O LORD, God of My Salvation

Read Psalm 88 in full before proceeding. It is a hard read; do not rush it. Notice that, unlike every other lament, it does not turn to trust or end in praise. And yet notice, too, that from first to last it is addressed to God. Keep your Bible open throughout this session.

As for me, I cry out to you, O LORD; in the morning my prayer confronts you.
Psalm 88:13

We have just come from the shouts of joy that end Psalm 32, and now we step into a room where the lights do not come back on. Psalm 88 is the darkest psalm in the whole Psalter, and we are going to handle it honestly, because its very darkness is one of the kindest things in the book. This is the one lament that never turns. Every other lament we have read travels from the dark toward trust, and most of them end in a song: Psalm 13 reaches I will sing praises; Psalm 42 keeps saying wait for God; Psalm 51’s broken heart finds its joy in Psalm 32. Psalm 88 does none of that. It begins in trouble, sinks deeper through every verse, and ends with the bleakest line in the prayer book, in some translations darkness is my closest friend. There is no turn. There is no happy ending. The psalm goes down into the dark and stays there.

And we have to ask why the Holy Spirit gave the church such a psalm: a prayer with no resolution, set, of all things, to music. For its heading marks it for the music director, to be sung in the worship of God’s people, and it names its author: Heman the Ezrahite, one of the wise men of Israel and a leader of the temple singers. This is no faithless man’s complaint. It is a faithful believer’s prayer, and a song the gathered church was meant to sing. Which means God deliberately gave His people words for a darkness that does not lift.

That is the mercy hiding in this psalm, and we should say it plainly before we go a step further, because someone reading these pages may need it more than anything else in this book. There are believers (perhaps you, perhaps someone you love) whose night does not end on schedule. Whose grief, or illness, or depression, or affliction goes on for years, with no song at the end of the day and no relief in the morning. If every psalm turned to joy by its last verse, such a believer would be left to conclude that his unbroken darkness has no place in Scripture, that his failure to find the happy ending is a failure of faith. Psalm 88 says the opposite, with the full authority of God’s own word: even this, the night that will not end, has a place in the prayer book of God’s people. A faithful believer can pray from unrelieved darkness and still be praying. You are not faithless because you cannot yet sing. There is a psalm for you, and God Himself wrote it into His book.

So we will not soften the darkness, and we will not rush the psalm to a comfort it does not offer. But we will hold onto two things the whole way down, and they are real, and they are enough. The first is that from its first word to its last, this psalm is addressed to God. The sufferer never stops praying, never turns away, never lets go of the God he cannot feel. That is faith, reduced to its barest and most stubborn form, and it is faith still. The second is that the One who is the burden of this whole series went down into a darkness deeper than this psalm’s, and came out, so that even the believer whose night lasts the whole of his life is not finally left in the dark.

We will follow the psalm down: the cry of a man calling God his deliverer from the bottom of the pit, the honest naming of the darkness, the despairing questions about the grave that the resurrection would one day answer, the unrelieved ending. And then we will find, underneath the darkest psalm, the One who entered the dark for us, and the hope that lies beyond its final verse. And we will end where this kind of darkness must never be left: not alone.

Before the darkness, there is a single ray, and we must catch it because so much depends on it. The psalm opens: O LORD God who delivers me! By day I cry out and at night I pray before you (v. 1). Hear what he calls God, even here, even at the start of the bleakest prayer in the Bible: God who delivers me, or as older translations have it, God of my salvation. Not God who has abandoned me, not God who is against me, but God who delivers me: the title of trust, the name a believer gives the God he is counting on to save him. The man who is about to sink through eighteen verses of unbroken darkness begins by naming the God he is sinking toward as his Savior. He has not let go.

And see what he is doing: By day I cry out and at night I pray before you … Listen to my prayer! Pay attention to my cry for help! (vv. 1–2). He is praying. Around the clock, day and night, he is bringing his trouble to God: not muttering it to himself, not nursing it in silence, not turning away in bitterness, but crying it out before God. This matters more than it may seem, and the whole comfort of the psalm hangs on it. A man does not cry day and night to a God he has given up on. The praying itself, however dark and unanswered, is the proof that faith has not died; it has only been stripped down to its bones. When everything else is gone (the feeling of God’s presence, the evidence of His help, the hope of relief) and all that is left is a man still turning his face toward heaven to cry, that bare turning is faith, and God sees it, and it is enough.

Hold that thought through everything that follows, because the darkness is about to close in, and you will need it. Whatever this psalm says about the pit and the wrath and the darkness, it says it to God, in prayer, by a man who called Him God who delivers me. The darkness is real. But it is darkness prayed into the ear of God, and that changes what kind of darkness it is. It is not the darkness of a man who has stopped believing. It is the darkness of a man who believes, and suffers, and keeps on praying anyway.

It helps to see that a dark prayer like this one is the very opposite of giving up. We sometimes fear that to bring God such bleak words (to tell Him the pit is deep and His face seems hidden and we have no strength left) is somehow to fail Him, to fall short of the trust we ought to have. But the alternative to lament is not cheerfulness; it is silence. The person who has truly given up on God does not pray dark prayers. He stops praying altogether; he turns his face to the wall and says nothing, because there is no one, he has decided, who is listening. The man of Psalm 88 does the opposite. He keeps coming, keeps crying, keeps spreading out his hands, and every dark word he prays is a word still directed at God, which means a word still trusting, at some level beneath all feeling, that God is there to hear it. Far from being unwelcome, this is precisely the prayer God invites. He gave us the words for it; He wrote them into His book; He set them to music for His people to sing. A God who did not want to hear our darkness would not have handed us a psalm with which to pray it.

The Depths of the Pit

Now the psalm names the darkness, and it does not flinch, and neither should we. For my life is filled with troubles and I am ready to enter Sheol … I am like a helpless man (vv. 3–4). He feels himself at the very edge of death, worn past the last of his strength, as good as among the dead. And he does the hard thing the laments have taught us to do: he lays even this at God’s door. You place me in the lowest regions of the pit … Your anger bears down on me, and you overwhelm me with all your waves (vv. 6–7). These are the billows and waves of Psalm 42 again, but here there is no refrain to break their force. The sufferer does not pretend his trouble came from nowhere; he believes God’s hand is in it, and he says so. That is not unbelief; it is the costly faith that will not let go of God’s sovereignty even when God’s hand feels like the thing that is crushing him.

And the darkness has a particular cruelty: it is lonely. You cause those who know me to keep their distance … I am trapped and cannot get free. My eyes grow weak because of oppression (vv. 8–9). This is among the bitterest parts of long suffering: that it isolates, that friends fall away, that the sufferer feels shut in, cut off, a burden others avoid. Anyone who has walked through a long illness or a long grief or a long depression knows this loneliness, and the psalm does not pretend it away. The weakened eyes, the trap with no way out, the absent friends: it names them all.

But look where even this section lands, for the ray of verse 1 has not gone out: I call out to you, O LORD, all day long; I spread out my hands in prayer to you (v. 9). After all the troubles, after the pit and the wrath and the waves and the loneliness, he is still praying. All day long. He spreads out his hands, the old posture of pleading, the empty open hands of a man who has nothing and asks anyway. He has no strength, no friends, no relief, and no evidence that God is listening, and still, every day, he lifts his hands toward heaven. If you want to know what faith looks like when it has been stripped of everything but its bare existence, it looks like this: empty hands, lifted every morning, to a God who has not yet answered. That is not a small or failing faith. In many ways it is the strongest faith there is.

Do You Work Wonders for the Dead?

In the middle of the psalm the sufferer presses God with a string of questions, and they are the questions of a man staring at his own grave. Do you accomplish amazing things for the dead? Do the departed spirits rise up and give you thanks? … Is your loyal love proclaimed in the grave, or your faithfulness in the place of the dead? Are your amazing deeds experienced in the dark region …? (vv. 10–12). He means them as a kind of desperate argument: save me now, while I am still alive, for once I am in the grave it will be too late; the dead cannot praise you, your loyal love does not reach down into the tomb. He is working from the dim and shadowed view of death that the saints of the old covenant largely had, in which the grave seemed a land of silence and forgetfulness, beyond the reach of God’s wonders. From where he sat, in the centuries before the empty tomb, the questions had only one bleak answer: no.

But we sit on the other side of an event Heman could not yet see, and from here every one of his questions has been answered, and the answer is a thunderous yes. Do you accomplish amazing things for the dead? Yes. God raised His own Son from the dead, the firstfruits of all who will follow, and He will raise every one of His own. Do the departed spirits rise up and give you thanks? Yes. There is coming a morning when the graves give up their dead and the whole company of the redeemed rises to praise the God who conquered death. Is your loyal love proclaimed in the grave? Yes, as nowhere else, for the Lord Jesus carried God’s loyal love down into the grave itself, lay three days in the heart of the earth, and rose, and so planted the flag of God’s chesed in the one place this psalmist thought it could never reach. The despairing questions of Psalm 88 are not left hanging. They are answered at Easter. The grave is no longer the land of oblivion; it has become, for those in Christ, the bed from which the dead will be wakened.

This is why the believer in the dark, even staring at his own death, has a hope the psalmist could only ache for. Whatever the darkness is (even if it is the final darkness, even if the night lasts to the grave) it does not have the last word, because Christ has been into the grave and out the other side, and has promised to bring His own through after Him. The questions that sounded like the bottom of despair turn out to be, read in the light of the resurrection, a list of the very things the gospel promises. Heman asked them expecting silence. We can ask them and hear, from an empty tomb, the answer yes.

And the yes is not a vague or general one; it is personal, and it has the believer’s own name on it. When Paul wrote the great resurrection chapter, he did not say merely that Christ rose, as a wonder that happened once to one man. He said Christ has been raised from the dead, the firstfruits of those who have fallen asleep (1 Corinthians 15:20), the first sheaf of a harvest that guarantees all the rest. The firstfruits are not the whole crop; they are the pledge of it, the proof that the field will be brought in. So the resurrection of the Lord Jesus is not a lonely miracle but the down payment on a promise that reaches to every grave where one of His own is laid. The believer staring at his own death, asking with Heman whether the departed rise to praise God, may answer himself with the firstfruits: this very body, worn down by affliction, will be raised; these very eyes, dim now with sorrow, will see; and the praise that the grave seemed to silence forever will break out louder on the far side of it than it ever could here. The grave is not the land of oblivion for those in Christ. It is the place where the harvest waits for its morning.

Why Do You Hide Your Face?

And yet the psalm itself does not reach that answer. It cannot; it was written before the tomb was emptied. So it presses on into its final, unrelieved verses, and we must let it, honestly. As for me, I cry out to you, O LORD; in the morning my prayer confronts you (v. 13). There is the emphatic as for me (in Hebrew, simply but I) we have heard in other psalms, the word on which Psalm 13 and Psalm 73 turned toward trust. But here it turns only toward more prayer. As for me, I cry out to you: the sufferer’s defiance of the dark is not a burst of restored confidence; it is simply the refusal to stop praying. Morning after morning, with nothing changed, his prayer comes before God again. The turn that other psalms make to song, this psalm makes only to persistence: I will keep crying to you, even like this, even still.

Then come the questions that have no answer in the psalm: O LORD, why do you reject me, and pay no attention to me? (v. 14). The Hebrew says it more starkly: why do you hide your face from me? The hidden face again, the felt absence of God that we met in the earlier laments, but here it is not resolved, only asked. And the psalm closes in the dark: I am oppressed and have been on the verge of death since my youth … Your anger overwhelms me … those who know me leave me alone in the darkness (vv. 15–18). Lifelong affliction, no relief, and a last word that is the loneliest in the Bible. The psalm ends there. No song, no turn, no resolution; just a faithful man, still praying, in the dark.

We must be honest about what that means and what it does not. It does not mean God had abandoned him; the felt absence of God, as we have seen all through the laments, is never the fact of it, and the very God whose face seemed hidden was at that moment giving this man the words of his prayer and preserving them for the comfort of His people three thousand years on. A God who had truly cast him away does not hand him a psalm to pray and put it in the church’s hymnbook. But it does mean this: some darkness has no happy ending inside this life, and the Bible is honest enough not to pretend otherwise. Psalm 88 will not lie to the long-suffering by manufacturing a cheerfulness they do not feel. It leaves the resolution where, for some believers, it actually lies: not in the next verse, but beyond the grave, in the hands of the God of their salvation. That honesty is itself a mercy. It means the sufferer does not have to fake a turn he has not made. He is allowed to end the day still in the dark, still praying, and still held.

The Darkness He Entered

And now the deepest comfort this psalm holds, which is not a comfort it could have known but one the whole of Scripture brings to it. The believer in the darkness of Psalm 88 is not alone there, because the Lord Jesus Christ has been to the very bottom of it. Read the psalm again with Him in view and it is almost unbearable how exactly it fits. My life is filled with troubles: in the garden He said, My soul is deeply grieved, even to the point of death (Matthew 26:38). You cause those who know me to keep their distance: in His hour every one of His disciples forsook Him and fled. Your anger bears down on me, and you overwhelm me with all your waves: at the cross He bore the full weight of the wrath against sin, ours, not His own. Are your amazing deeds experienced in the dark region? Over the whole land there was darkness for three hours while He hung dying. O LORD, why do you reject me? He cried, My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? He prayed Psalm 88 with His body. He went down into the depths of the pit, into Sheol, into the grave itself, into a darkness deeper than any believer will ever know, because His was the darkness of the world’s sin and the full hiding of His Father’s face.

And here is why that changes everything for the believer in the dark. When you are in the darkness of this psalm, you are not in a place where God has never been. You are in a place God Himself has been, in the person of His Son, and not as a visitor passing through, but as one who went all the way to the bottom and stayed three days. The darkness you fear you are alone in is a darkness with His footprints already in it. The cry you cannot finish, He finished. The forsakenness you feel, He felt in full and in fact, so that yours would only ever be a feeling and never the truth. You are not the first into that dark room. He went ahead of you, and He is there with you now.

And He came out. That is the thing that turns the whole psalm, not within its verses but beyond them. The Lord Jesus went down into the darkness of Psalm 88 and rose on the third day, alive forevermore, which means the darkness, even at its deepest, is not a sealed tomb but a passage. The believer who walks through the long night in Christ, even the believer whose night lasts until it ends in death, is walking a road his Savior has already walked to its end and out the far side. The last word of Psalm 88 is darkness. But the last word of the story is not, because the One who entered the darkness defeated it. The believer who dies in the dark dies in the One who rose from it, and will rise after Him.

There is a sentence at the very opening of John’s Gospel that was written for the believer in this psalm: And the light shines on in the darkness, but the darkness has not mastered it (John 1:5). The Lord Jesus is the light that came into the world’s dark, and the cross is the place where the darkness threw everything it had at that light (three hours of it over the land, the full weight of sin and death and the hidden face of God) and could not put it out. The darkness did its worst, and on the third morning the light was still shining, brighter than ever, and the darkness had not mastered it and never will. This is the promise underneath the long night of any believer: the darkness you are in, however deep, is darkness into which the unconquerable light has already come. You may not feel it; the psalmist did not feel it; faith in the dark rarely feels the light it trusts. But it is there, and it is shining, and it cannot be put out. And one day it will fill the room, when the One who is the light wipes away every tear and there is no more night at all. The darkness of Psalm 88 is real, but it is not sovereign. The Light has come into it, and the darkness has not mastered it.

Faith in the Dark

So we can gather up what God means to give us in His darkest psalm, and it is more than we might have feared. He gives the long-suffering believer the dignity of honest words: permission to pray the darkness exactly as dark as it is, without faking a turn that has not come. He gives the assurance that such a prayer is faith and not its failure, for faith is not the having of light but the holding-on to God in the dark, the empty hands lifted every morning to the God of our salvation. He gives, in the resurrection of Christ, the answer to the psalm’s despairing questions: yes, God accomplishes amazing things for the dead; yes, His loyal love reaches into the grave. And He gives the company of His Son, who went down into a darkness deeper than ours and came out, so that no believer’s night, however long, is a place Christ has not already been and beaten.

And it is worth remembering where this psalm sits. Psalm 88 has no turn within itself, but it is not a book by itself; it is one psalm in a book, and the book has an ending. The Psalter does not close in the dark. It climbs, through all its laments and all its waiting, to the last five psalms, which are nothing but praise (let everything that has breath praise the LORD), an unbroken shout of joy that the whole collection has been traveling toward. The darkness of Psalm 88 is held inside a book that ends in glory, just as the long night of any believer is held inside a story that ends in resurrection. The turn this psalm does not make, the larger story makes for it. There is a last page, and it is not dark: He will wipe away every tear from their eyes, and death will not exist any more, or mourning, or crying, or pain (Revelation 21:4). For the believer in the long night, the comfort is not that Psalm 88 ends well (it does not) but that Psalm 88 is not the last word. The last word is a morning with no evening, and every tear of every long night wiped away by the hand of God Himself.

There is a word our tradition has for this, and it belongs here. We are tempted to look for God in glory, in triumph, in the lifting of our troubles and the answering of our prayers, and when those do not come, to conclude He is absent. But God has hidden Himself, again and again, in exactly the opposite place: in suffering, in weakness, in the cross. The deepest revelation of God’s love is not a sunrise but a crucifixion. Which means the believer in the dark is not as far from God as he feels; he may, in fact, be standing closer to the heart of God’s own self-revelation than the believer for whom everything is presently bright. God is found in the dark, hidden in the suffering, at work where we can see nothing. And faith, in the dark, is simply trusting that He is there because He has promised to be, when every other evidence says otherwise.

But there is one more thing this psalm requires us to say, and it is not optional, because the psalm itself was never meant to be prayed alone. It was marked for the music director, to be sung by the gathered people of God. The sufferer in it is shunned and isolated, but the psalm in which he is isolated was placed in the hands of the whole congregation, so that when one believer cannot find his way out of the dark, the rest can stand around him and pray it with him, sing it for him, carry the faith he can barely hold. If you are walking through a long darkness, do not walk it alone. The lie the darkness tells is that you must hide, withdraw, spare others your weight, manage it in isolation, and that lie can be deadly. Lean hard on the people of God. Let them pray when you cannot. And know that some darknesses (the darkness of deep and lasting depression, of grief that will not lift, of the soul that has lost its footing) call for more than a book and more than private prayer. They call for the loving help of your pastor and fellow believers, and also of those trained to treat such suffering: your doctor, a licensed counselor or therapist. Depression is a real affliction of body and soul, and medical care for it is one of the good gifts God gives through His creation, just as surely as care for a broken leg. To seek that help is not a failure of faith. It is the body of Christ, and the neighbors God has placed around His suffering member, doing exactly what God gave them to do. And if the darkness ever brings thoughts of ending your life, tell someone today: your pastor, your doctor, or the 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline (call or text 988 in the United States and Canada).

Gathering the Threads

We sat, carefully, in the darkest psalm in the book: the one lament that never turns, that sinks from start to finish and ends with the loneliest line in the Bible. And we found that its very darkness is a mercy: God gave His people, in their own prayer book and set to music, words for a night that does not lift, so that the long-suffering believer would know his unbroken darkness has a place in Scripture and is not the mark of a failed faith. We held onto the ray that never goes out: that from first word to last the sufferer is praying, calling God the God who delivers him, spreading out empty hands every morning. And we saw that this bare, stubborn turning toward God in the dark is faith reduced to its strongest, simplest form. We heard his despairing questions about the grave, and answered them from the empty tomb: yes, God accomplishes amazing things for the dead, and His loyal love reaches even there. We let the psalm end honestly in the dark, refusing to fake a turn, and found that even its unrelieved ending does not mean abandonment, for the God whose face seemed hidden was at that moment giving His servant the words of his prayer.

And underneath it all we found the One who went down into a darkness deeper than this psalm’s (forsaken, grieved even to the point of death, shunned by His friends, swept over by the wrath we earned, down into the grave itself) and came out on the third day, so that the believer’s darkest night is a road his Savior has already walked to its end. God is found not in the absence of the dark but hidden within it, at the cross; faith in the dark is trusting His promise when every feeling says otherwise. And because the psalm was given to the whole congregation, the believer in the long night is not meant to walk it alone. The people of God are to surround him, pray when he cannot, and help carry a weight that some darknesses make too heavy to carry by oneself, with pastor, doctor, and counselor alongside. The psalm ends in darkness. But the story does not, because the One who entered the dark rose from it, and the believer who calls Him, even from the bottom of the pit, God who delivers me, is held, and heard, and never alone.

For Discussion

Psalm 88 is the one lament in the whole Psalter that never turns to trust or ends in praise. Why is it a mercy, rather than a defect, that God included such a psalm in the church’s prayer book? Who especially needs it?
From its first words to its last, the psalm is addressed to God: O LORD God who delivers me! … I spread out my hands in prayer to you (vv. 1, 9). How is the simple fact that the sufferer keeps praying, even with no relief and no answer, itself an act of faith?
In verses 10–12 the psalmist asks despairing questions (can the dead give God thanks? is His loyal love proclaimed in the grave?) and expected the answer no. How does the resurrection of Christ answer those questions with a yes the psalmist could not yet see?
The Lord Jesus entered the very darkness of this psalm: forsaken, grieved even to the point of death, abandoned by His companions, going down into the grave. How does it comfort a believer in unrelieved darkness to know that Christ has been to the bottom of it, and came out?
The psalm ends in darkness, with no happy ending inside its eighteen verses, yet it sits in a book that ends in unbroken praise, and in a story that ends in resurrection. How does that help us hold honestly to present darkness without either pretending it away or losing hope?
The sufferer feels abandoned even by his closest friends (v. 18), yet the psalm itself was given to the whole congregation to sing. What does that say about how the people of God should surround someone walking through a long darkness, and why is such a person not meant to walk it alone?

Looking Ahead

Psalm 88 cried from the depths and did not climb out. The next session, the last of our laments, cries from the same depths, but travels the other way. Psalm 130 begins with words the church has prayed for centuries, the De Profundis (“out of the depths”): From the deep water I cry out to you, O LORD (Psalm 130:1). It is a cry from the same kind of pit as Psalm 88, but this one finds its way to hope, and shows us the road from the depths that Psalm 88 was too dark to walk.

And it finds that road through forgiveness. If you, O LORD, were to keep track of sins, O Lord, who could stand before you? But you are willing to forgive, so that you might be honored (Psalm 130:3–4). The depths of Psalm 130 turn out to be, in part, the depths of guilt, and the way up is the mercy we have been learning all through this penitential cluster. It is a psalm of waiting, too: I rely on the LORD, I rely on him with my whole being; I wait for his assuring word. I yearn for the Lord, more than watchmen do for the morning (vv. 5–6). After the long night of Psalm 88, Psalm 130 teaches us how to wait for the morning: not in despair, but in hope, on the strength of the LORD’s loyal love and His great readiness to deliver. We will close the laments not in the dark, but watching for the dawn.

Read Psalm 130 in full before the next session; it is only eight verses. Notice that it, too, cries from the depths, but watch how it climbs: through forgiveness, through waiting, to a hope grounded in the LORD’s loyal love and His great readiness to deliver.

Closing Prayer

O LORD, God of our salvation, we bring You the prayers we cannot finish and the darkness we cannot lift. For those among us walking through a long night (the grief that will not pass, the illness that does not heal, the heaviness of soul that has no morning in sight) we ask You to hold them as You held Your servant of old, who cried to You day and night and could not see Your face. Teach them, and us, that to keep praying in the dark is not the failure of faith but its truest form, and that empty hands lifted to You are never lifted in vain.
We thank You that Your Son went down into a darkness deeper than ours, forsaken, sorrowful unto death, into the grave itself, and rose on the third day, so that no night of ours is a place He has not already been and beaten. Answer the despairing questions of every suffering heart from Your empty tomb: that You do work wonders for the dead, that Your steadfast love reaches even into the grave, and that the morning is surely coming. Surround the suffering with Your people and with all who care for them; let us carry one another’s darkness and pray when one another cannot; and bring us all, through whatever night, to the dawn that has no end. Through the same Lord Jesus Christ, who entered our darkness and is the light no darkness can overcome, and who lives and reigns with You and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and forever. Amen.