Variety: Psalm 88v6–18

Read Psalm 88.6–18

You have put me in the lowest pit,
    in the darkest depths.
Your wrath lies heavily on me;
    you have overwhelmed me with all your waves. 

 You have taken from me my closest friends
    and have made me repulsive to them.
I am confined and cannot escape;
     my eyes are dim with grief.

I call to you, LORD, every day;
    I spread out my hands to you.
Do you show your wonders to the dead?
    Do their spirits rise up and praise you?

 Is your love declared in the grave,
    your faithfulness in Destruction?
 Are your wonders known in the place of darkness,
    or your righteous deeds in the land of oblivion?

 But I cry to you for help, LORD;
    in the morning my prayer comes before you.
Why, LORD, do you reject me
    and hide your face from me?

From my youth I have suffered and been close to death;
    I have borne your terrors and am in despair.
Your wrath has swept over me;
    your terrors have destroyed me.
All day long they surround me like a flood;
    they have completely engulfed me.
 You have taken from me friend and neighbour –
    darkness is my closest friend.

Reflect

Today’s psalm starts with a brave declaration of faith: ‘LORD, you are the God who saves me; day and night I cry out to you.’ But it ends with the lament, ‘Darkness is my closest friend.’  And in between, God himself gets blamed for the trouble the psalmist is in. ‘You have put me in the lowest pit, in the darkest depths,’ he says in verse 6.

We’re never told what this suffering is all about. Whatever it is, it has a long history – ‘from my youth I have suffered and been close to death’ – and it’s causing serious mental distress. There’s terror and despair; there are words like ‘overwhelmed’, ‘confined’, ‘destroyed’ and ‘engulfed’. The psalmist feels like God’s anger is being directed towards him and he’s powerless to defend himself. But still he calls out to God, as the only one who can help him.

Sometimes, we find ourselves in what feels like a pit of darkness, and it’s not our fault and we can’t find anyone else to blame. A few years ago, the perfect storm of illness, anxiety, insomnia and the knowledge of an impending family bereavement put me at the bottom of a pit like that. In the dark, wakeful nights, I often bounced like a pinball between begging God for help and raging at him for not helping. 

Grief is hard to understand and hard to bear when we feel as if God himself is both our tormentor and our only hope of rescue. There’s deep pain in this confusion. How are we to think of God? What can we say in our prayers to him? For me, it was only when I stopped yelling and sat quietly in the darkness that I sensed Jesus with me in the pit.