Discipleship in the Psalms: The Darkness of Lament
Author: Daniel Owens, PhD
April 04, 2024
Sixth in a series.
Psalm 13
To the choirmaster. A Psalm of David.
1How long, O Lord? Will you forget me forever?
How long will you hide your face from me?
2How long must I take counsel in my soul
and have sorrow in my heart all the day?
How long shall my enemy be exalted over me?
3Consider and answer me, O Lord my God;
light up my eyes, lest I sleep the sleep of death,
4lest my enemy say, “I have prevailed over him,”
lest my foes rejoice because I am shaken.
5But I have trusted in your steadfast love;
my heart shall rejoice in your salvation.
6I will sing to the Lord,
because he has dealt bountifully with me.
What do you think was David’s most common mood? As a matter of historical fact, that might be a little hard to determine. But if we confine ourselves to the psalms of David, we would find that very often he was pretty down. And I don’t mean he was tired after a long day at the office. I mean, he was God-why-have-you-abandoned-me kind of down (Psa. 22:1), as was Jesus when he quoted Psalm 22 on the cross (Matt. 27:46; Mark 15:34). Psalm 22 is probably the most famous of the lament psalms, which Craig Broyles defines as “a set poetic prayer aimed to present a need to God so that he may resolve it and further his praise.”1
This definition is helpful, if a bit bland, compared to the actual lament psalms. These psalms were uttered from a place of suffering. We might adopt the language of Psalm 130:1 to say that these are prayers offered “out of the depths” or use the language of Psalm 88:18 to say that they are uttered from the darkness. How can we pray when we are lost in the darkness of our sorrow and suffering? The lament psalms show the way.
Unfortunately, our repertoire of modern worship songs does not often include lament, whether they be traditional hymns or contemporary praise songs. In a personal conversation more than a decade ago, I asked the late Edith Blumhofer (formerly a member at New Covenant Church), a historian of hymnody, why we do not sing lament songs. She answered that hymnals stopped including lament songs during the 18th century, under the influence of German pietism. As evangelicals, we inherit their spiritual legacy of experiential faith, and we too often want to emphasize the positive dimensions of our life with God in Christ. But to lose lament is to lose half of the spectrum of human emotion and experience. The loss of lament, as Walter Brueggemann rightly put it, was costly.2
And yet, since I went to seminary, thanks in large part to Walter Brueggemann’s work on the psalms, Protestants across the theological spectrum have been recovering the language of lament, particularly in relation to the problems of racial discrimination and violence. Lament is coming back into evangelical songs, such as Keith and Kristen Getty and Matt Papa’s “Lord from Sorrows Deep I Call” or Sovereign Grace’s “How Long, O Lord,” or even Andrew Peterson’s “The Silence of God.”
How can we dip our toes into the deep waters of lament? Most people begin with Psalm 13, which beautifully presents the three main movements of lament in short order.
Psalm 13:1–2 begins with David peppering God with questions, beginning with “How long?” This is the lament, which verbalizes David’s situation. His questions are like nails on a chalkboard for us because, as with Jesus’ cry of dereliction on the cross, it is God who is the source of the psalmist’s suffering. Can we say that? In Psalm 13, David accuses God of forgetting him or of hiding from him, such that he can turn only to himself for comfort and must endure the taunting of his enemy.
This brutally honest language to God strikes us as bordering on heresy, and yet David and Jesus both used such language. The genius of this is the honesty. God is never surprised or shaken by the intensity of our feeling, so he will not be taken aback by the intensity of our words. I recall the early days of the first COVID-19 lockdown in Hanoi in 2020. In obedience to the regulations at the time, I did not pass the threshold of our front gate for over a month. I got so stir-crazy that I could not stand it. How long will they keep us confined to our houses? It was disorienting, to say the least. That is the experience of David here.
The next movement in lament is to petition God to act (13:3-4). David implores God to “consider and answer” (v. 3). What kind of answer does he seek? Clearly, he is suffering to the point of death (v. 3), but also there is an enemy in the picture, who takes great pleasure in claiming victory for himself and defeat for David (v. 4). Psalm 15:5 promises that the righteous person will never be shaken, so how is it possible that David can be shaken by his enemy (Psa. 13:4)?
David’s situation is a moment of crisis in his covenant relationship with God, but that’s not the only character involved. Between verses 2 and 4, we realize that David’s situation involves a triangle of relationships between God, the enemy, and David.3 David seeks God to act to rescue him from his enemy. We are dishonest with ourselves if we say we have no enemies. Certainly the devil is our enemy, as is death (Hosea 13:14; 1 Cor. 15:55), but in truth we can find ourselves persecuted in big or small ways. David’s response was to go to God, and we should, too.
Finally, lament psalms usually conclude with praise or a vow of praise. Psalm 13:5–6 combines trust in God’s faithfulness or steadfast love with joyous praise. As is often the case, we do not know whether David penned this psalm after he had been delivered or before. I believe Rolf A. Jacobson’s summary is helpful: “The closing of the psalm has a sense of looking backward at yesterday, of living with eyes wide open in the now of today, and of gazing ahead hopefully to tomorrow.”4 It is likely that David prays with confidence based on past experience of God’s steadfast love (v. 5a) and bountiful dealings (v. 6b). And he anticipates joyful praise in the future (vv. 5b and 6a), though at present he finds himself in the darkness of God’s absence.
Psalm 13 holds promise for discipleship in several ways. First, it models perseverance in the darkness; though God may seem distant today, we can seek him to act and trust that he will. Second, it coaxes honest prayers from us, which can only deepen our connection with God because we open to his gaze our messiest and least faith-filled moments. Third, it helps us recognize that suffering does not happen in a vacuum—people can be our enemy, and often we need God to rescue us from their persecution. Finally, it reminds us that, sooner or later, God will act, and then our rightful response should be praise.
Daniel Owens, PhD, is NCC’s pastor of discipleship. Go to the NCC Blog for the previous posts in this series.
1 Craig C. Broyles, “Lament, Psalms Of,” in Dictionary of the Old Testament: Wisdom, Poetry & Writings, ed. Tremper Longman and Peter Enns (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2008), 384.
2Walter Brueggemann, “The Costly Loss of Lament,” Journal for the Study of the Old Testament 36 (1986), 57–71.
3Claus Westermann, Praise and Lament in the Psalms, trans. Keith R. Crim and Richard M. Soulen (Atlanta, GA: John Knox Press, 1981), 169.
4Nancy deClaisse-Walford, Rolf A. Jacobson, and Beth LaNeel Tanner, The Book of Psalms (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2014), 162.
BACK