Psalm 88: When Life Is Hopeless

Psalm 88:15, 13 "Afflicted and close to death from my youth up, I suffer your terrors; I am helpless. . . .But I, O LORD, cry to you; in the morning my prayer comes before you."

Have you ever felt as if life was hopeless? Perhaps you were going through struggle in which you could not find any way out, or a circumstance that seemed darker than any other. What did you do? Did you lift your words up to God? Or did you remain quiet in fear of questioning his plan? In Psalm 88, the bleakest and hopeless of all psalms, the psalmist gives us a great model of how we ought to approach the Lord in these times of great dispair. Let us look to it this morning to see how we ought to live even when life seems hopeless.

All of the previous psalms of lament that we have been going through include a positive response. No matter how difficult the trial is, the psalmist always finds a glimmer of hope and respond in praise. However, Psalm 88 is not so. The last verse of this psalm quite literally says "You have caused my beloved and my friend to shun me; my companions have become darkness" (18). This is the note on which the psalm ends: hopelessness and dispair. How are we to interpret this psalm? If there is no sense of hope found within it, what can we gain from it?

Before we answer that question, let us examine the intensity of the trial that the author of this psalm is going through. Although we don't know exactly what the trial was, we do know that it was constant (1-2), deadly (3), weakening (4), feuled by rejection (5, 8), and helpless (9). The psalmists goes so far as to say that he is helpless (see verse quoted above). What do we do with that?

The key to interpreting this psalm is to realize that even amidst great distress, the psalmist cried out to the Lord and to the Lord alone. One commentator on this psalm says this:

The only glimmer of light is that the psalmist can still pray. He is still able to appeal to Yahweh. But there is no hint of response or hope of improvement.1

Even though the situation in which the psaltmist found himself in was hopeless and helpless, he found hope and help outside his situation in the very fact that the Lord heard him. Even though he doubted God's plan amidst his situation (see verses 10-12) he still trusted that God was his only hope. Though his situation was helpless, his relationship to God was not.

Futhermore, we must notice that in this psalm, the psalmist has no problem blaming even the fullness of his trial on the Lord. "You [referring to God] have put me in the depths of the pit" (6), "your wrath lies heavy upon me, and you overwhelm me with your waves," (7) "your dreadful assults destroy me" (16) are all things that the psalmist says directly to God. How can we deal with this from a theological standpoint? How could God be the one behind all of this pain? Oftentimes, we desire to say that God didn't want the trial to happen to his child, but he simply allowed it for his purposes. Although I am not entirely against this interpretation, I think the Bible goes even farther than this. Not only in this psalm, but in the entirety of the Psalter, the book of Job, and most exclusively Romans 9, we see God being a sovereign God who purposely and willfully allows trials and even evil to come for his own sovereign good. Does God allow the trial? Yes. But I would argue that God also wants and desires the trial (at least in one sense). Why? Because "the testing of your faith produces steadfastness" (James 2:3). God knows what is for your good, and he often does more than allow trials in your life, but rather causes them to happen in your life in order that your faith might grow as you call upon him as your only hope amidst your trial.

So, where can the application be found in one of the most hopeless chapters in all of scripture? In this very fact: that God is still a God we can pray to even when everything else seems hopeless. Even though we may be doubting God's plan (10-12), feeling as if he is pouring our his wrath on us (7), and seeing no way that the trial will ever end (15), we can still pray to God. The question before us today is this: do we let our trials get to us? Do we allow them to crush our faith? Or, do we remain steadfast even amidst the darknest of trials and allow them to build our faith instead of break it down? Surely we ought to do so.

"Remember this, had any other condition been better for you than the one in which you are, divine love would have put you there." - Spurgeon

1. Interpreting the Psalms, ed. David Firth and Philip S. Johnson, 79.