Psalm 88 • Hope Through the Night
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(This transcript was prepared using software tools and has not been reviewed for complete accuracy.)
I'm now going to pray for our study of the scriptures.
And I mentioned to you earlier in the service, we're going to talk about some very serious things today.
And we're going to pray about some very serious things.
I don't usually write out prayers.
Today I did, because I want to be very specific about what I'm going to say.
If you're able and willing and you feel it's appropriate for you to be on your knees about what we are going to now pray about, I invite you to join me as we ask God's blessing upon the study of His Word.
>>> Heavenly Father, I thank You for making this church a beacon of gospel hope for those of many nations.
Thank You for the men, the women, and the children who are giving over their lives and their incomes and their prayers to see that the gospel will give hope to many more by mission efforts that free us from guilt and enslavement to sin by faith in Your Son.
We consider it a privilege to serve the cause of the One who took the penalty of justice for our sin on Himself so that we could be eternally free of its guilt and power.
Thank You that an aspect of Your gracious provision of power over sin is Your Word's clarity about what honors You and blesses Your people.
This week, we confess that our hearts are troubled with aspects of sadness, anger, confusion about the decision of our nation's highest court to approve practices Your Word prohibits.
The Bible clearly teaches the enduring truth that marriage consists of one man and one woman.
The Lord Jesus Himself said that this definition of marriage is from the beginning.
So no human institution has the authority to redefine marriage any more than a human institution has the authority to redefine the gospel, the covenantal love of Christ and His bride, the Church, which marriage of a man and a woman is designed to reflect.
So, Lord, we would pray that You would remind us by Your Word even this day that not mere opinion or politics or pragmatics are sufficient to allay our concerns or to turn our nation to You.
Your gospel must inform our witness, our ways, and our words.
We believe that our God reigns.
Neither panic nor malice are appropriate for the servants of a sovereign and saving Lord.
We pray that we would continue to be animated, not only by the certainty that our God will judge sin according to His wisdom and His time, but we will also be led by the good news that the same God offers reconciliation to all who turn to Him through the life, death, and resurrection of His Son, Jesus.
Thus, for the faithful witness to which You call us we pray that You would enable us to respect and pray for our governing authorities as Your Word commands even as we work to rebuild a culture of marriage.
We ask that You would enable us to champion the truth and beauty of biblical marriage in a way that brings healing to a sexually broken culture.
We pray that You would enable us to exhibit by word and deed the biblical truth that all persons, including L.G.B.T. persons, are created in the image of God and deserve dignity and respect.
We pray that You would enable us to love our neighbors for Christ's sake, regardless of whatever disagreements are a result of conflicting beliefs about marriage.
Help us to proclaim and live these truths with courage and kindness, even if expressing our convictions with that dual responsibility requires the highest of costs outside or inside the church.
Remind us that our stand for biblical morality has nothing to do with our willingness to welcome others or to justify ourselves.
Jesus welcomed us as sinners, and we are glad for that.
But along with our trusting Jesus Christ for His forgiveness of our sin comes the need for repentance from our sin.
So remind us that we are called to welcome all to Jesus, but clearly turning to Him always means turning away from whatever idols we worship.
That includes same-sex relations, but it also includes a divorce culture, an obsession with personal peace and affluence, and an indifference to suffering, all of which are unquestionably the sins of those of us in the church.
We're not called to be Pharisees, to look down on those not as holy as we.
In no way are we worthy of the grace that we have received by faith alone.
If we now must call others to repentance, then, Lord, help us not to delay our own repentance.
Please, for the sake of revival in our own hearts and church, make our calls to repentance not be narrowly directed to people who are same-sex attracted in any way that suggests their sin is greater than ours.
It is not.
Since our Supreme Court now has people awake to the issues of morality and faith, make those of us saved from our sin only by the shed blood of Jesus Christ, make us willing and able to speak the gospel more clearly, more lovingly, more courageously, more humbly, and more consistently than ever before.
Awaken us to the needs of our nation and the needs of our souls for Christ's sake we pray in Jesus' name.
Amen.
>>> Thank you.
Please be seated.
And consider with me these words of Psalm 88, as I've mentioned to you, one of the most difficult psalms in the Bible, because the darkness is so complete in the psalm.
The psalmist begins, verse 1 of Psalm 88, "O Lord, God of my salvation; I cry out day and night before you.
Let my prayer come before you; incline your ear to my cry!
For my soul is full of troubles, and my life draws near to Sheol," which is the place of the dead.
"I am counted among those who go down to the pit; I am a man who has no strength, like one set loose among the dead, like the slain that lie in the grave, like those whom you remember no more, for they are cut off from your hand.
You have put me in the depths of the pit, in the regions dark and deep."
The darkness continues throughout the psalm.
Verse 16 is its conclusion.
"Your wrath has swept over me; your dreadful assaults destroy me.
They surround me like a flood all day long; they close in on me together.
You have caused my beloved and my friend to shun me; my companions have become darkness."
Or as some of your translations say, "And now darkness is my closest friend."
June 21, 2015, last Sunday, at Mother Emanuel Church in Charleston, South Carolina, Pastor Norvel Goff preached the first sermon after the midweek Bible study in which nine parishioners of that church had been murdered by racist evil.
When Pastor Goff spoke, he said this: "We ask questions, Lord.
We ask why.
We cannot help it.
It's our human nature.
But through it all, those of us who know Jesus as we find ourselves engulfed in sadness and darkness, and as we find ourselves walking through the shadow of the valley of death, for those of us who know Jesus, we can look through the windows of our faith and we see hope and we see light.
And we can hear Your voice saying, 'I am with you.'"
Beautiful words.
Faithful words.
Noble words.
But what if you cannot say them?
What if you cannot look through the windows of faith and see hope or see light or hear God's voice saying, "I am with you"?
What if the darkness is too dark and the doubt is too loud?
What if death is all around like the young pastors that I ministered to this last week who have watched thousands driven from their homes, who have lost their churches, where death is actually all around, of loved ones and neighbor and friend and parishioner?
What if there is deceit in my marriage?
What if there is betrayal by my friends?
What if I face the loss of loved ones and the loss of respect, the loss of health, the loss of my faculties, the loss of my freedom, the loss of my future, the loss of the moral compass of my country?
What if I'm just getting old and getting tired and staying lonely?
What then, Lord?
These, after all, are our reality.
We can't escape them.
We are not able to dodge them in a fallen world.
These are our realities, and every one that I mentioned is actually on the page of the scriptures and most of them in this very psalm.
What if the darkness is that deep?
Then maybe you will have such a psalm: the only one in the Bible that there is no relief, no redemption, no silver lining, no dawn, no exit.
It is just darkness throughout.
You end up reading this psalm and you say, "Did somebody make a mistake?"
Well, you know that's not true.
It is God's holy Word.
So what grace is actually here, if there is no silver lining?
At least part of the grace has to be the reality that this is not a forbidden psalm, that all the words, as harsh and difficult as they actually are, are permitted in God's Word.
The father allows his child to complain.
Verse 3, "My soul is full of troubles."
Verse 4, "I am accounted among those who go down to the pit."
Our language today: "Lord, this is the pits."
And the Vacation Bible School song, "I'm happy, happy, happy, happy, happy all the time," doesn't fit.
Yes, for children.
Yes, from those who are at a stage of life that they don't yet know that the darkness sometimes can actually be complete in the horror and the pain and the sorrows that we sometimes will face.
The father allows his child to complain.
There's a grace in that.
The father also allows his child, believe it or not, to blame.
Verse 5, "Lord, I'm like those you remember no more."
The tone is about to change.
Verse 6, "You have put me in the depths of the pit."
Yes, I'm in the pits.
And, God, You did it.
If You're sovereign, if You're in control, if You rule, then You made this pit and You put me in it.
Verse 7, "Your wrath lies heavy upon me."
Verse 8, "You caused my companions to shun me, and you made me a horror to them."
Not only does the father allow his child to complain and blame but actually to begin to chide with sarcasm a God of covenantal promise.
Verse 9, "Every day I call upon you, O Lord; I spread out my hands to you."
But verse 10, "Do you work wonders for the dead?"
What good is it to do miracles if I'm dead?
Verse 11, "In your steadfast, is your steadfast love declared in the grave?"
What good to show love to a corpse.
Verse 12, "Are your wonders known in darkness, or your righteousness in the land of forgetfulness?"
What good are miracles if no one can see or no one can remember?
What good is it then?
And, finally, the father allows this child who complains and blames and chides actually to cry.
Verse 13, "But I, O Lord, cry to you; in the morning my prayer comes to you."
Verse 14, "Why do you cast my soul away?"
Worse: "Why do you hide your face from me?"
Verse 15, "I am afflicted and close to death from my youth up, I suffer your terrors; I am helpless."
We go to a secular play like "Les Mis" in our area right now or you've seen the movie and we weep at the words and scarcely can believe that they would be words like the words of the Bible.
"There was a time when the world was a song.
And then there was a time when it all went wrong.
I dreamed a dream in time gone by when hope was high and life worth living.
I dreamed that love would never die.
I dreamed that God was forgiving.
But the tigers come at night with their voices soft as thunder as they tear your hopes apart and they turn your dreams to shame.
I had a dream my life would be so different from this hell I'm living.
So different now from what it seemed.
Now life has killed the dream I dreamed."
I know the song.
I know why it's in the play.
Why is it in the Bible?
Surely one reason that this psalm is not forbidden is so that I can name my pain and you can too.
That if God allows an inspired writer to say these words to Him, then I too can name my pain.
Lord, this makes no sense.
Lord, this hurts too much to be good or even to work out for good.
Lord, where did You go?
I must tell you that there are some psalms that I believe without exaggeration I have read hundreds of times.
There are some psalms that I have preached dozens of times.
I confess to you, I have never preached from this psalm before.
But I can remember the time I read it when it had the greatest impact upon my life.
A close friend of mine, a man I went to seminary with, he was born in Greece, and he pretended like that was no advantage to him when we took New Testament Greek together until he smoked the rest of us on the exam and we said, "That's not fair."
He was in my wedding.
Beautiful pastor, cared for people in part because of his own emotional struggles that he went through over and over again, sometimes not even able to stay in the pulpit because of the emotional struggles he had.
But that darkness that he sometimes went into made him so void of judgmentalism, made him so able to be heart to heart with people who were struggling.
His people loved him.
Until the pit became too deep one time and the darkness too intense and he took his life.
The day after that, I called his wife.
And as we talked, she said to me that she had done her devotions in Psalm 88, this psalm, that day.
And I, with a start, told her I had done the same.
Why?
Why was Psalm 88 so important to us that day?
Because we needed to go to a place where God was not saying, "It'll be okay.
There's a silver lining.
You'll get over it.
Time to move on."
For that moment, we needed to know that God understood there is a pain, there is a place in life, there is an occasion, there is a darkness that is so deep you just want to know: Does God get it?
Does He understand?
And Psalm 88 is the message of the Father to say, "I understand how deep the darkness can go.
That it seems like you're at the bottom of the well and there is no way out.
You can't even see the light anymore."
And our God is so tender and courageous at the same moment as to allow that to be said in His Holy Word; that there is a darkness with no exit and I can name my pain because of such a God.
And right at the same moment as I am able to name my pain, I learn from this psalm I'm able to pray in the midst of it.
I mean, the psalmist doesn't have answers.
But he at least does this: Verse 1, "O Lord, God of my salvation; I cry out day and night before you.
Let my prayer come before you; incline your ear to my cry!"
He prays.
He prays again at the middle of verse 9, "Every day I call to you, O Lord; I spread my hands to you."
Verse 13, "But I, O Lord, cry to you; in the morning, my prayer comes before you."
It's not an answer: It's just a direction.
When the darkness is so deep, we're still able to call out to God.
Even when we have named the pain, we can pray when we name the pain.
Lord, I don't understand.
Lord, I don't understand.
I can't make sense of this.
This doesn't work.
How can it possibly be?
And it's just the message we learned in our youth: When it's hardest to pray, pray hardest.
And it may not seem to solve it, it may not seem to make it all go away, but I at least know that there is somebody who understands my pain who has given me a way to express it in His own Word.
And He's not saying, "Just get over it."
He is saying deeply and profoundly, "I understand the darkness."
That's at least part of the grace.
What other grace is here?
Not only that this is not a forbidden psalm, but it is not the only psalm.
Sometimes we forget in our culture where we kind of cherry pick our way through the psalms what we love and don't love that there are actually five books within the one book of the Psalm.
The first book of the psalms that goes to Psalm 41 is that collected from the lifespan of David, where promises were made of a kingdom that would be his and then would be eternal.
That there were blessings to come.
And the rejoicing and the dancing of that continues into the second book of the psalms as through the life and ministry of Solomon we begin to understand the kingdom is expanding; things are going wonderfully.
And then the dancing stops abruptly in book three, Psalm 73, where there is disaster upon the nation.
The kingdom divides.
The enemy is at the gate.
The people are taken into slavery.
By the rivers of Babylon, we sat down and wept when we remembered Zion.
Slavery and darkness and exile and death.
And it's in that book, book three, that Psalm 88 appears, right at the end, almost as the climax of the pain.
As God is saying, "I understand; it's real."
But it's not the only psalm.
You've still got books four and five to go where book four is saying, "Out of the pain there is still hope that God will provide a Messiah."
And, finally, book five: According to His promises now, how should you live and even praise when it's all not making sense?
From blessing to dancing to crisis to hope and ultimately to praise.
Every dimension of human feeling and suffering and joy is covered in the psalms.
It's why we love the psalms so much, that we find our different expressions and emotions at different phases of life.
But I will tell you for most of them, you--, most of us, we don't dive into the middle book of the psalms until we are quite mature.
I mean, early when you're a child in life, maybe in years where you're just looking for the happy stories, you don't go to the middle of the psalms.
But when it's all gone wrong, your heart is drawn like a magnet to those places where God says, "I understand."
And Psalm 88 is the apex of the "I understand."
We need the other psalms, but God gives us this one because so often we need to find our way into those middle psalms in life's crises, where God simply says, "I know you; I know your life; I know your struggle; I get it."
But the reason He says that in the middle is because He's affirming what He will say later.
If God is so honest, if we recognize truth so prla--, plainly in the pain, then what He says about relief and rescue and redemption is also going to be true.
You would not trust Him if He did not other--, understand every dimension of your hurt.
You would not believe it's true if it was happy, happy, happy, happy, happy all the time.
And because God is so honest, you begin to trust when He said, "The steadfast love of the Lord never ceases.
From everlasting to everlasting, I am God."
So that when the immediate and the temporal makes no sense, we see that He says that; He understands that and says the truth, so I will trust the truth when He says, "There is something more eternal to come."
If God is so honest about the darkness, then we can trust Him about the light.
Honesty about darkness is sometimes pretty tough.
When Kathy and I were in St. Louis and we'd been there for quite a while, a young pastor was brought to town to pastor a very large and, dare I say it, a very contentious church.
And as he began to pastor that large and difficult church, difficulties of life just began to wave over him.
Children born with multiple, multiple special needs of both body and mind, special needs that would be burdens on that family for the rest of their lives.
And as the pressures of the church and the pressures of family began to push upon him, one winter's day he took a walk along a train track to meditate, to think, maybe more.
He was struck by the train, almost killed.
The impact did tear his foot off.
And as the medications to help with the pain not only helped with the pain but created dependency and despondency, he fell into deep depression.
The church pressures never went away.
The family pressures never went away.
And so finally he took his life away.
He had been a lighthouse of hope in that church.
They had dark a long time and he'd been such a beacon of newness, of a new start and a new beginning, that when he was gone, his assistant pastor also attempted his life, same church.
And then weeks later, the other assistant pastor attempted his life, same church.
The wife of the senior pastor, just to get away from the darkness and the madness, began to attend our church.
Our pastor at that time was preaching through the psalms.
And on the Sunday that he preached Psalm 88, that other senior pastor's wife came to talk to him and said, "I was so anxious about how you would preach Psalm 88.
I so wanted you to be honest, because it is the psalm that I read to my children when my husband took his life."
Why?
Because God says here in this psalm, "It's okay for you to think that life stinks, but you are still My child."
And if God will let me say the truth that my life stinks, then I will believe Him when He says, "You are still My child."
If He's true about the darkness, then He must be honest about the light too.
And the fact that this is not the only psalm is what gives us hope when we are facing that darkness.
Said that young woman, "I will trust His words about the hope He offers and eternity ahead, because He has been so aw--, honest about my struggle."
Why do we love the psalm?
Not when you're young, when you've had a little bit of life: Why do you love this psalm?
Because it's not the last psalm.
There's one other critical place that I've read this psalm.
Those of you who've been to Israel with us, you know it.
There is an awful place that we visit when we're in Israel.
It's known as the House of Caiaphas, the high priest, the one who tried and tortured Jesus before sending Him on to the Romans.
If you go to that house, they've excavated underneath, and you'd find that there were stables that were kind of cut into the hillside where it falls away.
And in the rock, there are hitching posts that have been carved into the rock and they're low down where you can tie horses' reins.
But some of the hitching posts are carved high up into the rock where wom--, men would be tied and tortured.
In the house of the high priest.
What darkness.
And it's not the worst of the darkness.
Lower down, same house, is a grain pit turned into a holding cell where men were thrown down, held either by broken legs or a pit so dark and deep it would break their wills, where our Lord would have gone.
Now there are stairs that lead to the bottom of the pit for tourists.
And if you walk down the stairs to the bottom of the pit, there is a large book with only one psalm in dozens of languages: The one psalm is Psalm 88, to be read where our Lord was held.
"O Lord, God of my salvation; I cry out day and night before you.
Let my prayer come before you; incline your ear to my cry!
For my soul is full of troubles, and my life draws near to death.
You have put me in the depths of the pit, in regions dark and deep.
Your wrath lies heavy upon me, and you overwhelm me with all your waves.
O Lord, why do you cast my soul away?
Why do you turn your face from me?
You have caused my beloved and my friends to shun me, and darkness is my closest friend."
It means so much when you begin to recognize that this psalm, though it reflects our life, reflects our Lord's suffering.
This is not just what we experience: It's what He entered, for your sake and for mine.
And the reason I ultimately trust Him is not just that He knows the darkness but He would enter it to suffer and die for my sin and yours, so that we could say to our own souls and to the world, "When the darkness is so intense that I cannot even see the dawn, I will trust Him yet, because He entered in."
He didn't just see it from afar; He entered in.
So He'll listen to me now, even in my complaint and my confusion.
He will listen.
Turn to Him.
He will listen.
He knows what you're going through.
He knows the darkness, and He entered in so that your everlasting dawn would be without this darkness because you trust in Him.