We're continuing our Summer Psalms series. This is actually going to be the final Sunday this summer of the Summer Psalms. Next week we're going to start a little mini-series on vocation and rest. So what does it look like to have a theology of work and a theology of rest? A two-part series. So you're going to hear from Pastor Dave and Derek Metcalf on those two subjects while I'm on vacation up in Minnesota. So this Sunday is our final Sunday in the Psalms this summer.
Now, we're going to look at Psalm 88. And as I was looking at this Psalm, several things sort of came to mind by way of introduction. But one of them was just the way that this Psalm in particular sort of stands at odds with a lot of the stuff artistically that gets put out in the contemporary Christian world today. In fact, if you were to go to a Christian bookstore and kind of wander through the fiction aisles, a lot of the stuff that you would see there isn't gonna be stuff that will probably be read 30, 40 years from now. It's stuff that focuses there, it's entertaining, and people will read it for that reason, but it's not really great literature. Now that's not necessarily a knock. Some of it is good, but not all of it is. Now why is that? Well, one of the reasons for that is because a lot of the stuff that gets set apart for Christian fiction, whether it's an actual book or even a Christian movie by Christian artists, is oftentimes it has sort of a weak, naive even, sense of reality. What it talks about is sort of all flowers and happy endings. At the end of the story, everything's good and wonderful. And that's hard sometimes because it's so obviously out of step with reality. That's not necessarily the normal Christian life for many believers. That's how they walk through this fallen world. Nobody lives without experiencing pain and loss and hardship. And so fiction that has no real place in its narrative for suffering is just totally out of step with life in a fallen world. It's one of the reasons why Flannery O'Connor is such a giant in the literary world, even as a believer. In Flannery O'Connor's works, You see, she isn't afraid to be real. She's not afraid to deal with darkness head-on, to deal with the fact that we're living in a world that's not functioning the way God intended it to function. She actually wrote, "The truth does not change according to our ability to stomach it." And that should be reflected in our writing, and in our fiction, and in our storytelling.
We're going to see that in Psalm 88. We're going to see in Psalm 88 what Christian theologians have termed throughout the ages the dark night of the soul. The dark night of the soul. This sort of state of prolonged spiritual anguish. Now, it wasn't that long ago, it was a few weeks ago, we preached a sermon from a lament psalm if you remember that correctly. So it's a psalm that was dealing with pouring out and crying out to God in the midst of difficulty and suffering and hardship. Why are we back at another lament psalm? Well, the reason for it is there's more lament psalms than there are praise psalms in the book of Psalms. If you look at all 150 psalms, there's more laments than any other kind of psalm. And so it's right for us, even though we just touched on this topic 6 weeks ago, to circle back around to another lament, because the book of Psalms is continually circling back to that topic. Because the book of Psalms and the authors and the Holy Spirit who inspired them knows We need to be reminded. And here in Psalm 88, we see a psalm that touches on darkness. It touches on despair. At its worst, it deals with a sense the author has of being abandoned by God. You see in Psalm 88 that the dark night of the soul is a real psychological, a real spiritual phenomenon. There's this unrelenting torment. This morning we're going to see a man named Hieman. Looks like He-Man, but it's pronounced Heeman. And how he experienced hardship and how he wrote about that hardship and how he cried out to God in the midst of that hardship.
Let's look at the psalm together. Psalm 88:1. 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 prayer, for my soul is full of troubles and my life draws near to Sheol. 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 a pit, in the regions dark and deep. Your wrath lies heavy upon me, and you overwhelm me with all your waves. You have caused my companions to shun me. You have made me a horror to them. I am shut up so that I cannot escape. My eyes grow dim through sorrow. Every day I call upon you, O Lord. I spread out my hands to you. Do you work wonders for the dead? Do the departed rise up to praise you? Is your steadfast love declared in the grave, or your faithfulness in Abaddon? Are your wonders known in the darkness, or your righteousness in the land of forgetfulness? But I, O Lord, cry to you. In the morning my prayer comes before you. O Lord, why do you cast my soul away? Why do you hide your face from me? Afflicted and close to death from my youth up, I suffer your terrors. I'm helpless. 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.
Would you bow your heads? Well, Lord, we recognize this morning the authority and the power and the truth of your words. And we want to be shaped by that truth. We want you to write that truth upon our hearts. And God, I pray especially this morning that you would use this psalm, this lament, this crying out before you to minister to those who sit right now in darkness. Lord God, would you minister to the bruised reeds? Would you minister to those for whom depression is a daily struggle? And God, would you encourage and challenge and exhort those of us who are not in darkness how to walk patiently and how to walk kindly and how to walk in lovingness and mercy with those who are. Lord, teach us by your word. Show us where to find hope in a psalm like Psalm 88. Do this by the power of your Spirit. We pray this in Jesus' name.
Well, that's a dark psalm. There's no flowery ending. What I want to do this morning is I want to consider two things, two major points with some subpoints underneath. First, I just want to look at what we observe from the psalm itself. What do we see in Psalm 88? And then second, I want us to consider what do we learn
6 · First observation: the darkness in Psalm 88 is all-consuming, filling the psalmist's soul where blessing normally resides, indicating comprehensive saturation of suffering
So first, what do we observe from Haman's darkness? The first thing we see in Psalm 88 is that the darkness is all-consuming. It's everywhere. It's constant. Early on in the psalm, he confesses, "My soul is full of troubles." Now, that's a telling statement. Normally, when a psalmist says that he's full of something, it implies blessing. "My soul is filled with blessing. My soul is filled with your favor." That's usually how they use that word in that phrase. And here there's just a tragic irony. My soul, he even says, my soul is full of trouble. It has no of the Lord's blessing. It bemoans his life is filled with difficulty.
7 · Illustrates the all-consuming nature of the dark night of the soul by referencing church history testimonies of prolonged depression and Fitzgerald's image of perpetual 3 a
He's not saying I'm experiencing a couple bad days. He's saying the darkness simply doesn't lift. If you look in church history, people who describe melancholy— it's kind of the old-fashioned word for depression— or writers who will talk about the dark night of the soul, for some of these individuals, they report living in this sort of state for months, sometimes years, in some instances even decades at a time. During the dark night of the soul, it's as if all of life is lived in a sort of Arctic winter. 24 hours every day without the sun. As F. Scott Fitzgerald so tragically quipped, "In a real dark night of the soul, it is always 3 o'clock in the morning, day after day."
8 · Illustrates the all-consuming darkness through biblical figures (David, Jeremiah) and Charles Spurgeon, showing that depression strikes even brilliant, successful ministers without rational cause
When David experiences this sort of thing, he says his pillow is soaked with tears. Jeremiah gets immortalized as the weeping prophet because he experiences this sort of anguish. Spurgeon, when he would be in the heat of his depression, confessed often he would cry for days on end and had no idea why he was even crying. Now, Spurgeon, one of the characters I want us to look at as we go through the morning, isn't some irrational guy. He's a brilliant mind. He's a brilliant preacher. He's got all sorts of things in his life that appear from the outside— a huge congregation, published works, he's well known, he has fame. What's wrong? And he would say when he would get hit with this sort of darkness, it just consumed everything and the gloom was just thick. Just surrounded by it.
9 · Second and third observations: the darkness is like a living death (comparing the psalmist to the forgotten slain) and the darkness doesn't lift—Psalm 88 uniquely lacks the hopeful turn present in every other biblical lament, ending with the word "darkness
Towards the end in v. 15 and following from there, Heman searches for any source of light. First he looks back and he says, "I look to my youth and I look back and I don't even have a memory of happiness." It seems so far back. I can't even remember days when I wasn't in this darkness. And it says he looks forward and there's this sort of terrifying glimpse of looming death and with it the wrath of God. And then he looks at his present. And he says it leaves him feeling destroyed and swept over. The darkness consumes everything. The second thing we observe from his experience, from what he writes in this psalm, is that the darkness is like a living death. Listen to verse 3 and following: For my soul is full of troubles, my life draws near to Sheol. 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. Now the word Sheol is the place for the dead. It's the place where there are no living. The pit is a euphemism, a metaphor for the grave. The sense he's giving us is that what it's like in the midst of this darkness, it's like I'm living death. I'm alive but not really alive. The depression is so deep that he feels like his life is just ebbing away. His strength is fading. It gets so bleak, he actually compares himself to a soldier who gets slain on the battlefield and his body just gets tossed into a mass anonymous grave. I feel so close to death, and if I were to die, no one will remember me. It'll be as if I never existed. The darkness is like a living death. Even worse, we see next, the darkness doesn't lift. It's not just everywhere, it's not just making life as if it's like death, The darkness doesn't abate. We don't get any details about the nature of the situation. Some commentators think maybe he has like a sickness, like leprosy, that's just haunting him. But we don't know. It doesn't tell us. We don't know exactly what's going on. The one thing we see is there's clearly no evidence in this psalm that he has any expectation or hope that things are going to change. It's bad. It's a bad season. But it seems like an endless season. It seems like there's no next season coming. It's actually called, this Psalm, Psalm 88, the saddest Psalm in the Psalter. It's the saddest Psalm in the Psalter. It's a lament. Remember we talked about laments a few weeks ago. But every other lament in the book of Psalms, every other one has a point in the Psalm where the Psalm turns towards hope. Where the psalmist in the midst of the grief in the midst of the hardship, in the midst of all that's going on, the psalmist is able to sort of gird up his loins and preach the Gospel to himself and preach hope and preach the promises of the covenant. But that doesn't happen here. In Psalm 88, it never moves to resolution. Even the very last verse, you're kind of reading it and it's just like downer after downer after downer. You're like, holy smokes, this guy is broken. Brutal. You're kind of just waiting. When is it going to finally have that "but I will hope in the Lord" sort of verse? And you get to the very last verse and you're thinking, "I got one more verse here. I'm kind of looking towards the end. This has to be the place where we get the flicker of hope." The final word, you know what the final word is in the Hebrew? Darkness. That's how it ends. It's dark. It's still dark. It's like a living death, it's so dark. The dark is everywhere. The darkness isn't lifting. Darkness. After the abandonment of his companions, he concludes the darkness is his closest friend. It's unnerving in its bleakness. Every other lament has that point where the sadness turns to rejoicing. But here we witness no hopeful turn. Pastor James Montgomery Boyce wrote on this Psalm, "It is good we have a Psalm like this, but it is also good that we have only one." There's truth in that. It's good because it reminds us But sometimes life is a trouble-saturated reality. Sometimes the darkness is so unabated that it brings us to the very brink of despair. Sometimes the deliverance doesn't come like it came for David. Sometimes the ending is like Paul. Or Peter.
10 · Illustrates the unrelenting nature of depression through Spurgeon's extended quotation and the traumatic event that triggered one of his most severe depressive episodes, showing that even extraordinary ministerial success provides no immunity
Spurgeon puts it this way: Causeless depression cannot be reasoned with, nor can David's harp charm it away by sweet discoursings. As well fight with the mist as with this shapeless, undefinable, yet all-beclouding hopelessness. The iron bolt which so mysteriously fastens the door of hope and holds our spirits in gloomy prison needs a heavenly hand to push it back. Spurgeon knew of this. He had bouts throughout his life. The most acute one, he was preaching in his 20s. Huge crowds are coming to hear him preach. I can't even really fathom it. His own church is not large enough So they put him in a different location, different venue, and they say there's supposedly 10,000 people there to hear him preach. And there's no way to amplify the sound. He doesn't have speakers. It's a guy preaching to 10,000 people with the strength of his own voice. They must have had some sweet acoustics in how they designed that. Kevin, I'm expecting that kind of acoustics eventually when we get to the end of this, architecturally. And in that sermon, as he's preaching to a room packed with 10,000 people, a fool in the crowd yells out, "Fire!" It causes a panic. Dozens of people are injured, and I think 7 or 8 people die. And it just casts Spurgeon into a darkness. He just could not get out of it. He said, in his own estimation, he came as close to sanity as humanly possible without going insane. And he says here, "How do you fight against the mist? How do you beat back the fog?" Like Psalm 88, the darkness just won't lift.
11 · Fourth observation: God doesn't answer in Psalm 88
And what makes it worse, the final observation, God doesn't answer. Without question, the hardest part of this psalm is there is no audible response from God. We want to put it in there. They must have mistranslated this. Like, somewhere the scribe got this wrong. Like, there's a verse missing somewhere where God gives a little encouragement here. It's not missing. It's not there. God doesn't answer. The only involvement we see from God is verses 5-8 and then again at the end where Haman doesn't just say, "I feel abandoned." He says, "Oh, I know You haven't totally abandoned me. I sense Your presence in the sense," You're responsible for all this. That's where he sees God getting involved.
12 · Theological claim that biblical faith is characterized by realism about suffering rather than artificial optimism, acknowledging that prolonged darkness without resolution is part of authentic Christian experience
This is not like clichéd Christian fiction. It's not like a Francine Rivers novel. It shows us that biblical faith is inundated with realism. When you see faith talked about in the Bible, It's not glitzy and glamor, it's real in the midst of the hardship of life. And it shows us here that sometimes the fog doesn't lift quickly. Sometimes it's not just a hard month. A hard month sounds like a long time, doesn't it? And what if it's a hard second month and then to the point you're like, is this ever gonna stop? It's a reminder that there are times when we face excruciatingly difficult situations. And there are no easy answers. And there are no quick resolutions.
13 · Personal testimony illustrating prolonged darkness through the preacher's own multi-year period of depression, loneliness, and unanswered prayer, showing that even earnest prayer with faithful companions doesn't guarantee immediate deliverance
I don't think I've ever experienced something like Spurgeon's experienced. Something like Haman's experiencing in this psalm. When I was younger, I had a period that was just dark and hard and lonely. My tears wet my pillow. I know exactly what David means when he talks about that. It just was day after day and went on for several years. And I remember in the midst of that crying out to God and weeping. And it just didn't seem like there was an answer. It just didn't abate. And at one point, my mom actually found me in the basement crying. She's like, "What is going on?" And I explained the situation. And so it was like this moment, like this glimmer of hope. She said, "Okay, let's pray." And so we prayed, and I just remember thinking, like, we prayed and I thought, "Yes!" Like, she's prayed with me. It wasn't just like— God's going to deliver me now. And there was still like another year and a half of it. And you just sit there and you just wonder, Lord, where are you? I'm abandoned by friends, but I feel more abandoned by you. It's hard.
14 · Transitions from observation to application, insisting that Scripture is meant to shape believers, not merely inform them—the psalm must produce changed living
That's what we observe from Haman's experience in Psalm 88. But what do we learn? It's not just enough to observe. Well, that's what happens. Sometimes life is like that. We're supposed to learn from this. This psalm is meant to shape us. It's meant to lay a claim upon us, to help us live differently. Well, what do we learn from Haman's darkness?
15 · First lesson: even feeble faith is enough
First, Even feeble faith, even feeble faith is enough. Now there is nothing triumphant in this psalm. There's no triumphal ending. The darkness is oppressive. This isn't like the Superman comic books. It's like the Batman Gotham world. This is dark. His world is black. But even from the pit of despair, in the gloom of his grief, What does he do the whole psalm? He cries out to God. The fact that he's even crying out is confirmation that faith, as feeble as it is in the midst of his grief, is still at work. The faith we see in Psalm 88 is feeble, and it is marvelous. From the depths of his anguish, he cries out. Verse 1: "To the God who saves me." Nowhere else in the rest of the psalm is he going to talk about the God who saves him, but initially he cries out. "I cry out to the God who saves me." Even as he's experiencing God's silence, he keeps crying out day and night. It says every morning. There's this white-knuckled clinging. He's just clinging to God with all of his strength. Then he says, "My strength is fading." Like, you kind of picture like one of those scenes in a movie where like a guy is like clinging to a ledge and you can just see like the fingers are giving way. That's how I picture him. "My strength is failing. My faith is failing. I want to believe you're the God who saves. Where are you?"
16 · Theological claim that faith is not positive thinking but persevering prayer—the consistency of crying out matters more than the tone
It eliminates any shallow notion of faith as some sort of positive thinking. The marvel, the thing to imitate, is seen in the consistency of his prayers. In a constant, all-consuming darkness. It says he cries day and night. In another verse, every morning. Every morning I get up and the depression and the darkness is still there. And so every morning I get up in the midst of the darkness and I call upon God, "Hear me! Save me! The darkness is still there!" The cries and the questions and the confusion. By its inclusion in the Bible, it shows us that the cries and the questions and the confusion are okay. Grappling with God in prayer is always better than resignation and silence. Even when our prayers are cries of frustration. What is going on? When I was sitting in my basement when I was younger, it was, "Why are You doing this to me? Why is this happening?" And I've been with people since and I thought, I don't know if that's the most appropriate way to pray to God. He's God and you're not. But God understands. A bruised reed he will not break. We need Psalm 88 because it shows the faint-hearted it isn't wrong to express your deepest, rawest thoughts and emotions to God. As feeble as his faith seems in facing pain and admitting his anguish, We should also recognize just how courageous his faith is, how persevering.
17 · The continued prayers in Psalm 88 reveal implicit faith that God listens even when He doesn't answer
Most importantly, even as the abandonment by God seems to persist, he keeps praying. That's the theme of the psalm. It's still silent. I still feel abandoned. I talk about abandonment early and I talk about it at the end and then I talk about Your role in the abandonment of everyone around me. And yet I keep praying. Here's the grace you see in that. You don't keep talking if you don't think someone's listening. Even though there is no answer, he keeps crying out. He keeps expecting. I don't hear from You. I don't sense Your presence. I don't know that You're there, but I'm going to keep crying out because there's some sort of glimmer of faith and hope here that even though I don't hear, I know you listen. That's the grace of Psalm 88. If it wasn't here and all you had were the laments that end in hope or the laments that end with God responding, it might crush us when we get met with the apparent silence that sometimes happens in life. Psalm 88, for for all its darkness, is inspired and included in the canon because God does hear, no matter what else your circumstances might say.
18 · Second lesson: Gethsemane triumphs over the grave
Second thing we learn from Heman's darkness: Gethsemane triumphs over the grave. Psalm 88 shows us an unnerving absence of God's blessing and presence. He's just not there. There's no blessing. I'm not full of blessing. I'm full of trouble. This is only underscored when we realize God's silence— think about this— God's silence is painful in proportion to our previous communion with Him. You want to know who it hurts the most when God is silent? The people who previously communed with Him most closely. That's where it hurts. If you're just sort of casual friends with somebody and then they leave, "I kind of miss that person, but we weren't really that close to begin with." But a spouse or a parent or a child, precious friend like David and Jonathan, to lose the intimacy and fellowship of that relationship cuts deep. And it's the same thing with God. The reason he is in such acute agony can only be that once he experienced sweet fellowship with God. This is a man who writes worship songs for God. He's one of the sons of Korah. Those famous kind of band of worshipers, of worship writers we read about in the book of Psalms. He's one of them. That's what the prescription tells us. One of the repeated refrains of the Psalms, of this Psalm, is this fear of death, a fear of God's wrath. If you read Psalm 88 and you didn't have an understanding of the way all of Scripture comes to bear on all passages of Scripture, you could be just left hopeless. Like, you read this So I shoot you an email, "Hey, here's your daily devotion today, Psalm 88." Holy smokes! I'm going to lock the door. There's no way I'm going outside. Make sure you don't have any access to guns. In seriousness, I think there's an element in this psalm of a man who's considering ending it all. If this is it, it's just this psalm, and you don't get to read it in the light of the rest of the Scriptures, there's this sense of, man, you better hope to get some blessing from God in this life because the way He talks about death, when death comes, it is over and it is dark and it is lonely and it is done. But we can't forget the one who experiences more heartache in God's turned face than we can ever fathom. In fact, Psalm 88 and Psalm 22 in the history of the church are two passages typically read in the liturgies on Good Friday. This Psalm and Psalm 22. In Psalm 22 you read that famous passage that Jesus quotes as he hangs from the cross. My God, my God, Why have you forsaken me? Why are you so far from saving me, from the words of my groaning? O my God, I cry by day, but you do not answer, and by night, but I find no rest. That sounds like our Psalm, doesn't it?
19 · Expositional development of Jesus experiencing Psalm 88's full horror in Gethsemane: abandonment by friends, sweating blood in anguish, facing death alone with full knowledge of its wrongness as the author of life
In Gethsemane, Jesus begins to experience the full horrors of Psalm 88. He gets abandoned by His friends. He gets abandoned by it. And God is behind that. He's teaching those disciples a lesson in their faithlessness. And He's having Jesus, His Anointed, His Messiah, walk through all that He's called to walk through in those closing hours of His life alone, without support. He's overwhelmed in Gethsemane by the imminence of death. He's overwhelmed to the point that as He's praying, as He's crying out, His anguish is so great, the Gospel writers say He sweats blood. This isn't like He's just in some, like, special little posture and He's got His hands nicely folded. Like, this man is pleading with God. Nobody knows like Jesus what death is like. You don't know, because you've never experienced it if you're still alive. One exception being Lazarus. Everybody else, you've died and you didn't come back. That was it. Jesus knows what death is like. He might not have experienced it yet, but He's the author of life. He knows the depths of what it means, why death is so wrong.
20 · Psalm 88 is a psalm of disorientation showing brokenness, and Jesus explicitly fulfills verse 7—experiencing God's wrath cascading over Him like drowning waves—but Gethsemane and Golgotha ultimately show God's triumph over the grave
It talks about in the Psalms, there's Psalms of orientation and Psalms of disorientation. You got some Psalms that are super explicitly Messianic. You just see where they tie to Jesus. He quotes them, or authors quote them, them. And then you've got Psalms of orientation that just describe the world as it should be, and we see that through the lens of what Jesus will consummate when He returns. This is a Psalm of disorientation. It shows things are broken, and Jesus knows in Gethsemane it's broken, and the worst way it's broken is people die, and I'm going to have to die, and I'm going to have to die alone, and when I go to die, it's going to be on a cross, and I'm going to be crucified, and it's going It's going to be horrible and it's going to be agonizing. And he also knows he will explicitly fulfill verse 7 in the fullest way imaginable. "Your wrath lies heavily upon me and you overwhelm me with your waves." That sense of being overwhelmed by waves. Have you ever been in the ocean? I remember swimming in the ocean in Hawaii on our honeymoon. It wasn't even that choppy of water. I sort of swam out too far. I kind of had that moment of panic, like waves are coming and I'm getting a little nervous, like it's harder to get air. And all of a sudden, just this, "Oh my goodness, like, am I going to go down?" It's an image of judgment just cascading over an individual again and again, forcing you down to the pit. No night has ever been darker than Good Friday. But Gethsemane and Golgotha show us. They show us that God triumphs over the grave. They show us how to read Psalm 88 rightly.
21 · Christ answers every agonizing question Psalm 88 asks about death: God does work wonders for the dead, the departed do rise to praise, steadfast love does conquer the grave
It gives us hope even when you experience your own period of Psalm 88 where you sit there and you are fearful of death. When you sit there and there is no seeming response from God. When you sit there and it seems when it seems like communion and fellowship and intimacy with God are just cut off, when you sit there and everyone you thought you could count on is gone. Where are you? I thought you'd always have my back. We have an answer to the agonizing questions of death. Listen to what he asks, Heman, in verse 10. Do you work wonders for the dead? Do the departed rise up to praise you? Is your steadfast love declared in the grave? His thought is, it's not! You have to deliver me, God! If I go to the grave, it's over! And the thing about Psalm 88 is sometimes we don't get the deliverance before the grave. And by sometimes I mean nobody does. You're all going to face the grave. Death will be there. But listen to how those questions about death in Psalm 88 are answered in light of what we know about Christ. Yes, in Christ, God does work wonders for the dead. Yes, in Christ, the departed do rise up to praise. Yes, in Christ, God declares His steadfast love conquers the grave. Those things are yours in Christ. United with Him in His death so you might also be united with Him in a resurrection like His. It gives you hope as you read this psalm. The author of Hebrews reminds us of how Jesus' substitution, the fact that He stood in our place, gives us the ultimate hope we can possibly have in dark days. In Hebrews 5:7, "In the days of His flesh," Jesus— picture Gethsemane here— "offered up prayers." supplications with loud cries and tears to him, the one who's silent in Psalm 88, to him who was able to save him from death. And he was heard because of his reverence. Although he was a son, he learned obedience through what he suffered, and being made perfect, he became the source of eternal salvation to all who who obey Him.
22 · Third lesson: the importance of faithful friends
There's a sense where the writer of Psalm 88, Heman, knows, I'm getting this from God's hand and I'm praying for deliverance, but I deserve death. It's God's wrath, and when God pours out wrath, it's not wrong. And Hebrews 5 reminds us, because of Jesus, because of His obedience and His perfection, because of His reverence, because of what He learned through His suffering, because of the way it was made perfect, Eternal salvation is offered to anyone who obeys him, who obeys the command to trust and find life in him. The next thing we learn from Heman in the midst of darkness, we learn the importance of faithful friends. That's not something that's stated in the psalm, it's something that's totally absent. In the psalm. One of the hardest features is he gets cut off from every source of human consolation. And that's a lesson for us, the body of Christ. It's a lesson for us as we minister to the broken. Now listen, there are few things as difficult within the body as caring for somebody who's depressed. As helpless as the person's suffering feels to end the pain—think of Spurgeon talking about fighting a mist—as hard as it is for that person, a lot of times the person trying to care usually feels just as tempted to frustration and impatience. Why can't you just pull it together? I'm quoting all the right scriptures to you. Get it through your thick head. Why are you so melancholy? Just be happy. Those are real temptations everyone faces when they're caring for somebody who's in this kind of darkness. When someone's experiencing spiritual depression, Sometimes friendship is nothing more than staying and listening. Just being there. There aren't Band-Aids to this sickness. It's important to speak truth. Like Spurgeon says, this bolt only gets opened by a heavenly hand. So speak truth, encourage, exhort, but recognize and entrust the situation to God. I counseled a young man a while back up in Minnesota who was in this kind of situation. It was like month after month of counseling and sitting with him. I just gave into this temptation. It was just like, dude, pull yourself together. I don't know what's going on with you, and as you describe the situation and what happens, I kind of think It's not that big a deal. But it was. To Him it was, and He was in anguish. And I wasn't a faithful friend. I went to Psalm 42. Why are you cast down, O my soul? Hope in God. A couple verses prior, the psalmist talks about day and night I cry out to You. Oh, that's convicting when you're working on Psalm 88. That wasn't a faithful friend. Romans 12:10, "Love one another with brotherly affection." You want to know what that looks like? Look at verse 12. "Rejoice in hope, be patient in tribulation, be constant in prayer." Even more tenderly, Paul writes in his second letter to Timothy, his protégé, He challenges Timothy to shepherd the flock. He uses this just sweet phrase that is sweetly encouraging and just full of conviction. He tells Timothy to shepherd the flock with complete patience. Love them, Timothy. Preach to them, Timothy. Support them, Timothy. Care for them, Timothy. With perfect patience. With complete patience. Patience. It's in the same letter where Paul is going to go to admit a chapter later, "I've been abandoned by everyone. Nobody had the patience to stay with me. I'm in my chains and I'm going to my death and they're all gone. They've all left me." So Timothy, with complete patience,
23 · Direct application about caring for the depressed: reject artificial timelines, persevere in faithfulness recognizing it will drive you to desperate dependence on God's grace, exposing your impatience and self-sufficiency
Depression simply doesn't work according to our timelines. You don't get to schedule in, "Well, I'm going to give 15 minutes to this person and I'll give it a timeline of 3 weeks. So 15 minutes for 3 weeks and then, well, if they're not there, I did what I could." That's not what it looks like. And I don't say that because I think it's easy to keep going. It's hard to persevere in faithfulness, but that's what it means to bear somebody's burdens. That's what the calling is. And you know why it's hard and good? Because it's not easy. And when you do that, you're going to hit points where you're like, Lord, I am at my wit's end. I need more grace than I've ever needed in how I deal with this person. I am just aware of my impatience like I've never been aware before. I am aware of my self-sufficiency like I've never been aware before. God, give me the grace to keep walking with this person.
24 · Transitions to the extended illustration of William Cowper by reminding the congregation of the sermon's two historical figures—the familiar Spurgeon and the less familiar Cowper
This is where we go back to— we talked about the two illustrations, the one being the guy you've probably heard of, Charles Spurgeon, and the struggles he's gone through. We've touched on a couple of Spurgeon examples and quotes. The other one is an example of a guy you maybe haven't heard of. I know Woody has. His son is named after him. William Cooper. Looks like Cowper pronounced Cooper. Weird British thing.
25 · Extended historical illustration of William Cowper's life—childhood trauma, broken family relationships, public humiliation leading to suicide attempts, asylum conversion, yet perpetual depression and forbidden love throughout his Christian life—showing Psalm 88 as his autobiography
Cooper was born in 1731. He lived through the American Revolution and the French Revolution. Wasn't actually physically in America, but that's kind of the period he's living in. He's a contemporary with Whitefield and the Wesleys and Edwards. He's 27 years old when Edwards dies. He's also a contemporary of John Newton, who we'll hear about in a second. He's described, Cooper, as the poet laureate of the great revival in the Anglican Church that happened. So in America, what do we call that? The Great Awakenings that happened as Whitefield comes and Edwards comes, and there's this great stirring and people are getting saved and this amazing thing happens throughout New England. Well, something similar is happening back in old England. And they call it the Great Revival. And Cooper is known as the Poet Laureate. He's known as the one who turns the sweet phrases to give visual imagery through his words to what's happening in the land. And Psalm 88 might as well be this man's autobiography. His mother died when he was 6. He has— it's never explained, but he has this weird, broken relationship with his father. He writes massive amounts of works, poets and all these things, and none of them, there's not even a whisper of a tribute to his father. His father sends him off as soon as his mom dies to a boarding school. His experience is so horrible that he actually writes poems pleading with parents not to send their kids off to boarding schools. And part of it is because he suffers horrible abuse at the hands of older boys in the school. In the way he writes, it's possible even some of it was sexual abuse. Something horrible happened to him at that school. At the age of 32, his father arranges for him to get this job, special job as a solicitor, but it's a public job and his father's political rivals arranged so that in order to get the job, he's gonna have to sit for this public hearing that wasn't typical for the job. You weren't supposed to have to sit for a public hearing. Public hearing. So you think of like a Senate confirmation for a Supreme Court judge, something like that. You weren't supposed to have to do that, but his father has political rivals who want to stick it to the father by sticking it to the son. And so there's going to be just this horrible public scourging, and it just sends him into a terror to the point he attempts suicide 3 times, and upon the last one gets sent to an insane asylum. Now back in that day, an insane asylum is not a good place to be. But by God's grace, the man who runs the asylum is an evangelical, a believer, and the man just preaches the gospel consistently, puts Bibles in places he thinks Cooper's going to run into them. And in that context, in the midst of the insane asylum, he's saved. He gets converted. But like Psalm 88, the rest of his life is still marked with perpetual depression. It's still marked with multiple suicide attempts. And then he has the good fortune— I'll throw in this one too— he falls in love with a girl, wants to marry her, and the girl's father forbids it. So the one that he loves, he's forbidden from marrying.
26 · Contrast between perpetually depressed Cowper and perpetually joyful Newton, showing Newton's faithful pastoral friendship across 13 years in person and decades by letter, never growing weary of Cowper's unrelenting darkness
He ends up through a lot of circumstances in the church of one John Newton, author of Amazing Grace. The old slave ship man who gets saved and now is this great pastoral evangelical pastor. Newton becomes his pastor. And in the same way, I don't know if you can read about a guy that's more depressed than Cooper. I don't know that you can read about a pastor who is more happy in God than Newton. The man is just like the song Amazing Grace. Like, that is his life. He is amazed by God's grace. Your mercies are new every day. Like, that is Newton. Like, that's the inscription that should be above his head. Amazing grace, your mercies are new every day. That's what he knows. And these two couldn't be more different from each other and more at odds. But Newton befriends Cooper. For 13 years, he's his pastor. And when he actually moves to take a church in London, he continues pastoring him from a distance and sending countless letters back to him. And just to get a sense, I mean, this is a guy that is a living, breathing Psalm 88. The guy is constantly depressed, constantly melancholy, constantly trying to take his life. For decades, Newton ministers to him and doesn't grow weary of it.
27 · The Olney Hymn Project produced 276 congregational worship songs including Amazing Grace and Cowper's profound gospel hymns written during his darkness under Newton's pastoral care, showing God's sovereign purpose in suffering
And at one point, he kind of devises this idea. He knows Cooper is this brilliantly articulate poet, and he decides, "Let's arrange it. The two of us will sit down and we're going to write poems and hymns together." And in the writing of these, hopefully the truth will breathe hope to them. And so they do it, and it gets known as the Only Hymn Project. The Only Hymn Project ended up being 276 songs that Newton and Cowper wrote together for congregational worship. That's where the song Amazing Grace is written. Newton also writes How Sweet the Name of Jesus Sounds and countless other ones. Cowper pens the immortal words to these songs in this period. Oh, for a Closer Walk with God. One of my favorites, There is a Fountain Filled with Blood, the second line, drawn from Emmanuel's veins, and sinners plunged beneath that flood lose all their guilty stains. And he writes, God Moves in a Mysterious Way. You should recognize those songs. He writes them in that period to the ministry of Newton.
28 · Like Psalm 88, Cowper dies without resolution—in despair, convinced he's unsaved despite writing profound gospel truths
But in the end, like our Psalm 88, Cooper Dies in despair. There's no bow on the top of it. There's no happy little ending. He dies in despair. But Newton never abandoned him. He was a faithful friend all the way through. And even as Cooper, who writes these profound truths about the gospel— you read Cooper's hymns and you're thinking, man, This guy puts to words and poetry the nature of the atonement and the Gospel and Jesus and fellowship with God in ways that just speak to your soul. The guy who writes those lives his life in this perpetual sense of anxiety that he is cut off, that he is not saved. So he writes these truths and at the same time feels like it's not true for him.
29 · Newton's response to Cowper's death—confident hope in Cowper's salvation despite Cowper's own despair—models the faithful friendship the depressed need: brothers who remind them Christ has borne their pain and secures their hope
Well, as much as Cooper is convinced he's not saved and abandoned by God as he dies, Newton is convinced, and Newton never loses hope. And so he says a few days after Cooper's death, "Oh, with what a surprise of joy would be Cooper! Oh, with what a surprise of joy would he, Cooper, find himself immediately before the throne, and in the presence of his Lord, all his sorrows left below, and earth exchanged for heaven." Talk about a friend that's got your back, right? People in darkness need brothers like John Newton. Fellow pilgrims need people who remind them that Jesus has borne the full measure of our pain, that he sympathizes with us perfectly, that he secures our hope when our hands are weak.
30 · Theological claim that the motivation for complete patience with the suffering comes from amazement at Christ's perfect patience with us—Newton's patience with Cowper flowed from his own experience of amazing grace
I love to think, I can't help but think, that Newton's complete patience with Cowper was owing to his own amazement at God's patience with him. Right? It's amazing grace, right? In 2 Timothy, Paul writes, "With complete patience, shepherd the flock." In 1 Timothy, he writes this about himself. Where do you get the motivation for complete patience? Like Newton, like Paul, like Timothy's exhorted. But I received mercy for this reason, that in me as the foremost, Jesus Christ might display His perfect patience as an example to those who were to believe in Him for eternal life. That's where you get the strength to be a faithful friend. Oh, how faithful, how patient, how steadfast God has been with us. Me.
31 · Fourth lesson: the comfort of sovereignty amidst affliction
Final point, briefly. Last thing we learn. We learn the comfort of sovereignty amidst affliction. The comfort of sovereignty amidst affliction. Verse 14: O Lord, why do you cast my soul away? Why do you hide your face from me? I suffer your terrors. Your wrath has swept over me. Your dreadful assaults destroy me. You have caused my beloved and my friend to shun me. That's a hard reality he's wrestling with. He's not wrong in anything he's saying there. But these aren't accusations. I don't think he's accusing God. I think they're a recognition of God's sovereign control. He's asking God to stop, but I think if you look closely in that sovereignty, You hear a deep yearning for hope. This stuff isn't random. It's Job. You can't help but read this psalm and think of Job. He loses all of his wealth, loses all of his family, he loses his health. He's sitting on the ground covered in ashes and sackcloth. And his conclusion, like Haman, is that God is ultimately behind the suffering. What does he say? The Lord gives and the Lord takes away. Blessed be the name of the Lord. And it says after that, the author of Job says, in all of this, even in recognizing and saying, you are sovereign over this, Lord, Job did not sin.
32 · Theological claim that Psalm 88, like Job, teaches trust in God's sovereignty without revealing the why—the curtain doesn't pull back, but believers must acknowledge God's sovereign hand even when His purposes remain hidden
I think you have to read Psalm 88 in that light. He is struggling with it. Lord, this is from your hand. You can make it stop. But I think there's something deeper below it where he's recognizing If it's from your hand, it isn't random. Neither Job nor Haman can grasp the why behind the unrelenting affliction. And we see in the story of Job, don't we? The whole point of the story of Job is Job is sitting there going, "Why? Why is this happening?" And two things happen in the story. One is we're seeing the curtain pulled back. This is why God's proving Satan wrong in the midst of all this. Satan's hand is the direct point of the affliction, but it only happens as God allows. God is sovereign of the situation. And the other thing that happens is he's saying, "Why?" And God says, "Who are you? Who are you, O man?" In Psalm 88, the curtain doesn't get pulled back. Why? I don't know. Is Satan up there again? We don't know. It doesn't tell us. It doesn't show us. It doesn't reveal God's devices. Instead, instead, it teaches us to acknowledge His sovereign hand in all our hardships, even and especially when His purpose and hope seemed to remain hidden.
33 · Illustrates the comfort of sovereignty through Spurgeon's multiple concurrent trials—slander, sickness, pastoral demands, depression—showing that belief in God's sovereignty was his last handhold of sanity, not mere intellectual assent
Spurgeon is a great teacher in this regard. His life is constant trials. He faces vicious, vicious public slander. I mean, it's horrible what gets said about him. His wife suffers sickness. He suffers his own sickness. This incredible pain and gout. He has the demands of this giant flock, thousands of people that he's in charge of caring for. It says he answers hundreds of letters by hand each week. That's not like, oh cool, I have hundreds of letters, I'm so popular. It's like, it's exhausting. Week after week after week. And finally, he has these ongoing bouts with depression. There's darkness that just seems to keep coming, and when it comes, it's like the mist. But he never wavered in the belief that God was sovereign over every tribulation. God's sovereignty for Spurgeon in the midst of affliction, it's not just an intellectual exercise. It's not just a theological truism. For Spurgeon, it is the last faithful handhold of sanity, the last place of survival in the face of the depression.
34 · Spurgeon quotations showing that recognizing God's sovereignty over affliction provides hope—trials measured out by God's hand and traced to their source at God's throne become sweet rather than bitter
This is what he writes: It would be a very sharp and trying experience to me to think that I have an affliction which God never sent me, that the bitter cup was never filled by His hand, that my trials were never measured out by Him— measured out meaning they're never going to be more than I can handle— nor sent to me by His arrangement of their weight and quantity. You see the hope Spurgeon takes in the midst of horrible anguish? I think that's there. In Psalm 88, it's from you, Lord. Make it stop. But it is from you. In a sermon in 1868, he writes, if you drink of the river of affliction near its outfall, it is brackish and offensive to the taste. But if you will trace it to its source, where it rises at the foot of the throne of God, you will find its waters to be sweet and health-giving. That's not written by a guy who's got this disconnected sweet life of cushions and leisure. It's by a guy of decades experiencing hardship.
35 · Theological claim that God's sovereignty produces worship out of suffering—both Heman and Cowper's unrelenting depression became the source for songs that minister to others, showing sovereign purpose in the pit
We can see the same mercy when we step back and examine the lives of Heman and the life of Cowper. The psalmist appears to be one of the pioneers of David's worship band, you could say. These sons of Korah that you read about in the Psalms. The prescript tells us he's one of them. He's one of the pioneers of these guys that write Psalms and write worship music. The similarities with Cooper are undeniable. Both men experienced this seemingly unrelenting spiritual depression, and yet in God's sweet, quiet providence This became the source for songs of worship. In all the bitterness, God was at work. These men couldn't have written these songs without the trial. There was a sovereign purpose in the pit for both of them. If not for Heman's trial, we wouldn't have Psalm 88 to minister to us in our darkest night. And if not for Cooper's Pit, we would never have received the gift of a great hymn, "God Moves in a Mysterious Way." It reminds us that many of our great hymns and much of life's deepest worship grows in the soil of difficulty. And remembering God's sovereignty in it.
36 · Concludes by reading Cowper's hymn "God Moves in a Mysterious Way" in full, allowing the congregation to hear theology forged in the pit and pointing to Christ as God's ultimate interpretation of suffering
I'm going to finish by reading the words of "God Moves in a Mysterious Way." As we read this, think of the life of William Cooper. God moves in a mysterious way, His wonders to perform. He plants His footsteps in the sea and rides upon the storm. Deep in unfathomable minds, deep in unfathomable minds, of never-failing skill, He treasures up His bright designs and works His sovereign will. Ye fearful saints, fresh courage take! The clouds ye so much dread are big with mercy, and shall break in blessings on your head. Judge not the Lord by feeble sense, but trust Him for His grace. Behind a frowning providence He hides a smiling face. His purposes will ripen fast, unfolding every hour. The bud may have a bitter taste, but sweet will be the flower. Blind unbelief is sure to err and scan His work in vain. God is His own interpreter, and He will make it plain. He makes it plain in the face of Jesus. Would you bow your heads?