Songs in the Night

Having grown up in New Orleans, I can’t tell you how many times we’ve tuned in to the Weather Channel during hurricane season. And there’s Jim Cantore with the rain jacket leaning against the wind, screaming in the mic. Sheets of corrugated metal flying past. A small horse. They always seemed to send Cantore into the eye of the storm. He’s not in the studio, crisp shirt, full Windsor, witty banter with colleagues. He’s giving a live report on location while trying to not die.

Same here. This isn’t Heman the Ezrahite on a podcast with The Gospel Coalition, every hair in place. “Heman, glad to have you in the studio today. So tell us about hardship and the songwriting process.” No, this is a live report from landfall. Sideways rain. Screaming into the mic. And this is where the psalm starts to get real—these I/you descriptions, mainly in verses 3-8: “I have had enough” (v. 3); “I am . . . going down” (v. 4); “I am like a man without strength” (v. 4); “I am . . . abandoned . . . lying in the grave” (v. 5). And you: “You no longer remember [me favorably . . . I am] cut off from your care” (v. 5); “You have put me in the lowest part of the Pit” (v. 6); “Your wrath weighs heavily on me; you have overwhelmed me with all your waves” (v. 7); “You have distanced my friends from me; you have made me repulsive to them” (v. 8).

Christian friend, God doesn’t run in to make sure all your statements in prayer are theologically tidy and properly nuanced. God is not put off by your desperation.

This psalm doesn’t give us enough information to determine whether he is actually experiencing the wrath of God, whether God is actively pushing Heman’s friends away, and so on. That’s not the point. He’s not writing a seminary thesis. He’s telling God how he feels.

Psalm 88 isn’t a license to spit bitter accusations at God. This is a man wrestling with the tension between what he knows and what he feels. What he knows he expresses in the first five words of the psalm: “Lord, God of my salvation.” That’s the tidiest theology in the whole psalm. But his feelings aren’t buying it. In other words, “I know you are the God of my salvation, but my experience is telling me there won’t be any saving today.”

Christian friend, it is possible to have faith yet feel cut off from God’s favor and blessing. Some of the greatest heroes of the faith have felt that. The great hymn writer, William Cowper, author of “There Is a Fountain Filled with Blood.” Luther, Bunyan, Spurgeon. Many others.

The great preacher Charles Spurgeon experienced tremendous hardship. Nine years into his marriage to Susannah, she became virtually homebound. They couldn’t figure out what was wrong. For the next twenty-seven years, she hardly ever heard him preach. Spurgeon himself was greatly afflicted with all kinds of trials. For the last twenty-two years of his ministry, one-third of it was out of the pulpit, sick or recovering. He writes of one Sunday when he preached Psalm 22—“My God, my God, why have you abandoned me?” (v. 1). He said, “Though I did not say so, yet I preached my own experience. I heard my own chains clank while I tried to preach to my fellow prisoners in the dark” (Spurgeon, An All-Round Ministry, 221–22).

The psalmist is desperate, and there’s no reason to hide that in the presence of God. The text then changes direction to argument.

Disputation: Do You Work Wonders for the Dead?

Psalm 88:9-12

The psalmist stockpiles questions that, to the Old Testament way of thinking, demand the answer no, and then he calls for action to remedy the situation.

Now we need to bear in mind that when it comes to what happens after death, the Old Testament saints were largely in the dark. The blessed hope (if you will) of the Old Testament patriarchs wasn’t to “die and go to heaven.” It was to live to see your children’s children. To live out your days in the promised land. And they didn’t mean the one up there. They meant the one they were standing on.

Yes, there are hints of resurrection or life after death in Psalm 16, two verses in Isaiah, and a few other places. However, we shouldn’t force Old Testament saints to pass New Testament exams. Being an inspired biblical writer didn’t mean you had this “matrix plug” with a full download of future names, places, and events, so that somewhere in 750 BC you wake up and tell your friends, “The tomb is empty,” and you quote words Paul will write much later: “Jesus has brought life and immortality to light through the gospel!” (see 2 Tim 1:10). Awesome! So it shouldn’t surprise us when we don’t hear Old Testament saints say, “To live is Christ and to die is gain” (Phil 1:21).

Even in the New Testament, it shouldn’t surprise us when we read Mark 9. Jesus is coming from the Mount of Transfiguration event with Peter, James, and John, and he orders them to tell no one what they had seen “until the Son of Man had risen from the dead.” Then the text says, “They kept this word to themselves, questioning what ‘rising from the dead’ meant” (Mark 9:9-10). So again, let’s not require pre-resurrection believers to pass post-resurrection exams.

That said, even though the New Testament sheds new light on this, there is still truth tucked into these questions—namely, that God gets unique glory and praise when he rescues his people in this life, in the sight of the nations. The psalmist asks, “Will your wonders be known in the darkness?” (v. 12).

Think about the great rescuing act of God in the Old Testament. What if it never happened? What if Israel never left Egypt? Never crossed the Red Sea? Instead, they died in captivity. What becomes of that great outburst of praise on the far side of the Red Sea? It never happens. The Song of Moses never gets written. Miriam’s tambourine never gets played. Church, we do well to remember, God receives glory when he saves us from death, not just through it. When he takes away ashes and gives us garments of praise here. When he rescues a marriage and writes a new story.

In that way the psalmist may lack a full understanding of the doctrine of resurrection as it comes into focus in the New Testament. But in another way he’s onto something important. God gets glory when he rescues his people not just “then and there” but “here and now.”

This brings us to the third refrain.

Isolation: Why Do You Hide Your Face from Me?

Psalm 88:13-18

This is the deepest pain a believer can experience—the pain of feeling God is absent. We don’t know exactly what kind of experience he is facing. Is it mental anguish? Is it spiritual attack? Is it primarily physical? Maybe it’s all of it mixed in together. Whatever it is, the final straw, the specific thing that makes life unlivable is that he’s alone. He’s dying. Heaven is painfully silent. And he’s alone.

I don’t know where all of you are right now, what you’re going through, but Psalm 88 has welcome realism should you find yourself in a place of deep spiritual darkness. Friend, it’s possible to have faith and feel burdened beyond your strength. It’s possible to have faith and feel like God is hiding from you. It’s possible to have faith and wrestle with hard questions. It’s possible to have faith, and yet every day with Jesus isn’t sweeter than the day before. It’s possible to know him as the God of your salvation and yet feel convinced there will be “no saving today.” It’s possible to have a right knowledge of God and yet for that knowledge to not yield its full, soul-stabilizing effect at every point of your life.

You ask, “Where is faith in the most misery-laden song in the Bible?” Don’t forget the little chorus he sings three times: “I cry out, I cry out, I call.” Consider it. What keeps this man talking to God when his experience tells him no one is listening? What keeps him asking for help? What makes him want to declare God’s praise when his prayers still go unanswered? Don’t miss what we’re seeing here. We see someone calling and crying out to God in the midst of total devastation, and the Bible has a word for that: faith.

That’s the end of Psalm 88, but Psalm 88 isn’t the end of the story.

Restoration: How the Story Ends and How We Help One Another

The 150 psalms are divided up into five books or mini-hymnals. Flip the page and look at Psalm 90, which begins Book IV. They’re not organized chronologically; Psalm 90 is a Psalm of Moses. They’re arranged to tell the story of the pilgrimage through which God is taking his people, a pilgrimage from suffering to glory. We’re coming to the end of Book III. Beginning in Book IV, the tone begins to change. It even bears out statistically. In Books I through III (Pss 1–89) lament psalms outnumber hymns of praise by more than two to one. In Books IV and V (Pss 90–150) the proportion is reversed plus some (Kidd, With One Voice, 29).

What does this mean? As this big, sweeping story of God and his people comes full circle, we discover that what begins in personal anguish ends in global praise (Ps 150). That whole story pivots on Jesus Christ coming into the world. He took up (fully) the anguish of Psalm 88. He was the only truly God-forsaken person who ever lived. When he hung on the cross, God’s wrath truly swept over him. He said, “Why have you abandoned me?” (Matt 27:46). And because we’ve read the New Testament, we know why. He was forsaken so that we who trust in him would never be forsaken. He was abandoned by his friends so that we could know unbroken friendship with God.

A happy ending awaits all who have trusted in Christ. We have confidence in future grace. But we still need Psalm 88 because this world hasn’t become any more like heaven in the three thousand years since this psalm was composed. We still need songs in the night, and God gives them to us.

Reflect and Discuss