Walk Of Life – Day 07, November 2022 – Thoughts From The Book Of Psalms
PSALM 88
Lord, I have called daily upon You; I have stretched out my hands to You. – Psalm 88:9
The Psalm 88 is yet another psalm that portrays the humility of the psalmist. He is literally pleading to the Lord God of Hosts, God of his salvation.
See the extremity of his supplication. He insists that he calls the name of the Lord both in the morning and in the evening. Do we have the same experience? Do we call out to our God both in the morning and in the evening? Are we coming to the Lord before we try out other resources or do we come to Him because we have no other help?
Psalm 88 has been called “an embarrassment to conventional faith.” What we hear in the psalm is a voice of despair, fear, and hopelessness, crying out to a silent and absent God. The psalm certainly is quite unique when compared with other psalms of lament. The psalm is the desperate cry of someone who seeks to connect with God Jehovah, but the sound of His silence explodes in his ears. The psalmist finds himself in the deepest darkness of abandonment and despair. Yet, his unanswered cry does not silence the poet. God may stay quiet, but not the psalmist. He continues to hurl his cries into an empty sky, convinced that even in the face of God’s inattention, He should still be addressed. Even when confronted with the reality of death, death caused by God, the poet sticks to his protest, to be met yet again with more silence. God didn’t speak, He didn’t act. The poet is ignored, snubbed, shunned, and rejected. The last word he speaks is darkness. His life of faith has ended in darkness. Nothing has changed, nothing has been resolved, and life has been denied. Our journey with the psalmist takes us “into the dark night of his soul, and the darkness is deep.”
What should one do about this complete silence and this bottomless darkness? What is this psalm doing in the Bible? What does this psalm say about the life of faith? What should one’s response be when facing this dark night of the soul? Should one abandon God in the face of his desertion?
When one continues to speak to God when He keeps silent is an expression of bold faith. Someone who has lost his or her faith would stop praying, choosing not to address a God whose silence is proof that He doesn’t exist. Here we find the psalmist reacting to God’s silence with intense prayer. “This psalm, like the faith of Israel, is utterly contained in the notion that Yahweh is here and must be addressed.
The poet provides us with fleeting glimpses of his faith. He still speaks to God, he affirms his relationship (God of my salvation), he believes praise is the norm and wishes to return to it, he acknowledges God’s attributes (faithful love, faithfulness, righteousness, wonderful works). Rhetorically the psalm shows that it is part of believers’ life experience that they will suffer and experience abandonment and despair. The psalm moves beyond a safe pattern of lament, where there is usually something positive – a vow to praise, a confession of trust, an affirmation of God.
