The Book of Psalms

Word Study

"God of my salvation," Hebrew Elohei yeshu'ati (אֱלֹהֵי יְשׁוּעָתִי). The darkest psalm in the book still opens with this title. Whatever the sufferer feels, he addresses God as the One who saves, and he keeps that name on his lips to the end.

"I have cried," tza'aqti (צָעַקְתִּי). From the edge of the grave the sufferer cries without ceasing: "O LORD God of my salvation, I have cried day and night before thee." The praying has not stopped, only gone unanswered.

"full of troubles," save'ah vera'ot (שָׂבְעָה בְרָעוֹת), sated, glutted with evils. His soul is "full of troubles" the way a man is full after a heavy meal. He has had his fill of evils and can hold no more, and "my life draweth nigh unto the grave."

"the pit," bor (בּוֹר). "I am counted with them that go down into the pit: I am as a man that hath no strength." He is not merely near death but already numbered with those who have gone down into it.

"free among the dead," bammetim chofshi (בַּמֵּתִים חָפְשִׁי). The phrase is bitter: he is "free among the dead," released from the world of the living only in the sense that he has been discharged into the grave, "like the slain that lie in the grave."

"cut off from thy hand," nigzaru miyyadekha (נִגְזְרוּ מִיָּדֶךָ). The deepest wound is not death but separation: the dead are those "whom thou rememberest no more: and they are cut off from thy hand." What he dreads is being outside the reach of God.

Explanation

Before the darkness swallows everything, catch the two things this opening does, for they are the reason the psalm is not despair but faith. First, look at the very first words: "O LORD God of my salvation." This is the darkest psalm in the Bible, and yet it opens by naming God as my salvation. Everything that follows will feel like the opposite, no rescue, no light, no relief, and still the sufferer will not let go of this name. It is the one shaft of light he clings to when every other light has gone out, and it holds the whole psalm up. Second, notice the direction of all his misery. He is "full of troubles," his life "draweth nigh unto the grave," he feels "counted with them that go down into the pit", but every word of it is poured out "before thee," to God, at God, toward God. He does not turn away from God in his pain; he turns to Him, and cries "day and night." That is the great lesson of this passage: faith in the dark is not the absence of anguish but the refusal to stop praying. Heman feels forgotten, "whom thou rememberest no more... cut off from thy hand," and the feeling is crushing; but the feeling that God has forgotten him does not stop him from crying to God. He prays his very complaint that God seems not to hear, straight into the ear he fears is closed. This is what it looks like to keep believing when you cannot feel a thing.

Gospel Focus

"O LORD God of my salvation, I have cried day and night before thee", no one has prayed these words more truly than the Lord Jesus Christ. In the days of His flesh He "offered up prayers and supplications with strong crying and tears unto him that was able to save him from death" (Hebrews 5:7); in Gethsemane He cried through the night, His soul "exceeding sorrowful, even unto death" (Matthew 26:38), the very language of this psalm, "my soul is full of troubles." The Man of sorrows entered the pit that this psalm describes, going down into the place of the dead for us. And because He did, no believer who prays this psalm prays it alone; the God of our salvation has Himself cried day and night in the dark. When your soul is full of troubles and life draws near the grave, you may cry as Heman did, and as Jesus did, and hold, as they held, to the one name that light or dark cannot change: "O LORD God of my salvation."

Word Study

"the lowest pit," Hebrew bor tachtiyyot (בּוֹר תַּחְתִּיּוֹת). The sufferer traces his agony to God's own hand: "Thou hast laid me in the lowest pit, in darkness." Not merely fallen in, but laid there, and laid at the very bottom.

"in the deeps," bimtzolot (בִּמְצֹלוֹת). The pit gives way to deep water. He is pictured sunk where the sea is deepest, out of the light and beyond any footing.

"thy wrath lieth hard," alai samekhah chamatekha (עָלַי סָמְכָה חֲמָתֶךָ). "Thy wrath lieth hard upon me." The word is one of pressing weight, as of something laid on a man and leaning down until he cannot rise.

"all thy waves," kol-mishbarekha (כָּל־מִשְׁבָּרֶיךָ), thy breakers. "And thou hast afflicted me with all thy waves." Breakers do not come singly; they arrive one behind another, and he says all of them have gone over him.

"I am shut up," kalu (כָּלֻא), imprisoned. To the affliction is added isolation: "Thou hast put away mine acquaintance far from me... I am shut up." He is locked in, cut off from the people who might have stood by him.

"cannot come forth," velo etze (וְלֹא אֵצֵא). "I am shut up, and I cannot come forth." There is no exit he can find and no strength left to force one; yet even so, "I have stretched out my hands unto thee."

Explanation

The striking thing in these verses, and it is strange comfort, is how relentlessly the sufferer lays his suffering at God's feet. Read the pronouns: "Thou hast laid me in the lowest pit... Thy wrath lieth hard upon me... thou hast afflicted me with all thy waves... Thou hast put away mine acquaintance." He does not say the pit is bad luck, or fate, or the mere cruelty of enemies. He sees the hand of God even in his darkness. This is not faithlessness; it is the opposite. Only a man who truly believes God is sovereign over all things will argue with God about his pain, because only such a man believes God is the one who can change it. The despairing turn away; Heman turns toward the God he holds responsible. And the affliction he describes is total. It is wrath, the heaviest word: he feels the displeasure of God pressing down like a weight. It is like drowning, "all thy waves," breaker after breaker rolling over him with no gap to breathe. And it is lonely: "thou hast put away mine acquaintance far from me... I am shut up, and I cannot come forth." Suffering has walled him in; friends have withdrawn, and he cannot get out. This is the isolation of the deepest affliction, the sense of being sealed in a room no one else will enter. And yet, even here, verse 9: "LORD, I have called daily upon thee, I have stretched out my hands unto thee." Shut in on every side, he still stretches out his hands to God. The prison has walls, but it has no roof; the way up is still open.

Gospel Focus

"Thy wrath lieth hard upon me, and thou hast afflicted me with all thy waves", these words reach their deepest truth at the cross of Jesus Christ. There the sinless Son bore what He had never earned: the wrath of God against our sin pressed down upon Him, wave after wave of judgment rolling over His soul, until He cried out under it. And the loneliness of this psalm was His to the full, for "all the disciples forsook him, and fled" (Matthew 26:56); His acquaintance was put far from Him, and He could say with the prophet, "I have trodden the winepress alone; and of the people there was none with me" (Isaiah 63:3). He was shut up in the darkness of that hour so that we might be brought out. Because Christ bore the wrath that "lieth hard," no believer in Christ will ever face that wrath, "there is therefore now no condemnation to them which are in Christ Jesus." What Heman felt as wrath, and could not explain, the child of God now knows can never be wrath in the judicial sense, for Christ has drunk that cup dry. Even our darkest afflictions are now, in Him, the discipline of a Father, not the sentence of a Judge.

Word Study

"But unto thee," Hebrew va'ani eleikha (וַאֲנִי אֵלֶיךָ). Even now the sufferer keeps praying: "But unto thee have I cried, O LORD." The whole weight of the psalm hangs on that "but"; the God he complains of is still the only God he calls to.

"shall my prayer prevent thee," tekaddemekka (תְקַדְּמֶךָּ), come before, meet thee early. "And in the morning shall my prayer prevent thee." His prayer is up before he is, going out to meet God at the first light of every new day of trouble.

"why castest thou off," lammah tiznach (לָמָה תִזְנַח). "LORD, why castest thou off my soul?" He does not deny that he has been thrown away; he asks God the reason for it, and asks it to God's face.

"hidest thou thy face," tastir panekha (תַּסְתִּיר פָּנֶיךָ). "Why hidest thou thy face from me?" The face that the priestly blessing asked God to shine on His people is here turned away, and that is the sharpest grief in the psalm.

"distracted," afunah (אָפוּנָה), benumbed, at wit's end. "While I suffer thy terrors I am distracted." He is not merely sorrowful but numbed past thinking, a man who has run out of any way to make sense of what is happening to him.

"into darkness," machshakh (מַחְשָׁךְ). The psalm closes with its unrelieved last word: "Lover and friend hast thou put far from me, and mine acquaintance into darkness." There is no turn to praise at the end, only the dark, and the prayer still going up into it.

Explanation

Everything in this closing turns on one small word and one final word. The small word is "But": "But unto thee have I cried, O LORD." After all the wrath and drowning and abandonment, after the questions that get no answer, comes this stubborn "but", the hinge on which faith hangs when nothing else holds. He has no relief to report, no light to point to; all he has is that he is still crying to God, and he will keep a standing morning appointment: "in the morning shall my prayer prevent thee", my prayer will be there to meet You at daybreak, before anything else. This is faith reduced to its barest essential: not feeling, not answers, not deliverance, simply the refusal to pray anywhere but to God. And then the final word, and it is unlike the ending of any other psalm. Every other lament, however dark, climbs at last into some ray of hope, "but I will trust," "yet will I praise Him." This one does not. Its last line is: "Lover and friend hast thou put far from me, and mine acquaintance into darkness." The psalm ends in the dark, with no resolution, and God inspired it that way on purpose. Why? Because some of His children walk through seasons this dark, depression, dereliction, long unanswered anguish, and they need to know that such a prayer is in the Bible; that a saint can end a day in darkness and still be a saint; that God is not offended by the honest cry that finds no light. Psalm 88 is God's gift to those for whom the morning has not yet come. It does not pretend. It simply keeps crying "unto thee", and trusts the God it cannot see.

Gospel Focus

"Why hidest thou thy face from me?... mine acquaintance into darkness", these closing cries were answered, and taken up, at Calvary. When Jesus hung upon the cross, "there was darkness over all the land unto the ninth hour" (Matthew 27:45), and out of that darkness came the cry that gathers up all of Psalm 88: "My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?" (Matthew 27:46). The Son endured the hiding of the Father's face, forsaken by His friends who fled and by the felt presence of God, and went down into a darkness deeper than Heman's, real dereliction under the weight of the world's sin. He did it so that His people would never be truly forsaken, for it was because He was cast off that we are received. And here is the hope this psalm withholds but the gospel supplies: Christ's darkness had a third-day morning. He was heard; He rose. So the believer whose own psalm seems to end, like this one, in the dark may know that in Christ the darkness is not the end of the story, even when it is the end of the chapter. "Neither death, nor life... shall be able to separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord" (Romans 8:38-39). The morning is coming, because the Man of sorrows already walked out of the tomb into it.