Mark 14:50, cf v8). Peter, whom He loved, denied Him thrice. Jesus was utterly alone.
Then, on Good Friday, He became a horror to the watching crowds as He was crucified like a common criminal. On that cross, He experienced Ps 88:7, 16, 17 in the truest sense. He bore the cup of God’s heavy, overwhelming, dreadful wrath for the sin of God’s redeemed. That wrath, a fraction of which would have completely and utterly ruined us, He drank every last drop.
When Jesus took our sins upon Him, He knew what it was really like to live Ps 88:14, to have his soul cast away from God, to have the Father turn away. At that moment, when God looked at Jesus, He saw sin. That is why Jesus cried out “My God, My God, why have You forsaken me?” And after it was finished, Jesus died, and was counted among those who go down to the pit.
Friends, because Jesus bore every drop of God’s wrath for your iniquities and my sin on that cross, we are now accounted righteous and can know for a fact that no wrath remains against us. Because Jesus was forsaken and experienced true loneliness, we know God will never leave nor forsake us. On the Cross, God worked wonders for us, He demonstrated His steadfast love and faithfulness to those who rejected Him. Therefore, whatever we feel emotionally, even in the darkest night of the soul, we know that because of Jesus and His work on the cross that God loves us and is for us.