Peter Smythe

Thou hast laid me in the lowest pit, in darkness, in the deeps. —Psalm 88.6

Today the gospel has been transmogrified into a catholicon for the believer who walks out his salvation with all the emotional sophistication of a nascent teenaged girl. One can’t go to church for a month of Sundays (more like two weeks for me) without having to down doses of “God Will Make a Way,” “It’s Your Time,” or some other yin yang about how the Majesty on High is working harder than a coal miner to help us become emotionally self-actualized.

Read this recent riff on Psalm 88:

I read Psalm 88 recently in my devotions, and it filled me with thanksgiving. Which might seem odd. Because this psalm just may be the most bleak of the canonical songs.

Heman the Ezrahite, the apparent composer, was seriously depressed. Maybe he was chronically ill. Or maybe, like many, he battled almost constantly against a relentless darkness. We really don’t know. But he said he had been this way since his youth (v. 15). He felt abandoned by God (v. 14), his beloved (v. 18), and companions (v. 8). He was desperate and his prayers seemed to be going unanswered (vv. 13-14). He was so overwhelmed that he felt close to death (vv. 3, 15).

So why did this psalm make me feel so thankful? Simply because God mercifully included it in the Bible. I find that amazing.

This song is a cry for help to a God who seems angry and distant. Admittedly, that doesn’t seem very encouraging at first. I mean, if I had consulted God about songwriting and what his hymns should include, I would have taken this one to him and said, “This psalm needs at least a verse or two of some hopeful promise. And, really, the last word of the song shouldn’t be ‘darkness.’ Way too heavy.”

But God wisely didn’t consult me. He knows there are moments for saints when things look so bleak that all we can do is cry a lament to him. We cry, “Where are you? I know you’re there and I know there’s light, but I can’t see it! Please, please show me!”

I’ve been there. I’ve known that kind of darkness. And this Psalm is a gift from God to his children. It’s a song for them to sing during the desolate moments, which one day will be swallowed up in unending light.

There are other psalms one should meditate on in such times, like Psalm 27 and Psalm 139. And the Bible as a whole resounds with hope. But Psalml 88 is a merciful reminder from God that the experience of darkness is “common to man” (1 Corinthians 10:13), that when we’re in it we are not as alone as we feel, and that he is with us after all.

Isn’t it just like God to make a bleak psalm a light for those who sit in darkness?

“…even the darkness is not dark to you; the night is bright as the day, for darkness is as light with you” (Psalm 139:12).

—Desiring God

I’ve been there? I’ve known that kind of darkness? What kind of exegesis is this? What hermeneutic turns a 3,000 year old psalm about a righteous man suffering the horrors of God’s abandonment into Chicken Soup for the Christian Soul? Did God Almighty really go through all the trouble of inspiring the psalmist, inculcating the psalm into Israel’s spiritual history, and preserving it for generations just to serve up a dollop of spiritual comfort food?

God didn’t inspire such a craven Gospel.

While the Bible might be about us—our redemption, our salvation—it follows more the path of a Hollywood action thriller than some Freudian self-help book. At the movies, there’s always the ditzy blonde who, through her own klutziness, has gotten herself and a whole lot of other people in a real mess. Unless she’s saved by some confabulous hero whose got some dazzling plan of action, she’s toast. She’s the damsel in distress, but she’s not the story’s protagonist; the hero is. The excitement of the saga doesn’t stem from her woe-is-me monologue (“oh, woe is me in this dark and dirty and stinky castle”), but in seeing just how in God’s name the hero overcomes every insurmountable obstacle, and beats back the atrocious villain just to save her.

Psalm 88 isn’t an echo of the girl’s lament, it’s a scene out of our hero’s rescue mission.

On the day that he was resurrected, Jesus walked along the road to Emmaus with Cleopas and a friend of his, and later appeared to the rest of the disciples. Both times, he hearkened back to the Old Testament, and asked them, in so many words, “Didn’t you see the trailer?”

And he said unto them, These are the words which I spake unto you, while I was yet with you, that all things must be fulfilled, which were written in the law of Moses, and in the prophets, and in the psalms, concerning me. —Luke 24.44

Ought not Christ to have suffered these things, and to enter into his glory? And beginning at Moses and all the prophets, he expounded unto them in all the scriptures the things concerning himself. —Luke 24.26

Notice that with the disciples he mentioned that he was in the scenes from the psalms.

Fortunately, he showed us just how the script is supposed to be handled. In Matthew 18, some Pharisees didn’t want to believe him and said, “Hey, show us a sign that you’re not just another Clark Kent.” Jesus turned on them, telling them that they didn’t need a sign because they had the trailer:

An evil and adulterous generation seeketh after a sign; and there shall no sign be given to it, but the sign of the prophet Jonah: For as Jonas was three days and three nights in the whale’s belly; so shall the Son of man be three days and three nights in the heart of the earth. —Matthew 12.40

Maybe the Pharisees thought the silly story of how a prophet was swallowed up by a big, bad sea monster was only worthy of a Veggie Tales release, but Jesus ripped a page out of Jonah’s script and put it in his own storyline. Jonah had playacted the “belly of hell” (Jonah 2.2), but he was doing the reality show.

And remember, Jonah didn’t survive that voyage of the damned with nary a peep. He prayed from the belly of that whale, echoing the psalms:

I cried by reason of mine affliction unto the Lord, and he heard me; out of the belly of hell cried I, and thou heardest my voice. (Ps. 88.6; 42.7) For thou hadst cast me into the deep, in the midst of the seas; and the floods compassed me about: all thy billows and thy waves passed over me. Then said I, I am cast out of thy sight; yet I will look again toward thy holy temple. (Ps. 31.32) The waters compassed me about, even to the soul: the depth closed me round about, the weeds were wrapped about my head. (Ps. 69.1) I went down to the bottoms of the mountains; the earth with her bars was about me for ever: yet hast thou brought up my life from corruption, O Lord my God. (Ps. 16.10) When my soul fainted within me I remembered the Lord: and my prayer came in unto thee, into thine holy temple. (Ps. 18.6)

Jonah’s first breath was Psalm 88.6. So Psalm 88 isn’t some kind of craven comfort for the verkempt believer; it’s a snapshot of what our hero had to suffer to save his bride:

Let my prayer come before thee: incline thine ear to my cry. For my soul is full of troubles: and my life draweth nigh unto the grave. I am counted with them that go down into the pit: I am as a man that hath no strength.Thou hast laid me in the lowest pit, in darkness, in the deeps. Thy wrath lieth hard upon me, and thou hast afflicted me with all thy waves. —Psalm 88.2, 3, 6, 7

Not so? Then you haven’t watched all of the trailer.

Jonah echoes Psalm 69 and Paul quotes from the same psalm in Romans (“The reproaches of them that reproached you fell on me.” —Romans 15.3). But Paul doesn’t use Psalm 69 as some lame lament to God; he scores it as Jesus’ own voice. And he did the very same thing in Hebrews 10 with Psalm 40:

Above when he said, Sacrifice and offering and burnt offerings and offering for sin thou wouldest not, neither hadst pleasure therein; which are offered by the law; Then said he, Lo, I come to do thy will, O God. He taketh away the first, that he may establish the second. —Hebrews 10.9-10, quoting Psalm 40.6, 7.

In Psalm 40, we hear again of “the destroying pit, the mire of mud” (v. 1). But the cool thing about that psalm is that it not only shows us the scene when it looks all hope is lost—it was all too much for him, the adversary had snatched his victory, and the church was doomed to spiritual death forever—it also includes the next scene where our hero defies death, hell, and the grave and saves the day:

And He causes me to come up from the destroying pit! From mire of mud! And He’s raised my feet upon a rock! He has established my steps! And to me he says, Thy throne, O God, is for ever and ever! —Psalm 40.2 mashup with Hebrews 1.8, Smythean

No, we haven’t been there; we haven’t known that darkness. But Jesus has. And that’s why there will never be a hero like the hero of our redemption. Ever.

You might also like:

• Jonah 2:5 – Still A Little Bit Softer Now
• Jonah 2:2 – Echoes of Jesus
• The Sign of Jonah – 2
• The Sign of Jonah
• Matthew 12:40: In the Belly of Hell (3)