Last week we were in Psalm 62, looking at soul stillness — what it looks like to aim your soul at God during times of trouble. David wrote that psalm when he was being shaken and, with a bold declaration, said, "I will not be greatly shaken."
This week we're going to be in another lament — Psalm 13. Another song written during trouble, but this one is even darker. What do we do when our lives are shaken and we cannot feel God's presence? What do we do when the circumstances of our life are just shaking, out of our control, filling us with fear and dread and uncertainty? And when we pray, it feels like no one hears. When we look, it seems like God is absent. What do we do when we're called to walk in the dark?
I want to read to you a profound passage from C. S. Lewis in that amazing little book, The Screwtape Letters. It's a book written by a senior demon to his junior demon trainee, giving him advice about how to tempt and destroy the walk and the faith of humans who are trusting in Jesus. It's a long passage, but I want you to listen carefully. Remember, this is a demon speaking:
You must have often wondered why the enemy [God] does not make more use of his power to be sensibly present to human souls in any degree he chooses and at any moment. But you now see that the irresistible and the indisputable are the two weapons which the very nature of his scheme forbids him to use. Merely to over-ride a human will (as his felt presence in any but the faintest and most mitigated degree would certainly do) would be for him useless. He cannot ravish. He can only woo. For his ignoble idea is to eat the cake and have it; the creatures are to be one with him, but yet themselves; merely to cancel them, or assimilate them, will not serve…. Sooner or later he withdraws, if not in fact, at least from their conscious experience, all supports and incentives. He leaves the creature to stand up on its own legs—to carry out from the will alone duties which have lost all relish…. He cannot "tempt" to virtue as we do to vice. He wants them to learn to walk and must therefore take away his hand…. Our cause is never more in danger than when a human, no longer desiring, but still intending, to do our enemy's will, looks round upon a universe from which every trace of him seems to have vanished, and asks why he has been forsaken, and still obeys. C. S. LEWIS, THE SCREWTAPE LETTERS
A human, no longer desiring, but still intending. This is the heart of Psalm 13. So let's dive in together.
1 How long, O Lord? Will You forget me forever? How long will You hide Your face from me? 2 How long must I take counsel in my soul and have sorrow in my heart all the day? How long shall my enemy be exalted over me?
How long? Four times the lament is made. This is standard lament terminology. How long? You should recognize it from last week in Psalm 62. In fact, Psalm 62 and Psalm 13 are the only two psalms where this exact phrase — עַד-אָנָה — ʿad-ʾānâ — is used in this way. And it's not asking for a date on the calendar. It's a temporal interrogative, but it's not asking for information. David's not saying, "Is this going to last two weeks? Two months? Two years?" It works rhetorically as an insistence that this intolerable situation must come to an end. If he were writing it today, I think he'd just say, "Really?" Like that. That's how we use that word. If we're in a situation and something happens and we say, "Really?" — we're not questioning whether it's actually happening. We're infuriated that it's happening. We want it to stop. Parents, how many times have you said that to your kids? That's what David is doing when he says, "How long, Lord?" Like, "Come on. Really?"
So the psalm begins with this honest but blunt prayer: this cannot go on. I cannot endure this situation, this shaking, this absence — it has got to stop. And right there in verse one is the great fear. Will this not end? Will it last forever? Is this all it's going to be? The fear in this psalm is not the pain of the experience itself. It's the fear that it will never come to an end.
And unlike Psalm 62, where David asks this question of his enemies, in Psalm 13 he is asking it of God. He's accusing God. He's honestly complaining to God — about God. Let that sink in. How long will You forget me? How long will You hide? How long must I be alone under the grip of the enemy? Where are You, God? Why are You not helping me? David is doing something here that I'm afraid many in the church today never do. He's actually being honest about how he feels about God in his lived experience. My guess is that for many of you here, you've never done this — and even the thought of it feels scandalous, maybe even blasphemous. How dare I express these doubts, these fears, these complaints, these hurts to God?
I want you to notice that Psalm 13, like Psalm 62, starts with a superscription: to the choirmaster, a psalm of David. Let that sink in for a minute. This is a psalm written by David out of his own personal experience, and once again he sets it to music and gives it to the choirmaster — which means this is how Israel was trained to worship. This is how God's people — not just David — learned to approach God when it was necessary. Real worship requires, well, reality. It's an absolutely bedrock requirement. Real worship must come in alignment with reality — all of our feelings, all of our experiences, all of us, the good, the bad, and the ugly. Worship above all must be true and authentic.
And as Jesus put it:
23 But the hour is coming, and is now here, when the true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and truth, for the Father is seeking such people to worship Him.
Jesus cuts through all the politics — Judean versus Samaritan, this mountain or that mountain — and He says this is it. It's not about the externals. It's about the heart. And if you want to worship the Father, this is what the Father wants: bring your heart as it is. Sometimes our heart is full of joy, and sometimes it's full of sorrow. Sometimes it's brimming with faith, and sometimes it shudders in fear. We've developed in modern Christianity this idea that worship is only about the times when our hearts are doing well — it's a happy thing, a celebration thing. And it is. But we've lost the beauty of lament. And the reality is, if you're not hurting right now, keep living. We live in a broken world and we're going to experience brokenness. What this psalm does is lay for us a foundation, a perspective about how we worship God when we don't feel His presence — when we don't want to worship, when we're walking alone in the dark.
So let's get into the text. The second complaint of verse one is the nail the whole psalm hangs on:
1b How long will You hide Your face from me?
God, I'm looking for You — but You're hiding. He uses this anthropomorphic language. To understand the full nature of this complaint, you have to understand what God's face meant to the people of Israel. This is something they heard probably every day — it's the Aaronic blessing of Numbers chapter 6:
24 The Lord bless you and keep you; 25 the Lord make His face to shine upon you and be gracious to you; 26 the Lord lift up His countenance upon you and give you peace.
This is the sign of the covenant. The shining face of God is a picture of God's favor, of God's covenantal relationship. So when David says that the face of God is hidden, he's saying a lot. He's wondering out loud whether that blessing — that covenant blessing — even exists anymore. He's asking whether God is even with him, because in his current situation he cannot feel God's presence. I've been there more times than I'd like to admit. I'm guessing you have too.
But I want to draw a careful distinction here, because the psalm doesn't say that God actually left him. David doesn't actually accuse God of that. David accuses God of hiding His face — not withdrawing it. And this is the heart of it: David is complaining to the very one he's complaining about. God is there — but he cannot feel Him. He cannot sense Him. And that is the problem. The problem is not absence. It's silence. And maybe that's the first lesson we need to pull from this psalm this morning: God's silence, or the felt absence of God, does not constitute His actual absence. Just because you're not hearing something, just because you're not feeling something, just because you're not seeing something — it doesn't mean God is not there.
Your feelings are really good at reporting how things seem. They're actually terrible at reporting how things are. It's like Father's Day — how many fights, fathers, with your wives, with your kids have come from you thinking something, feeling something that isn't actually the case? But then we act on it because we feel it, we think it, we assume it. We all know what assuming does. Our feelings are really good at reporting potentials, but they're terrible at reporting what actually is.
But that doesn't change the genuine pain of the feeling. We don't just say, "Oh, stop feeling that way. Stop being afraid. Stop being scared. Stop being sad. Stop worrying." It doesn't change the genuine pain of the feeling in the moment. Not a bit. The feeling of absence, the emptiness of silence, is devastating. And David is brutally honest about that:
2 How long must I take counsel in my soul and have sorrow in my heart all the day? How long shall my enemy be exalted over me?
Taking counsel in my soul is the opposite of what we saw last week — of talking to your soul, directing and commanding your soul. This is the overthinking, repetitive, consuming, inescapable thoughts that plague us in the absence of God speaking to us. All we have is our own flesh and the enemy speaking to us. And the sorrow in my heart is not simple sadness. In Hebrew it is יָגוֹן — yāgôn — the heavy grief of death, a weight so heavy it is bearing you down to the grave.
Now this is super interesting in the Hebrew, because he says he is taking counsel — thinking — in his soul, the נֶפֶשׁ — nepeš — which in the ancient Near Eastern concept was the emotional seat. And he is sorrowful in his heart, the לֵבָב — lēbāb — which in the ancient Near Eastern concept was the thinking seat, the seat of logic and reason. So you see how convoluted this is? He's feeling in his thinking place and thinking in his feeling place. What this paints is a picture of an interior life that is completely upside down — total internal disorder. And it's relentless: "all the day long." That's all I've got.
And the last "how long" moves from upward complaint toward God and inward complaint toward his own heart, to outward complaint against his enemies. This is more than just "I have some enemies and life is hard." The enemy is exalted in the position that belongs to God alone — that supreme height. We're going to hear more about that next week in Psalm 46. The verse ends with this little Hebrew phrase over me — עָלַי — ʿālay. Hold on to that, because structurally it's going to hold this whole psalm together.
3 Consider and answer me, O Lord my God; light up my eyes, lest I sleep the sleep of death, 4 lest my enemy say, "I have prevailed over him," lest my foes rejoice because I am shaken.
Consider. Answer. Light up. The psalm moves from complaint to plea — a prayer of absolute desperation. The first two verbs, consider and answer, actually tumble out in the Hebrew without any connecting word. The "and" is added in English. It literally just reads, "Look. Answer me." But notice now how David addresses God: "O Lord my God." David is appealing to the covenant God that he is in relationship with — in covenant with. He may not feel the presence of the one he's in relationship with, but he is claiming the actual covenant relationship. God, hear me. Look at me. Answer me. Because this is who You are, and that gives me my identity.
That last request is beautiful. "Light up my eyes" comes from a Hebrew verb that means to cause something to shine. It's an idiom for life, for vitality, for strength. If you were with us several months ago when we were in 1 Samuel 14, remember when Jonathan was faint from the battle — Saul had made that foolish vow that no one should eat — but Jonathan didn't know about it. He sees some honeycomb, takes it, eats it. Do you remember what it said? It caused his eyes to shine, and it renewed him, strengthened him, invigorated him, and he continued the battle. This is the same word, the same imagery. Oh Lord, my God, light up my eyes. There's no life outside of You. There's no strength outside of You. I need You to give me life, lest I sleep the sleep of death. David at this point is saying: if You don't show up, I'm done.
These three petitions profoundly demonstrate what I've been trying to preach for the past several months — that we become what we behold. I've been using this metaphor of a mirror. What it means to be made in the image of God, as God's imagers. We were made to receive the light of God and then reflect the light of God. But a mirror in the dark is worse than useless. And that is what David is experiencing. He's in the dark, and so he prays: look, answer, shine. Make my eyes shine. I can't reflect Your glory if I don't receive it.
This is what makes lament a discipline — a gift of God that we desperately need. It answers the question: what does faith do when God hides His face? What does faith do when God seems absent, when the light of God is blocked? Faith asks to be beheld so that it can behold. God, shine Your light on me that I might shine. God, I need Your light. In other words, it turns to the light even if the light cannot be felt. That's what faith does. That's what David does.
Verse four lays out the stakes, and it's bigger than just David's personal experience — because David is God's anointed and chosen king. So if the enemies prevail against David, it's not just David's honor that is diminished. It's God's. God, help me, because we're in this together. And even if I can't feel You, see You, hear You, or sense You in any way, I'm calling on You. To keep praying when prayer feels empty is one of the greatest acts of faith and one of the greatest acts of spiritual warfare we will ever experience.
Notice what he doesn't pray. He doesn't say, "Help me to feel better. Help me to feel You again." He prays, "Look at me. Answer me. Brighten my eyes with Your light." So let me say this to those of you who are right now where David was when he prayed this: you're in the dark. You don't feel close to God. You don't feel His presence. Here's the good news from this text: when you're in the dark, your job is not to manufacture the light. Mirrors don't produce light — they receive it and reflect it. Your job, when you're in the dark, is to look for it, to long for it, and to ask for it. Ask, and then stop acting on your feelings and start acting on the character and faithfulness of God.
This is what Lewis meant when he said: "Our cause is never more in danger than when a human, no longer desiring, but still intending, to do our enemy's will, looks round upon a universe from which every trace of him seems to have vanished, and asks why he has been forsaken, and still obeys."
This is exactly where David goes next:
5 But I have trusted in Your steadfast love; my heart shall rejoice in Your salvation. 6 I will sing to the Lord, because He has dealt bountifully with me.
But. But I. No matter how I feel, no matter what is happening, no matter what my enemies might think or say — this is what I will do. And I want to point out what I think is the most important thing about this: nothing happens between verse four and verse five. There is no resolution. There is no rescue. There is no victory. There is no influx of light. David is still in the dark in this entire psalm. And it is in the dark that he says, "But I have trusted in Your steadfast love."
"I have trusted" is in the perfect tense, which means it started in the past but has ongoing ramifications and reality — it continues in the present. David is not working up some new faith in the dark. He is looking back to when he was in the light and saying: I've been in the light. And even though I can't feel it, I'm still in the light. Even though I'm in the dark, I'm in the light, because I'm in Your steadfast love. This word — חֶסֶד — ḥesed — is one of the most important words in all of Scripture and it's nearly impossible to translate into a single English word. Steadfast love, loyal love, covenant loyalty — it's God's committed, faithful love that does not bend. Even when we are faithless, God is faithful. That is the nature of God. So David's hope, his trust, is not in his present experience of God's character, but in the reality of God's character.
So on the basis of who You are, God — not how I feel — "my heart shall rejoice in Your salvation. I will sing to the Lord." The verbs here are volitives, verbs of the will. I'm going to worship in the dark. I'm going to rejoice. I'm going to sing. It might be better translated: let my heart rejoice. Let me sing to the Lord. This is exactly what we talked about last week — the leading, directing, and commanding of your own soul to do something. Because of who God is, because I've been in the light, because I'm in a covenant faithful relationship, David says: let my heart rejoice. Let my soul sing to the Lord. It's a choice. He's addressing himself. He's commanding the interior to take a posture toward God — not based on his circumstances, certainly not based on his feelings, but based on the character and nature of God.
So let's talk about worship for a minute. I've already said that in our modern cultural experience of church, we've turned worship into this warm, fuzzy feeling experience. We actually use worship as a tool to pursue that experience. I want to feel a certain way, so I'm going to go to a certain type of church with a certain type of music and a certain type of ambiance. And we pursue this feeling. And then far too often we only choose to worship when God is blessing us, when things are going well. But when we're struggling, when we're hurting, when we're in the dark — it's the last thing we want to do.
Worship is so much bigger than your feelings. That doesn't dismiss your feelings, because your feelings have to be a part of worship. But worship is not dictated by your feelings. Worship is ultimately a defining of reality — acknowledging the reality of who God is, of God's worth, of the nature of the relationship, and acknowledging the condition and reality of our heart and our mind and our circumstances. So no matter where we are, worship is just acknowledging and defining and calling out. At the end of the day, worship is responsive. We respond in worship to good circumstances and we respond in worship to difficult circumstances. We respond in the light and we respond in the dark. That's why these laments are so important, because I think it's something we've lost — the ability to communicate authentically to God when we're hurting, when we're doubting, when we're afraid. And so we try to grit our way through it. Or worse, we just walk away disappointed in God.
Forgive me — just one quick rabbit trail. Some of us don't worship, and we've got this list of excuses. "Oh, that's not my personality." "I'm not a good singer." I don't know if you've ever heard my dad sing, but it's one of my favorite things. Not because of the quality of the vocalization, but because of the authenticity — it's a man who loves God. It says make a joyful noise. I genuinely love to hear my dad sing because it's true. It's authentic. It's heartfelt. Worship is commanded. Make a joyful noise unto the Lord. Clap your hands, all the earth. We are commanded to come before God and extol Him, lift Him up, magnify Him, attribute to Him the worth that only He deserves. And some of you have got to stop using your personality as an excuse. Let me say this on Father's Day: too many men come into worship and stand there with their arms folded and don't sing and just mumble. I have to say it — you're not too cool to worship God. And here's the thing: if you don't do it, He'll raise up a rock to do it. And I don't know about you, I don't want to be outworshipped by some granite. It's what we're made for.
So David says in the dark: I have trusted, I will trust, because of trust established in the past. So let me rejoice and sing in the present, because:
6b because He has dealt bountifully with me.
"He has dealt bountifully." גָּמַל — gāmal — to do all that should be done. And this again is in the perfect tense. Some commentators think it's backwards-looking; others see it as forward-looking. I think it's both. David says: I'm going to trust in Your unfailing love. I will worship. I will rejoice. I will sing because, God, You do all that should be done. In the past, You've done what should be done. Right now, You're doing what should be done, even if it doesn't feel good to me. And I'm trusting that You are always going to be the God who does what needs to be done. That's the posture of faith. You're going to do what should be done, no matter how I feel about it. So I can rejoice and sing in the dark because of who You are, God. You are the God who will do all that should be done. You've always done it. You're doing it now. So I will rejoice.
Notice how the psalm ends. It ends with that little phrase עָלַי — ʿālay — over me. I told you to hold on to that word. In verse two, the enemies are exalted over David. Now here at the end, David chooses to rejoice and sing of God's faithful love and salvation over David — even though he can't feel it. There is something greater than the darkness. What a beautiful resolution — without any external resolution. Nothing changes in the psalm. But David still expresses his faith to God. That's what lament is.
I couldn't help but think of a scene in Tolkien's Lord of the Rings. Frodo and Sam are in Mordor, and in the books it's a long journey — a long time in the grey, in the dark, in the fear and anxiety and danger. And Frodo is losing his battle of will against the ring. He can't remember the touch of grass. He can't remember the taste of strawberries. He's broken, at the end of himself. And there's that beautiful moment where Sam is looking at him, and Tolkien writes:
"There, peeping among the cloud-wrack above a dark tor high up in the mountains, Sam saw a white star twinkle for a while. The beauty of it smote his heart, as he looked up out of the forsaken land, and hope returned to him. For like a shaft, clear and cold, the thought pierced him that in the end the Shadow was only a small and passing thing: there was light and high beauty for ever beyond its reach." The Return of the King, Book VI, Ch. 2, "The Land of Shadow."
You're in the dark. You're surrounded by shadow. But up above that shadow there is light that will never be dimmed. So we don't give in to the shadow. We long and we ask for the light.
That is Psalm 13. A complaint, a choice to trust, a conclusion of praise, regardless of feelings or circumstance.
How does this point us to Jesus and the gospel this morning? How doesn't it? David is such a foreshadowing of Christ, the true and better king, the true and better David. Psalm 13 lays out the structure of faith in darkness — the very structure Jesus establishes, Jesus lives out, and Jesus calls us to. Jesus lamented on the cross: "My God, My God, why have You forsaken Me?" — a direct quote from Psalm 22, which follows the exact same pattern from complaint to praise. Jesus is in the dark and He cries out, but then, like David, He chooses:
46 Then Jesus, calling out with a loud voice, said, "Father, into Your hands I commit My spirit!" And having said this He breathed His last.
Literally in the dark — if you read the crucifixion account, it goes dark for hours. Jesus on the cross, rejected, scorned, humiliated, chooses to entrust Himself to the Father even in death. In the dark, Jesus chooses to trust, and He dies. But again, that's not the end, because of the ḥesed of God. Jesus died, but death is no obstacle to God. This is the pattern of the cross — the pattern Jesus actually calls us into:
34 And calling the crowd to Him with His disciples, He said to them, "If anyone would come after Me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow Me. 35 For whoever would save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for My sake and the gospel's will save it.
This means that like David, like Jesus, we will be called to walk into the dark, to walk into the battle, to walk into the heartbreak and heartache. And like David and like the greater David, Jesus, we must learn how to fight the fight of faith and choose to worship God when all is stripped away — choose to trust Him not for His blessings but for His heart.
I remember sixteen years ago when we moved here — it was a move of God that didn't make any sense financially, according to the real estate market. Our house — the real estate market in Portland was a mess — and we had to put our house on a short sale and we came really close to losing it. It was so messy. And I remember in that time, people would come up to me and say, "Oh, you know what? God's leading, so it's going to be okay. God's leading, so that house is going to sell. You're going to make money off it." It was so well-intentioned, so kind — and so wrong. It was ridiculously wrong. This is the deep presumption: if God's calling, then it's going to be easy. If God's calling, then it's always going to be warm and fuzzy. But sometimes God calls us to lose stuff. And we lost a lot on that house. My credit tanked so bad — unbelievable. I loved the well-meaning assurances, but we're still here. I lost stuff, but it's just stuff. Jesus lost His life, and God was able to deal with that. And I know that's not what you want to hear this morning, because it's not what I want to hear either. I'd rather the prosperity gospel was true. I'd rather it was always easy. But as the old cliché goes, there's no crown without a cross.
Let me end this morning with this astonishing little text in Revelation:
9 When he opened the fifth seal, I saw under the altar the souls of those who had been slain for the word of God and for the witness they had borne. 10 They cried out with a loud voice, "O Sovereign Lord, holy and true, how long before You will judge and avenge our blood on those who dwell on the earth?" 11 Then they were each given a white robe and told to rest a little longer, until the number of their fellow servants and their brothers should be complete, who were to be killed as they themselves had been.
I just read an article yesterday about a man and his wife who were missionaries in Haiti and were killed. He was on the phone with his dad while it was happening. Happy Father's Day. At one point he said to his dad, "Dad, I'm so tired." He'd been beaten and beaten and beaten. And then he put the phone down, and it was reported that up until his very last breath, he looked at the people who were beating and killing him and said, "God loves you. I forgive you. God can forgive you." Those are the souls under the altar — those who have been slain for the word of God and for the witness they had borne. And what are they doing as they await the return of the King and the fulfillment of the kingdom? They cried out with a loud voice: "O Sovereign Lord, holy and true — how long?" They are actually lamenting in paradise as they await the reunification of the heavens and the earth. It's the same lament. How long? If you go and read the Septuagint of Psalm 13, the Greek of "how long" there is the exact same Greek used in Revelation 6. How long before You will judge and avenge our blood? It's going to mess with some of your theologies about what happens after you die. And good — we've been getting our theology about eternity from really bad novels and Touched by an Angel. I'm going to stick with the book.
Even the saints who have chosen faithfulness unto death are even now crying out together — how long? How long? And even they are told: wait. Wait until God does all that should be done. Wait for the return of the King.
And so, church, the "how long?" turns into an "Even so, come, Lord Jesus, come."
If you're here this morning and life is good and God is close — rejoice, worship God, and practice the disciplines in the good times so that they may serve you in times of trouble.
If you're here this morning in the dark, hurting and feeling helpless, practice the discipline of lament. Bring your complaints about God to God. He's big enough to handle it. There have been multiple times in my life when I couldn't even do it at home, couldn't pray in here — I've had to walk out into the desert just to yell, just to scream, just to cry out. Here's the deal: God is big enough to deal with our anger, our fear, our frustration. Pretending we don't have it doesn't help us, and it doesn't fool God. So we might as well lament. Take your complaints about God to God, and then let the truth about God guide your steps. Don't be driven by the flimsiness of your feelings. Don't define yourself by the circumstances that are constantly changing around you. Choose instead to rest yourself, to aim yourself, to direct yourself toward the unchanging, unfailing love and faithfulness of God. Look to Jesus, the author and perfector of our faith:
5 The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.
Amen.
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