Psalm 77: Questions in Grief

When the present is awful and you have questions about God's care and love, think about the past.

Remember what He's done in the past, and by remembering, recalling, meditating on what He's done in the past, it'll help you to be reassured He won't abandon you now. How should Christians respond in their day of trouble? Sometimes we might feel like we should just grit our teeth, smile, and hide the pain and suffering from those around us, maybe even from God.

Is that how you typically respond? Welcome to the Friday edition of Renewing Your Mind, and today we'll be looking at a psalm that provides practical help for us in those darker moments of life. W. Robert Godfrey has been with us this week, helping us love the psalms in a deeper way, and that really was the goal behind both the series and his book, Learning to Love the Psalms. Both resources cover different psalms, and both are available for your gift of any amount at renewingyourmind.org.

Today is the final day for that offer. We live in a fallen world. You and I will face challenges, so how should we pray? How should we respond when we find ourselves navigating darker days and real grief?

Here's Dr. Godfrey. To this point, we've been looking, first of all, at a kind of overview of some general themes as to how to approach reading the psalms, and then we've looked at a series of psalms from book 1 and 2 of the Psalter. In book 1, we looked at the king's confidence in God's care, looking at psalms that tend to be quite personal, beginning with distress and culminating in confidence in God. Book 2 is more communal, is more kingdom-oriented, I was suggesting, and I called that book The King's Commitment to God's Kingdom. So we're looking a little bit more at the kingdom, a little less just personally, but it's only a slight difference when you look at those psalms.

There's a lot of similarities. But when we come to book 3, which we're doing today, which is Psalms 73 through 89, we are coming to a rather sharply different book in the Psalter. And I've called that book The King's Crisis Over God's Promises. And a number of the psalms in book 3 are psalms that reflect intense emotional crisis on the part of God's people. Psalm 74 reflects the destruction of the temple and the great lament for the loss of God's temple. Psalm 73 is a psalm of distress very personally. Psalm 80, as I mentioned before, is perhaps the bleakest psalm in the whole Psalter, a psalm of individual loneliness and a sense of abandonment. It says, darkness is my only companion.

That's a pretty bleak outlook on life. And then Psalm 89 culminates and ends this book 3 by being very specific about a sense of the loss of God's faithfulness. The first part of Psalm 89 says, God has promised that David's son will always sit on David's throne. And the second half of the psalm says, but David's son is not sitting on David's throne.

And so what's going on? So it's a book in which questions are intense. And I want to focus our attention to delve deeper into that sense of crisis looking at Psalm 77, another psalm of deep distress, but also a psalm in which the psalmist manages to come to some comfort and some encouragement in the midst of his trouble. Verse 2 of Psalm 77 reflects the psalmist's sense that he is speaking out of a day of trouble. A day of trouble is a phrase that actually recurs a number of times throughout the Psalter. And sometimes the day of trouble represents some very specific problem that the psalmist talks about. In other cases, the day of trouble is left somewhat more general, and that tends to be the case here. We're not told exactly what the day of trouble is, but it's big trouble. It's not little trouble.

It's big trouble. There may be a hint for us a little further on in verse 2. Verse 2 reads, In the day of trouble I seek the Lord.

In the night my hand is stretched out without wearying. My soul refuses to be comforted. That may allude to Jacob hearing about the death of Joseph and saying that he refused to be comforted. So the day of trouble may be because of a death of a loved one, but it may be something else. In any case, it's very, very intense, and that's the first thing that I want us to consider.

I've said before that one of the things that's attractive about the Psalter is its emotional honesty. The psalmist doesn't pretend to feel better than he feels, and we sense that here. It's a day of trouble, and so verse 1 says, I cry aloud to God, and He will hear me. In the day of trouble I seek the Lord. In the night my hand is stretched out without wearying.

My soul refuses to be comforted. Again, it's interesting the number of times throughout the Psalter the theme of meditating in the night, awake on the bed, troubled, praying, crying out to God. The older I get, the more appreciative I am of these night miseries. And here again we see that he's sleepless. He can't sleep for this trouble. Verse 3, when I remember God, I moan.

When I meditate, my spirit faints. So here is a picture of someone who is sleepless, who is not finding comfort, who is distressed wherever his mind turns. Verse 4, you hold my eyelids open. Again, the theme of sleeplessness.

I am so troubled I cannot speak. There's this deepening sense, this deepening communication of how profound the trouble is, how profound the grief and anguish are. And then we, in verse 5, get a hint of where eventually he'll be able to find a little comfort, although it's not coming right now. He says, I consider the days of old the years long ago. He said, verse 6, let me remember my song in the night, let me meditate in my heart. So he's beginning to cast his mind back to the faithfulness of the Lord. That's a theme he'll return to later in the psalm. But before he manages that, he says, my spirit made a diligent search, but what did it come up with?

It came up with a whole series of questions, tough questions, haunting questions. Verse 7, will the Lord spurn forever and never again be favorable? Has His steadfast love forever ceased? Are His promises at an end for all time? Has God forgotten to be gracious?

Has He in anger shut up His compassion? Those are pretty extreme questions, aren't they? Those are questions that boil down to feeling completely abandoned by the Lord, judged by the Lord, forgotten by the Lord, punished by the Lord.

Whatever's going on, he feels utterly alone. And one of the things that has intrigued me over the years is how many questions there are in the Psalms. I tried to count them up once, and there aren't actually question marks in Hebrew, so you're sometimes left a little uncertain about these things. But I ended up with about 170 questions are asked in the Psalms.

That's a lot of questions. And I think sometimes we're sort of told that if we're really spiritual, we shouldn't ask why. And I've realized finally why that kind of advice is offered. Ministers offer that advice because they don't know why. And so they don't want to be troubled.

They don't want to admit their inability. But the Psalter is full of whys, other questions as well. And it's not that the Psalter, any more than the minister, can answer for sure in every given circumstance exactly why something is happening. But what the Psalter says, it's okay to ask.

It's okay to wonder. It's okay to be honest with God. And I think that's part of the liberating character of the Psalter, that emotionally and in prayer we don't have to pretend to be other than we are. When we're miserable, we can say we're miserable. When we're sinful, we can say we're sinful.

When we feel abandoned, we can say we feel abandoned. And I think part of the pattern of the Scriptures is God never objects to His people coming to Him honestly. Now we should aim at also coming in faith. I mean, when we come to Him, we're coming at least because we have a little faith.

If we didn't have any faith at all, we wouldn't come to Him. Calvin always says you should control your anger, and that's true as far as it goes. But there are a lot of verses that allow us to be pretty angry. And it's part of why I think we're given these verses, so that we can come with honesty and ask questions. A number of times in the Psalter, there's reference to Exodus 17, to Israel at Rephidim.

And you remember the story, or maybe you don't. But it's an important episode in Israel's history where Israel begins to complain to Moses and ask, why did you bring us out in the wilderness to die? Why didn't we just stay in Egypt?

At least we had some food in Egypt. And that place is later renamed Massah and Meribah, the place of grumbling and complaining. And you might say, well, aren't the Psalms with all these questions encouraging grumbling and complaining?

Would you end up really just with the sin that you saw at Rephidim? And the answer is no, because when you read the story of Exodus 17 carefully, what you discover is the real offense of Israel there is they weren't praying. They were muttering amongst themselves. They were, if you will, complaining behind God's back.

And what was at the very heart of their complaint? Is God with us or not? It was a complete lack of faith. It was an abandonment of God. And that's why it becomes emblematic in the Scriptures for the wrong way for God's people to react. It's picked up in Psalm 95, it's picked up in Hebrews 3 and 4, so that this really becomes a key example of how not to react to try to grumble amongst yourselves behind God's back. But if you come to God, if you come forthrightly to God, if you come honestly to God, if you come honestly with faith in God, you can say what's really in your heart. That's what the Psalms say over and over again. And I think we should find to be tremendously encouraging.

And sometimes it really is bleak. What does the Psalmist feel here? Will the Lord spurn forever and never again be favorable? That's what he feels has happened to him, and he's asking a question about that.

Now these questions, of course, are rhetorical questions in which the answer is somewhat implied in the question itself. I suspect even as the Psalmist asks these questions, he kind of knows the answer, and the answer he kind of knows is no, he won't spurn forever. Nonetheless, that's the way he's feeling. Has his steadfast love forever ceased? Now, a couple of times we've heard that word in the Psalter, steadfast love. That's the Hebrew word chesed, and it's one of the Hebrew words kind of worth learning. They're all worth learning, but chesed is hard to translate into English, and in the King James it was usually translated mercy. So it would have read here, has his mercy forever ceased? It's usually translated mercy in the New Testament, Greek. I sometimes translate it covenant love, covenant faithfulness. It is love, it is mercy, but it's particularly for his people in light of the covenant that he has promised will not fail. So it's sort of like saying, has his unfailing love failed?

And, of course, implicit then in the very question is an answer. No, unfailing love can't fail. But that's how he feels. He isn't feeling the covenant faithfulness and love of the Lord. Are his promises at an end for all time?

You see, this is one of the very lowest moments of spiritual experience, isn't it? When you begin to wonder if the promises of God are really reliable. It's wonderful to have promises, but they're really only wonderful if the promises are kept.

I can promise you all a million dollars at the end of this lecture. But the promise is significant only if I keep it, and I want to assure you I won't. But God's promises aren't like that, you know. God's promises are always reliable, and so he feels so disoriented. Has God forgotten to be gracious?

Has he in anger shut up his compassion? Now, we know the psalmist is a sinner, but there doesn't seem to be in this psalm a particular sin that's in mind. And so I think he's giving voice to that sort of general floating guilt we can all feel. I'm suffering, so I'm wondering, am I suffering because I'm guilty of something I'm not aware I'm guilty of? Is God being vengeful to me, and I'm not even aware of why?

That's sort of what's going on here. So these are questions that in days of trouble, in terrible moments, God's people experience and wonder about and don't know how to react to. And so what does the psalmist do in this really low point? It says in verse 10, then I said, I will appeal to this, the ears of the right hand of the Most High, I will remember the deeds of the Lord, yes, I will remember your wonders of old. It's interesting that verse 11 is the center of the psalm, and therefore, as we've seen, may well be the heart of the matter, the center of the meaning of the psalm. Actually, this is following a pattern we find in a number of psalms.

What should the people of God do when they're really in distress? Well, pray is one of the things to do, and the psalmist is praying, this is a prayer. But the Psalter also says when the present is awful and you have questions about God's care and love, think about the past.

Remember what he's done in the past, and by remembering, recalling, meditating on what he's done in the past, it'll help you to be reassured he won't abandon you now. And that's wonderful spiritual advice, and it's developed here in the Psalter. Verse 5, he says, I consider the days of old, the years long ago. He may be thinking very personally there, that's one way we can meditate on God's faithfulness.

We can think of the way he's been faithful with us individually in the past, the experiences we've had of his goodness and mercy and care in our own individual lives. But here, as often in the Psalter, his mind also goes back to the great faithfulness of God to his people in his great saving works. And so in the Old Testament, that was of course the deliverance from Egypt above all.

That's the great emblem of God's saving mercy, of his power. They were enslaved in Egypt, and God brought them forth with a mighty arm. He liberated them. He brought them to the land of promise.

This is the great deliverance to which they are frequently called to look back. Is God mighty? Yes, he defeated Pharaoh. Yes, he opened the Red Sea. Is God loving and faithful?

Yes, he had remembered Israel all those centuries in Egypt, and now he brought them forth. He's a saving God. He's a remembering God.

That's what's brought to the fore as they look back. And so it's interesting, at verse 13 we come to a new question, your way, O God, is holy. What God is great like our God?

Now not a doubting question, but a faith-filled question, very much like what was said as Israel passed through the Red Sea, what God is like unto our God. Part of what the deliverance from Egypt is all about is the defeat of the Egyptian gods. The Egyptians had more gods than you could remember the names of, and Pharaoh himself was the living God. But our God defeated all the gods of Egypt, including Pharaoh.

In fact, Pharaoh was drowned in the Red Sea. So here is the epitome of deliverance, and the Old Testament in many places and throughout the Psalter goes back to that, and in verse 15 we see that celebrated, you with your arm redeemed your people, the children of Jacob and Joseph. And then it goes on to meditate on that, but it meditates on it in a fairly unique way because the meditation in the first place is not on the victory and the power, but on the darkness of the moment, which of course is exactly, would be somewhat encouraging to someone in a very black moment in their lives.

When we look back at other black moments, they weren't defeat, but they were victory. That's what we see in verse 16 and 17. When the waters saw you, O God, when the waters saw you, they were afraid. Indeed, the deep trembled. The clouds poured out water. The skies gave forth thunder. Your arrows flashed on every side. The crash of your thunder was in the whirlwind. Your lightnings lighted up the world. The earth trembled and shook.

Now think for a moment. Usually, with the help of Cecil B. DeMille, think of just the water coming back and Israel walking through and the great triumph, but I think DeMille does have lightning in the background, but for Israel standing on the edge of the Red Sea, the lightning wasn't really in the background. It's flashing all around them. The earth is shaking under their feet. Rain is pouring down. The wind is hurling, and don't they have to wonder for a minute, is this deliverance or is this death?

You know, what's really going on here? And then at verse 19, your way was through the sea, your path through the great waters, yet your footprints were unseen. I love that phrase, yet your footprints were unseen. The way opened up.

It was you who opened it up. It was you who were leading us, but we didn't see you. We didn't see you. Now, many other places, the stress is on how God did lead them, the column of fire and the column of smoke.

Is that what it was, the other column? But here, the emphasis is on what they didn't see. You know, it's great to have things you do see, but sometimes you'd like to see more, and that's where the emphasis is here. Why couldn't we see God? Why couldn't we see God, but we didn't? He led us, but we couldn't see His footprints. There weren't any footprints of God in the sand.

We just had to walk. And you see how this comfort is coming around in all sorts of ways to people in the day of trouble. God is with you. God is opening the way, but you may not be able to see the footprints. And then it closes with, you led your people like a flock by the hand of Moses and Aaron.

God's footprints couldn't be seen, but God's ministers were there to help, to lead, to guide. And this is, again, pointing the sorrowing soul to a place where He can be helped, where He can be encouraged and strengthened. One of the things that's good to do when you're looking at Psalms is to look at words that are repeated. Sometimes it's very common words, verse 2, in the day of my trouble I seek the Lord.

In the night my hand is stretched out without wearying. You can see Him raising His hand in prayer, asking the Lord to take His hand. And then in verse 10 we read, then I said I will appeal to this, to the ears of the right hand of the Most High. So He's raising His hand, reaching out for the hand of God, remembering that the hand of God had reached Him and blessed Him in times past. And then we close with, verse 20, you led your people like a flock by the hand of Moses and Aaron. So the hand of God may not have been right there. He may not have seen the hand of God or felt the hand of God, but God holds His hand through the hand of Moses and Aaron. And it's a picture of God being with His people, but not always visibly, not always with a clear answer to every question, but with a presence by the hand of those who are appointed to lead His people. And so this is really a marvelous Psalm in terms of expressing the depth of pain, but also showing a way forward.

It doesn't close by saying, and then I felt perfect again. No, but I had a hand to hold onto that reminded me that God was holding onto my hand as well. And so as we close, that's the encouragement that I think we should all have in the day of trouble, that even though we can't see it or always feel it, God is holding our hand. I loved Dr. Godfrey pointing out the emotional honesty of the Psalms. The Psalmist doesn't pretend to feel better than he is.

And the example in those moments, not only to pray, but to remember the Lord, His promises and His provision in the past. This is the Friday edition of Renewing Your Mind, and we've spent the last few days considering the riches of the book of Psalms. These messages are from W. Robert Godfrey's Learning to Love the Psalms series. In 12 messages, he introduces you to the book of Psalms and walks you through a number of them in great detail. His companion book also provides a study of additional Psalms, so I would encourage you to request both today for your donation of any amount at renewingyourmind.org or by calling us at 800-435-4343. This offer ends at midnight, so request digital access to the series and the study guide and the hardcover book when you give a gift at renewingyourmind.org. This year marks the 100th anniversary of J. Gresham Machen's classic book, Christianity and Liberalism. Next week, Stephen Nichols will join us as we return to Machen and the clarity and the conviction that came out of the controversy and conflict of the early 20th century. So join us beginning Monday here on Renewing Your Mind.