Psalm 88: Troubles

Do you ever feel overwhelmed, out of control, even out of place? As much as I hate to admit it, I am not great with directions and if I am not careful, it is easy for me to get turned around, to lose my bearings, to get a bit disoriented. Our emotions are a lot like directions, they can help us find our way, but if we do not have a firm grasp on them, they can lead us to places we had no intention of going. Psalm 88 is a lament. It is a song in trouble. Michael Wilcock wrote, “The whole psalm is one long, desperate cry.” It starts with an important bit of truth, but then it overflows with a painful dose of reality. 

The most positive and possibly the most important part of the psalm is the first line, the address, “O Lord, God of my salvation . . .” It is important because it means that everything that follows is spoken to God. The psalmist is not complaining, he is not blowing off steam, he is not gossiping or even questioning (even though he will ask some questions), he is not talking about God, he is talking to Him. I have always taken Psalm 51:6 literally. David wrote, “you delight in truth in the inward being”. God knows our hearts, He knows our thoughts, He knows our emotions, His desire is that we trust Him enough, that we yield to Him enough, that we love Him enough to tell Him the truth, even when the truth is not easy to tell. 

He writes “For my soul is full of troubles . . .” I want to pause there a moment, the psalmist expresses something that we have all felt, but also something that we have not all felt safe to say to God. Jesus said, “In this world you will have trouble” and yet we live trying to avoid trouble and act as if trouble is something we cannot talk about once we realize we cannot avoid it. You know this already, but I will say it anyway, you are going to experience trouble, what you may not know is that you can talk about it, you can be honest about it, you can be broken by it, you can share it all with God, you do not have to be careful, He loves when we are honest. 

David wrote “My God, My God, why have you forsaken me?” in Psalm 22. Elijah prayed, “It is enough; now, O LORD, take away my life”. Abraham said, “Shall a child be born to a man who is a hundred years old?” Mary and Martha both said, “Lord if you had been here my brother would not have died.” Even Jesus, on the night of His arrest said, “My soul is very sorrowful, even to the point of death”. These were people who loved and were loved by God, but they were touched by trouble. The faced disappointment, even despair. They wrestled with doubts, struggled with obedience, and had both experiences and emotions that were overwhelming at the time. But each of them shared the truth of their hearts, the depth of their despair and the reality of their pain with God. 

I am not sure anything can be more disorienting than unshared trouble. The idea that we need to be careful with what we say to God, that we need to figure it out for ourselves or just push through, it does not just exhaust us, it deceives us. The psalmist’s trouble is real, and his sorrow is deep and even though he is talking to God in this song, his bearings are off. He speaks to the “God of My salvation” but accuses Him of being the source of His trouble. He says that it is God who has put him in the depths of the pit, caused his friends to shun him, cast his soul away and even assaulted him. He knows in his heart who God is, but his trouble has caused him to question, maybe even to forget what God is like. I have been there, I have gotten lost in my trouble, maybe you have also, maybe you are right now.

Thankfully, Jesus did not just say, “In this world you will have trouble”. He added, “But take heart! I have overcome the world!” He is not only the God who saves Me, He is the God who cares for me. He is not only might, He is near. He is not only holy, He is humble. He is not only good, He is kind. When we begin to tell God about our trouble, it opens our hearts to be reminded of His character. Jesus was saying that our trouble did not come from Him, but we could give it to Him. Peter wrote from Jesus’ promise when he told us, “Cast all your anxiety on him because he cares for you.” 

I would like to tell you that Psalm 88 ends with a removal of trouble or a lifting of the psalmist’s spirit, but it does not. His song ended while he was still having trouble to see anything but the darkness of his trouble. What I can tell you is what I have seen God do in my own trouble. He has caught my tears in His bottle, sat with me in my sorrow, come close to me when I was broken-hearted. Some of my troubles have passed, some have been overcome and some have remained, but in all of them, God has been good, and He has been present. My encouragement to you today is not that everything will turn out all right, but that God will never turn from you. Your trouble is real, face it so that it will not distract you, share every detail of it with God so that it will not disorient you. Most of all, let God remind you not only of who He is but what He is like because much more than knowing what is going to happen in your situation, you will be carried by remembering that God is good, that God loves you and that even when trouble comes, God is here.