How Long, O LORD?

Read Psalm 13 in full before proceeding (it is only six verses), and read it twice. Mark where the psalm turns from complaint to trust, and notice how few words it takes to get there. Keep your Bible open throughout this session.

But I trust in your faithfulness. May I rejoice because of your deliverance! I will sing praises to the LORD when he vindicates me.

Psalm 13:5–6

We have spent three sessions in the throne room, among the royal psalms, with the King enthroned and wed and reigning. Now we get up and walk into a very different room: the largest room in the whole house. We said in the genre map that something like a third of the Psalter is given over to lament, to crying out of trouble, and that this fact should reset our expectations: if the Bible’s own prayer book is mostly laments, then the praying life God means His people to have is not a steady sunlit cheerfulness with the hard parts edited out. A great deal of honest praying is done in the dark. It is time we learned how.

And we should pause over what it means that God filled His own prayer book with so much lament, because it tells us something about the God we pray to. He did not hand His people a hymnal of unbroken sunshine and expect them to fake the rest. He gave them words for grief, for doubt, for the long night when heaven seems shut, and He put those words in the book He means us to pray. That is not a concession to our weakness; it is a kindness, and a dignity. It means God would rather have our honest how long than our polished pretending; that He is not scandalized by the complaints of His suffering children but has actually scripted them, so that the believer in the dark need not invent his own words but may reach for the ones the Spirit already breathed out for exactly this. The sheer quantity of lament in the Psalter is the measure of how welcome our honesty is at God’s throne.

And there is no better place to learn than Psalm 13, because it is the lament in its clearest, simplest form: six short verses that lay the whole shape bare. We named that shape in the genre map. A lament begins by addressing God and pouring out the complaint; it makes its petition, asking for help; and then, in most of them, it turns. The complaint gives way to trust, and the psalm ends in a vow of praise. Psalm 13 is the textbook example, the model every other lament fills out in its own way. If you can pray Psalm 13, you can pray the whole room.

It opens with the rawest words a believer ever prays. How long, LORD, will you continue to ignore me? How long will you pay no attention to me? (v. 1). The Hebrew is more pictorial still, and older translations keep its pictures: Will you forget me forever? How long will you hide your face from me? (Psalm 13:1 ESV). Four times in the first two verses comes that cry, how long, how long, how long, how long, the sound of a soul worn thin by a trouble that will not end, and honest enough to say so to God’s own face. And then, only four verses later, the same psalm has turned entirely around: But I trust in your faithfulness. May I rejoice because of your deliverance! (v. 5). From how long, will you forget me forever to I trust, in the space of a prayer you could say in thirty seconds. How a believer travels that distance, and how he can travel it himself, is the whole lesson of this session.

Before we walk it, two things to hold in mind. The first is that this raw complaint is not the opposite of faith; it is one of faith’s truest expressions, and the Psalter hands it to us as a gift. We are not required to clean up our prayers before we bring them, not required to pretend we are fine, not required to feel our way to a cheerful mood before we are allowed to speak to God. The Bible gives us words for the dark, and they are words we may pray straight to His face. The second is that we never pray this psalm alone, because the Lord Jesus prayed its deepest form first. On the cross He prayed the ultimate how long, the ultimate why have you hidden your face: My God, my God, why have you abandoned me? And He prayed it not feeling abandoned but truly abandoned, in our place. The great Lamenter has been to the very bottom of this room, and He is with us in it.

So we will follow the model lament down and back up: the fourfold cry of the complaint, the specific pleas of the petition, and then the turn (the single word but on which everything swings) and the song that, against all appearances, ends the psalm. And we will learn, from the simplest lament in the book, how a believer prays his way through the dark without either pretending it is light or being swallowed by it.

How Long?

How long, LORD, will you continue to ignore me? How long will you pay no attention to me? (v. 1). Notice first to whom the complaint is addressed. The believer does not mutter his how long to himself, or to a friend, or into the empty air. He says it to the LORD, to God’s face: will YOU forget me, will YOU hide YOUR face. And that is the first thing the lament teaches us, because it is exactly backward from what we usually do. When God seems absent, our instinct is to stop praying, to go quiet, to take our complaint everywhere except to Him. The lament does the opposite: it takes the complaint about God’s silence straight to God. You do not accuse someone of forgetting you unless you believe they are there to hear it; you do not cry how long will you hide your face to a God you think is absent or deaf or powerless. The complaint is itself an act of faith. It is faith with its gloves off, faith honest enough to tell God the truth about how His silence feels.

And feel what the complaint actually says, because it is staggering that the Holy Spirit put these words in the church’s prayer book. Will you forget me forever? The believer feels forgotten by God. How long will you hide your face? He feels that God has turned away, gone dark, withdrawn the warmth of His presence. This is the experience the old teachers called the hidden face of God: the seasons, known to almost every Christian who prays for long, when heaven seems shut and the God who was near has gone silent. The Psalter does not scold that experience or pretend it never happens to the faithful. It hands the faithful words for it. But hold fast to this, for the whole turn of the psalm will depend on it: the feeling of God’s absence is not the fact of it. The believer feels forgotten, but he is not forgotten. Can a woman forget her baby who nurses at her breast? … Even if mothers were to forget, I could never forget you! says the LORD (Isaiah 49:15). The face feels hidden; the steadfast love behind it has not moved an inch. The lament is the prayer that travels from the feeling to the fact.

The complaint also names trouble in three directions, and it is worth seeing all three, because a believer in pain often cannot sort out what is even wrong. There is the trouble above (will you forget me, hide your face), the felt absence of God, which is always the worst of it. There is the trouble within: How long must I worry, and suffer in broad daylight? (v. 2), or, in the Hebrew’s own picture, take counsel in my soul and have sorrow in my heart all the day (Psalm 13:2 ESV). It is the churning of a mind that turns the problem over and over and gets nowhere, the sorrow that sits on the chest from morning to night. And there is the trouble outside (How long will my enemy gloat over me?), the actual affliction, the person or circumstance that is winning. God, self, and enemy: the lament names them all and brings them all to the LORD.

That middle trouble, take counsel in my soul, deserves a closer look, because it names the very thing that makes the dark so much darker than it needs to be. To take counsel in my soul is to be one’s own only counselor, turning the trouble over endlessly in the locked room of one’s own head: the three-in-the-morning spiral, the same anxious circuit run again and again with no exit. We met it in Asaph, who confessed, When I tried to make sense of this, it was troubling to me, until he stopped reasoning alone and went into the sanctuary of God. The lament is the way out of that locked room. Instead of taking counsel only in his own soul, the believer takes the whole churning mess and says it out loud to God. The cure for the endless inward spiral is not more inward spiraling, however hard you think; it is to turn the complaint outward and upward, to the One who can actually answer. That turning is what the next verses do.

Light Up My Eyes

Having poured out the complaint, the believer asks. Look at me! Answer me, O LORD my God! Revive me, or else I will die! (v. 3). The Hebrew speaks in pictures here too, and older translations keep them: light up my eyes, lest I sleep the sleep of death (Psalm 13:3 ESV). Three pleas, quick and bare: look at me, take notice, do not leave me unregarded; answer me, break the silence, say something, do not leave me with how long; and light up my eyes. That last one is a picture worth pausing over. When a person is sinking (from grief, from sickness, from sheer exhaustion of soul), the light goes out of his eyes; they dim, they dull, the life seems to drain from them. To have one’s eyes lit up is to have life and vigor restored, to be brought back from the edge, which is why the NET can render it simply revive me. The believer is asking God to put the light back in his eyes before they close for good, lest I sleep the sleep of death.

Notice that he prays this honestly, too. He is close enough to the end of his strength to speak of the sleep of death, not as a wish, but as a fear; the trouble has worn him down toward the grave, and he says so. And here, even in the petition, the gospel is quietly near. For there was One who did sleep the sleep of death, who was worn all the way down, past the edge the psalmist only feared, and whose eyes God lit up again on the third morning. Because the Lord Jesus slept that sleep and woke from it, the believer’s own sleep of death, when it comes, is not the end he dreads but a sleep from which he too will be wakened. The plea light up my eyes, lest I sleep the sleep of death is answered, finally and forever, at an empty tomb. Even the darkest petition of the lament is held inside the resurrection.

The pleas come with reasons, three of them, each marked in the Hebrew with lest, telling God why He should act. Lest I sleep the sleep of death: for the believer’s own life. Then my enemy will say, “I have defeated him!” Then my foes will rejoice because I am upended (v. 4). And here the believer’s concern widens past himself. If he goes down, the enemy will gloat, will claim victory, will say that trusting the LORD comes to nothing in the end. And that touches more than the believer’s pride; it touches the LORD’s own honor, for the enemy’s gloating is finally directed at the God the believer trusted. There is something bracing in praying this way, in asking God to act not only for our sake but for His name’s sake, that the watching world may not be given cause to say His people trust Him for nothing. The lament cares about God’s reputation in the believer’s rescue.

And we should not leave the petition without remembering that the Lord Jesus prayed one of His own, in a garden at night, sweating as it were great drops of blood. My soul is deeply grieved, even to the point of death, He said (Matthew 26:38). That is the very edge the psalmist names, and He asked, plainly, for the cup to pass from Him. The sinless Son of God, in the dark, asked His Father to take the trouble away. So no believer need ever feel that to ask God for relief, to plead let this pass, light up my eyes, do not let me sink, is somehow beneath a person of faith. The Lord Jesus asked. He asked honestly, out of a sorrow that went down to death, and then He added the words that make the asking holy: Yet not what I will, but what you will. That is the petition of the lament at its purest: ask boldly for the cup to pass, and then lay the matter down into the hands of a Father who can be trusted with the answer, whatever it turns out to be. We pray our pleas inside His.

But I Have Trusted

And now the whole psalm turns, and it turns on a single word. But I trust in your faithfulness (v. 5). But. After four verses of how long and will you forget me and the sleep of death, one small adversative word swings the entire psalm around: but I trust. It is the same emphatic turn we heard in Asaph (But I am continually with you), the believer planting his feet against everything he has just confessed and saying, in effect, and yet. And yet, for all of that, I trust.

Everything hangs on what changed between verse 1 and verse 5, so look closely, because the answer is the most important thing in the session. What changed was not the circumstances. Read the psalm again and you will find that nothing in it says the trouble lifted. The enemy is not reported defeated; the sickness is not said to break; the long sorrow is not announced over. As far as the psalm tells us, the believer’s situation at verse 5 is exactly what it was at verse 1. And what changed was not that he reasoned his way out; there is no argument in the psalm, no clever solution to the problem of his suffering. So if neither the circumstances nor the logic changed, what did? The believer turned. He turned his eyes from the trouble he had been staring at to the God he had been crying to; he turned from his feelings, which said forgotten, to God’s steadfast love, which said otherwise. The turn of the lament is not a change in the weather. It is a change in where the believer is looking.

And here is the secret the lament has been teaching all along: the complaint is prayed to the God who has promised, and He meets the one who prays it. He did not wait until he felt better to pray; he prayed, honestly, out of the dark. He named the trouble, brought it to God’s face, asked for help, and somewhere in the praying, as he held God to His own word, the grip of the trouble loosened and the grip of faith tightened, until he could say but I trust. It was not the praying that did it, but the God he prayed to, keeping His promise. This is why we must not save our praying for the days we feel strong. The lament is prayed precisely on the days we feel forgotten, and it is the road God has given from how long to I trust. You do not find the turn by sitting in the dark waiting for it. The LORD brings you to it, through the very words He has given you to pray.

It helps to see plainly what kind of thing the turn is, because we can mistake it for something it is not. The turn is not a mood that descends on the believer if he is lucky, nor a feeling he must somehow generate before it counts. It is an act (a deliberate, often effortful act of faith) in which the believer takes the truth he has not been feeling and says it anyway: but I trust in your faithfulness. He is not reporting a warm sensation; he is making a confession, planting his weight on a promise whether or not the promise feels true at that moment. And because it is an act and not a mood, it is something the believer can do even on the days he feels nothing, and may have to do more than once, for the dark does not always lift at the first turning. Some laments make the turn in six verses; some, like Psalm 88, hardly seem to make it at all, and the believer holds on by his fingernails to a God he can only address and not yet praise. The turn is not always quick and it is not always felt. But it is always available, because it rests not on our feelings but on the steadfast love we are turning toward.

Your Steadfast Love

And see what the believer trusts in: not in better circumstances, not in his own strength, not even in his own faith, but in your faithfulness. The Hebrew word is chesed, one of the great words of the Old Testament, which the NET renders here faithfulness and elsewhere loyal love, and older translations steadfast love. It is the LORD’s covenant love, His faithful loyalty, the love that has bound itself by promise and will not let go. And the crucial thing about chesed is that it is steadfast: it does not rise and fall with the believer’s feelings, does not withdraw when the face seems hidden, does not depend on the weather of the soul. The believer who felt forgotten in verse 1 anchors himself in verse 5 not to a feeling but to a fact: the fixed, sworn, unwavering love of God, which was holding him just as firmly when he felt forgotten as it is now that he has remembered it.

This is why a believer’s assurance must never finally rest on how he feels. Feelings are true reporters of the weather and terrible reporters of the facts; they will tell you honestly that the face seems hidden, and they will tell you, falsely, that you are therefore forgotten. The chesed of God is the surer ground. It is, as another lament puts it, the loyal kindness that never ceases, whose compassions are fresh every morning (Lamentations 3:22–23), there even on the mornings we cannot feel it. And for us who live on this side of the cross, the steadfast love has a face and a name and a wound in its side. We anchor not to an abstract covenant loyalty but to the Lord Jesus, in whom God’s chesed came to find us, and of whom Paul could say that neither death, nor life … nor anything else in creation will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord (Romans 8:38–39). The steadfast love the psalmist trusted in the dark is the love that went to the cross and will not be parted from us by anything the dark can do.

And there is a place a believer can look when his feelings insist he is forgotten, a fixed point outside himself that settles the question once for all. God demonstrates his own love for us, in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us (Romans 5:8). The steadfast love of God is not merely asserted; it was proved, in public, in history, at a cross. When the feeling of abandonment is loudest, the believer does not have to argue with it in the abyss of his own heart, where the feeling always wins. He can turn his eyes to an event that already happened, that cannot be undone, that no mood can erase: God gave His own Son for him while he was still an enemy. A love that went that far, when we were at our worst, is not a love that quietly slips away when we feel low. The cross stands in history like a fixed star. There is the proof of the steadfast love, fastened down in time, shining whether the believer feels its warmth tonight or not. Feelings of abandonment are answered not from within but from Calvary.

I Will Sing

The lament that began in how long ends in a song. May I rejoice because of your deliverance! I will sing praises to the LORD when he vindicates me (vv. 5–6). The believer who was sinking toward the sleep of death is, by the last verse, singing. And the tenses are worth catching, because they are the very grammar of faith. May I rejoice: that is still looking ahead; the rejoicing has not fully arrived. But the last verb of the psalm is, in the Hebrew, a completed action, which older translations render he has dealt bountifully with me (Psalm 13:6 ESV): past tense, spoken as a thing already done. The deliverance the believer is still waiting for, he speaks of as if it had already come, because he is so sure of the steadfast love behind it that the praise begins before the rescue is in sight.

That is the boldness faith learns in the lament: to sing in advance. The believer does not wait until the trouble is over to praise God; he praises God in the dark, on the strength of the chesed he has trusted, sure that the One who has bound Himself to him in love has already, in effect, dealt bountifully with him. The deliverance is as good as done because the God who promised it does not lie. There is no pretending here, no forcing of a cheerful mood. The trouble of verses 1 and 2 was real and is, as far as we know, still present. But the believer has found something more solid than his trouble to stand on, and from that solid place he can sing while the storm is still blowing.

And mark that the song does not erase the complaint. This is important, because there is a false and cruel version of faith that tells the suffering Christian he ought to skip straight to verse 5, that the how long of verses 1 and 2 is beneath a believer, that real trust does not complain. Psalm 13 says no such thing. It complains for two whole verses before it ever turns, and it does not apologize for the complaining, and it does not pretend the trouble was never there. The turn to trust does not delete the lament; it stands alongside it. The believer holds both at once (the real trouble and the trusted love, the honest how long and the bold I will sing), and that holding-both is not a failure of faith but the very shape of it. Faith is not the absence of the dark. It is trusting the steadfast love in the middle of it, and singing before the morning comes.

And we should notice that this lament was never meant to be sung only alone. Its heading marks it for the music director: it was handed to the one who led the temple’s music, to be sung by the gathered people of God in worship. The laments are congregational songs. That matters enormously for the believer too weak to make the turn himself, because there are such nights, when a Christian can manage the how long but cannot, for the life of him, reach the but I trust. On those nights the church sings it for him. When you cannot sing, the people of God around you can; they carry the song you have lost, they confess the steadfast love your own heart cannot feel, they hold the trust on your behalf until you can hold it again yourself. This is part of why God gives us the gathered congregation and does not leave us to lament in isolation: so that the body can do for the weakest member what he cannot do for himself, and bear his lament up to God when his own voice fails. It is also why a believer whose darkness runs long or deep should not carry it in silence, but should bring it to his pastor, and should not hesitate to seek the help of a doctor or counselor as well; God cares for His people through these gifts too.

How to Lament

So gather up what the model lament has taught us, because it is meant to be used, not just admired. When the trouble comes (and for every believer it comes), Psalm 13 hands you the pattern. Do not go silent and carry it alone; take it to God’s face, in His own words, as rawly as you feel it: how long, LORD? Name the trouble in every direction, the felt absence above, the churning within, the enemy without, and refuse to be your own only counselor in the locked room of your head. Then ask, plainly, for what you need: look at me, answer me, light up my eyes. And then turn. Do it not by waiting to feel better, not by reasoning your way out, but by fixing your eyes on the steadfast love of God, which held you all through the dark and holds you still; and from that solid ground, begin to sing, even before the morning, because the God who has bound Himself to you in chesed has as good as dealt bountifully with you already.

And do all of it in Christ, the great Lamenter, who prayed the deepest how long of all. When you feel forgotten, remember that He was truly forsaken: that the hidden face you only feel, He actually endured, and endured it in your place, so that the felt absence of God is the worst you will ever know and the real abandonment will never be yours. He slept the sleep of death you fear, and woke, so that your own sleep is not the end. And the steadfast love you trust in the dark is His love, which went all the way to the cross to find you and will not be separated from you by anything. The believer does not lament into the void. He laments to a God whose face only seems hidden, anchored to a love that went to the grave and back, in the company of a Savior who has prayed every word of the dark before him.

And in the company, too, of a great chorus of God’s people who have prayed it before us and pray it with us still. The how long of Psalm 13 is not a lonely cry; it is the cry of the whole waiting church, and it echoes all the way to the end of the Bible, where the souls of the martyrs under the altar cry out with one voice, How long, Sovereign Master, holy and true (Revelation 6:10). For three thousand years the people of God have prayed how long, and they pray it yet, and they will go on praying it until the day it is finally answered. So the believer in his own dark valley is never praying alone or praying something strange; he is joining a song the whole communion of saints has been singing since David first set it to music. And the answer to every how long is coming, on the day the great Lamenter returns and wipes away every tear, and the long question is at last put to rest, not with an explanation, but with His own face no longer hidden.

This is how most of the praying life is actually lived: not on the mountaintop but in the long valley, where the trouble does not lift on schedule and the face seems hidden for longer than we think we can bear. The Psalter does not rush us out of that valley; it gives us a whole roomful of songs to sing in it, and Psalm 13 is the first and simplest of them. Learn it by heart, and you will have words for the worst nights of your life: words that begin in honest darkness and end, six verses later, in a song; words that do not lie about the trouble and do not lie about the God who is greater than it. That is the gift of the lament: permission to be honest, and a road, through the honesty, back to trust.

Gathering the Threads

We walked into the largest room of the prayer book, the laments, and learned its shape from the clearest example in the book. Psalm 13 begins with the rawest cry a believer prays, the fourfold how long, the felt absence of God’s hidden face, addressed straight to God. That is not faithlessness but faith with its gloves off, since we cry how long only to One we believe is there. We saw the trouble named in three directions, God and self and enemy, and warned against the locked room of taking counsel only in one’s own soul. We heard the petition (look at me, answer me, light up my eyes, lest I sleep the sleep of death) and found even that dark plea held inside the resurrection of the One who slept that sleep and woke.

And we watched the psalm turn on a single word, but I trust in your faithfulness, and saw that nothing in the circumstances had changed; what changed was where the believer was looking. He turned from his feelings, which said forgotten, to God’s chesed, His steadfast covenant love, which does not rise and fall with the weather of the soul and held him even when he could not feel it: the love that, for us, went to the cross and cannot be separated from us by anything. And we heard the lament end in a song sung in advance, the deliverance spoken of as already done, the trouble real but no longer the ground the believer stood on. The turn did not erase the complaint; faith holds both, the honest how long and the bold I will sing. That is the lament, and that is how a believer prays his way through the dark: honestly, to God’s face, anchored in steadfast love, in the company of the great Lamenter who prayed the worst of it first.

For Discussion

1. Psalm 13 opens with a complaint addressed straight to God’s face: How long, LORD, will you continue to ignore me? The session argued this is faith, not faithlessness. Why is it an act of trust, rather than a failure of it, to bring God your rawest complaint in His own words?

2. The psalm names trouble in three directions: toward God (who seems to hide His face), toward the self (sorrow and endless counsel in the soul), and toward the enemy. How does taking the trouble to God differ from turning it over and over alone in your own head (compare Psalm 73:16)?

3. The believer feels God has forgotten him and hidden His face (v. 1), yet the Scriptures insist God does not forget His own (Isaiah 49:15; Hebrews 13:5). How do you hold together the real feeling of God’s absence and the fact of His presence, and which of the two should a believer’s assurance rest on?

4. The whole psalm turns on one word in verse 5: But I trust in your faithfulness. Nothing in the psalm says the trouble lifted. So what changed between verse 1 and verse 5, and how does a believer make that same turn?

5. The turn rests on God’s chesed, His steadfast love, the covenant faithfulness that does not change with our circumstances or feelings (Lamentations 3:22–23). Why is that a surer anchor than waiting to feel better, and how is it finally grounded in Christ (Romans 8:38–39)?

6. The Lord Jesus prayed the deepest lament of all from the cross: My God, my God, why have you abandoned me? (Psalm 22). How does it help a believer who feels forgotten to know that Christ was truly forsaken in his place?

Looking Ahead

Psalm 13 taught us to take the complaint to God. The next lament teaches us something that goes hand in hand with it: what to do when the trouble is not an enemy outside but the downcast state of our own soul. The next session takes up Psalms 42 and 43 (almost certainly one psalm in two parts), the great lament that opens with the image everyone remembers: As a deer longs for streams of water, so I long for you, O God! (Psalm 42:1). It is the prayer of a believer cut off from the house of God, thirsty for a nearness he cannot reach, taunted by the question Where is your God?

And it does something Psalm 13 only hinted at: the psalmist turns and speaks to his own soul. Three times the refrain comes: Why are you depressed, O my soul? Why are you upset? Wait for God! For I will again give thanks to my God for his saving intervention (Psalm 42:5). Where Psalm 13 took counsel in the soul and warned us of the locked room, Psalm 42 shows us the way out: the believer learns to stop merely listening to his downcast soul and to start preaching to it, telling it the truth it has forgotten. We will learn, from a thirsty deer and a downcast soul, how to talk back to ourselves with the gospel.

Read Psalms 42 and 43 together before the next session; they are meant to be read as one. Watch for the refrain that repeats three times, and notice that the psalmist is speaking, in it, not to God but to his own soul.

Closing Prayer

O LORD, You have given us words for the dark, and we thank You for them. When we feel forgotten, when Your face seems hidden, when the trouble will not lift and we have run the same anxious circuit in our souls one more sleepless time, teach us to do what this psalm does: to bring the whole of it to You, honestly, to Your very face, and not to carry it alone in silence. We confess that our feelings tell us we are forgotten; remind us that Your steadfast love has not moved, that You who would not forget a nursing child will never forget us, and that the face that seems hidden is the face of the God who loves us still.

Turn us, as You turned the psalmist, from our trouble to Your chesed, the steadfast love that went to the cross in Your Son and will not be separated from us by anything in all creation. Light up our eyes; and when at last we sleep the sleep of death, wake us as You woke Him on the third morning. Teach us to sing before the morning comes, sure that You have dealt bountifully with us. And in every dark valley, keep us close to the Lord Jesus, the great Lamenter, who prayed the worst of it in our place. For He lives and reigns with You and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and forever. Amen.