Hope When You Are Hopeless

Psalm 88

A Song. A Psalm of the Sons of Korah. To the choirmaster: according to Mahalath Leannoth. A Maskil of Heman the Ezrahite.

O LORD, God of my salvation,

I cry out day and night before you.

Let my prayer come before you;

incline your ear to my cry!

For my soul is full of troubles,

and my life draws near to Sheol.

I am counted among those who go down to the pit;

I am a man who has no strength,

like one set loose among the dead,

like the slain that lie in the grave,

like those whom you remember no more,

for they are cut off from your hand.

You have put me in the depths of the pit,

in the regions dark and deep.

Your wrath lies heavy upon me,

and you overwhelm me with all your waves. Selah

You have caused my companions to shun me;

you have made me a horror to them.

I am shut in so that I cannot escape;

my eye grows 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? Selah

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 am 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.

When we step back and look at Psalm 88 as a whole, we can see Jesus everywhere in it. He is the means by which God is the God of our Salvation. 

When we see the litany of struggles and sorrows and darkness and abandonment, we remember that 

He was despised and rejected by men,

    a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief;

and as one from whom men hide their faces

    he was despised, and we esteemed him not. – Isaiah 53:3

Psalm 88 describes Jesus Christ. He shared our sorrows. He too has been abandoned. He too cried out to the Heavenly Father asking, take this cup from me, yet not my will but yours be done. 

And when we question the goodness of God’s sovereignty and wonder how he can work through brokenness and pain and even injustice, again we see Jesus, for

it was the will of the Lord to crush him;

    he has put him to grief;

when his soul makes an offering for guilt,

    he shall see his offspring; he shall prolong his days;

the will of the Lord shall prosper in his hand.

It was through the sorrow and grief and pain of Jesus and through the greatest injustice ever done, the killing of the Son of God, that we have salvation, that we have hope, that we have access to the Father. God’s sovereignty over the greatest suffering brought life for you and me, so how can we not trust his sovereignty over our suffering now?

Psalm 88 seems to resolve in darkness. But it actually resolves in Jesus. Left on our own, we would be hopeless, with little reason to carry on. But we have a savior, a mediator, who understands our sorrows because he has lived them. And he is infinitely more than empathetic because

Surely he has borne our griefs

    and carried our sorrows; – Isaiah 53:4

There is not a pain or a sorrow you carry that Jesus has not borne in himself at the cross. There is not a loneliness or abandonment or betrayal that he does not intimately know. There is not an injustice committed against you that is more than a mere shadow of the injustice committed against him. And so Hebrews tells us that We do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses, but one who in every respect has been tempted as we are, yet without sin. And this means that we can, we must, with confidence draw near to the throne of grace, that we may receive mercy and find grace to help in time of need. (Hebrews 4:15-16)

This is the ultimate invitation, declaration, argumentation, and revelation of Psalm 88. In all its darkness, it reveals to us the person and work of Jesus Christ. It reveals to us our living hope. It invites us to the throne of grace where we can receive the mercy we so desperately need in our pain and sorrow.

It invites us to lament–to bring our complaints and sorrows to God in raw, crushed, honesty as an act of faith and worship. And it demands, because of his sovereignty and his Son, that we take them nowhere else. And where else can we turn, but Jesus, for hope and healing and the mercy we need.