If I'm being honest, most of life is spent moving from one hard thing to the next. Frustration shows up in a lot of different ways and comes at us from a lot of different angles, and part of growing up (in life and in faith) is learning how to move through those seasons in a way that's actually healthy.
The trouble is that a lot of us were handed a faith that treats every hard season like a problem to solve. Something's wrong, so you pray about it, claim the promise, move forward, and trust, and if you do all of that you can expect the breakthrough. Every dark night is supposed to have a morning attached to it, and usually a pretty quick one. So when people go looking for the meaning of Psalm 88, they're usually expecting to find the place where it turns around.
But what if the Bible has a prayer that refuses to do that? Psalm 88 is a song that just sits in the dark, and it's in your Bible anyway.
Here is what I believe. Psalm 88 doesn't fix anything, and I don't think it was ever meant to. It gives you permission to sit in the dark without rushing to the next step, and it's proof that God isn't scared of your worst night. I'm not saying we should camp out in despair forever, because there's real movement in this psalm. It's just not the movement most of us were taught to look for.
A Worship Song With No Happy Ending
Some context helps here. The Psalms is the largest book in your Bible, and it wasn't written in one sitting. Somebody didn't wake up one morning with a song, keep that up for five years, and then publish a book called Psalms. It's a collection of poems and songs gathered over centuries and edited together by scribes and teachers who were shaping the way Israel worshiped Yahweh. A good portion of them are connected to King David, but there are plenty we can't trace to anyone. Some were written by Israelites, some by people outside Israel, and some were learned from someone else and written down later.
The Psalms are divided into sections that are actually called books, and Psalm 88 sits at the end of the third one. That section is full of writings that wrestle openly with exile and with the frustration of people who felt like everything God promised had fallen apart, so you get a lot of very transparent wrestling with God in there, and Psalm 88 closes it out.
A lot of psalms open with a short heading that tells you something about the song, and the one on Psalm 88 is unusually long. It calls it a song and a psalm of the sons of Korah, it's for the music director, and it's attributed to Heman the Ezrahite (there's also a musical direction in there that I'm not going to try to pronounce). The detail that matters is the sons of Korah. They were temple singers, so think of them as the worship leaders at your church, the people responsible for leading Israel in worship. And the worship leaders left behind a song with no happy ending. Most of the songs we sing to God climb up out of the depths before they're done, but Psalm 88 doesn't, and somebody kept it in the songbook on purpose.
Most scholars consider it the darkest psalm in the Bible, a lament with no resolution inside the prayer itself. If you've never read it, it's gritty and honest and very down to earth, and it never gets to a hopeful ending. It actually starts out sounding okay:
"O LORD, God of my salvation, I cry out to you by day. I come to you at night." (Psalm 88:1, NLT)
Then it turns pretty quickly.
"For my life is full of troubles, and death draws near." (Psalm 88:3, NLT)
The word underneath that is Sheol, which is a way of talking about death and the afterlife as darkness and rest, a place where you're just gone. It isn't hell in the way most of us picture hell (and I've written about that before), but the point is that his troubles are so bad he's basically ready to call it quits. Then it gets harder, because he starts pointing at God as the one doing this to him.
"You have thrown me into the lowest pit, into the darkest depths." (Psalm 88:6, NLT)
I don't know if you're like me, but I'm almost 48 now, and there have been times I've looked around at what was happening in my life and honestly wondered if God was the one doing it to me. That's where he is. He's in so much distress that he can't see clearly what's going on, and I think that's kind of the point. When things are hard we want to know why, as if having the reason would bring some kind of resolution, and he never gets one. By verse 14 he's asking God why he rejects him and turns his face away, and then the psalm ends like this:
"Your fierce anger has overwhelmed me. Your terrors have paralyzed me. They swirl around me like floodwaters all day long. They have engulfed me completely. You have taken away my companions and loved ones. Darkness is my closest friend." (Psalm 88:16 to 18, NLT)
And that's the end of the song.
Is It Okay to Lament? The Movement Most of Us Miss
If you grew up in church, you were probably told that your doubt and despair meant something was broken in you. The church doesn't do a great job with this. There's a biblical word for it, lament, and there's even a whole book called Lamentations where Israel grieves the exile and the destruction of the temple. But we don't talk about it much, because the way we've built church tends to push those things aside, and when they do show up they get treated like a lack of faith or a lack of trust.
Almost every other lament in the Bible has a turn, and once you look for it, it's easy to see. This is awful, this is awful, this is awful, and then, but God, I will trust you, I know morning is coming. That isn't a bad thing. The challenge is that we get pushed toward that turn way too early. I think we have to give ourselves permission to sit in the lament and not rescue ourselves right away. Yes, we have faith and we trust, and those things are true, but there are also times we need to sit in it and be honest with God about the frustration and the doubt and the questions, and God is okay with that. It's in your Bible, and it was sung in worship.
Think about how many times you've been in a church service where the last song ended with something like I'm alone in the dark, and then the guitar just stopped and everybody stood there. It would feel weird, right? I think it feels weird because we've been trained to see sorrow and suffering as something to escape instead of something we can actually learn from and grow in.
I also think this is why a lot of church leaders get nervous about a psalm like this one. If I could name the fear, it's that if we sit in questioning and anger and doubt for too long, we'll walk away from our faith. And to be fair, that does happen. Someone sits in that place, disengages, and eventually says, God, where are you, why don't you help me, I guess you don't exist, and then they leave.
But there's something in Psalm 88 that's easy to miss, because we're so focused on the emotions we can relate to. Go back to the very first line. He calls God the God of his salvation, and he says he cries out day and night. All through the lament he keeps coming back to God, and in verse 9 he says it again:
"My eyes are blinded by my tears. Each day I beg for your help, O LORD; I lift my hands to you for mercy." (Psalm 88:9, NLT)
Whether this was one person's lived experience or how it became a song, I don't know, but the power of Psalm 88 is that the person praying it stays in conversation with God through all of it. He doesn't say "I guess you don't exist" and walk off. He keeps talking to God, even while he's accusing him.
That's the part I think we miss far too often. We get frustrated and angry, we don't understand why something tragic happened, and we step out of the relationship. Psalm 88 gives us permission to lament and to be honest and transparent with God, but it also shows us someone who stays in the relationship in the middle of it, and I think that's what keeps him from being swallowed by the darkness. He isn't alone in it. That kind of pain without the relationship can take us somewhere really hard, and the anger and the accusations in this psalm never lead him out of the relationship.
Both Are True
You might be thinking, but Joe, shouldn't we eventually move out of that place? I've been in a lot of conversations about forgiveness lately, some of them at Barstool Theology, and there's a real tension between what the text invites us into and the very real pain that makes us want to hold on to unforgiveness. When is it okay to move on? Sometimes we jump straight to "I need to forgive because the Bible says so" without ever actually processing our own pain, because a lot of us were raised to believe the faithful thing is always the quickest next step.
The Bible does have that movement. Plenty of psalms end with the "yet," and Paul says this in Philippians:
"No, dear brothers and sisters, I have not achieved it, but I focus on this one thing: Forgetting the past and looking forward to what lies ahead, I press on to reach the end of the race and receive the heavenly prize for which God, through Christ Jesus, is calling us." (Philippians 3:13 to 14, NLT)
Being able to take steps forward is an important part of the process, so both are true. Think of Job, who sat in the ash heap mourning for days before anybody said a word about how to get out of it. It's okay to sit, and there's probably a step forward at some point. I think the mistake the church makes is treating every dark night like it's Philippians 3, like we have to press on right now and faithfulness means getting over it and out of it instead of sitting in it for a while.
I'll be honest about my own experience with this. People have told me that if I keep reading the books on my shelf, the scholarship on how the Bible was formed and edited and shaped, it will eventually lead me to stop believing. That hasn't happened. If anything my faith is deeper now than it's ever been, and I trust God and this text more than I ever have. Even when I run into something I hadn't thought of before and it's challenging, the questions and the wondering end up deepening my faith, because I keep bringing them to God instead of walking away with them.
So if you've been hurt, or you have questions that never got answered, or someone told you to just have faith and trust and that wasn't enough, I want you to know it's okay to sit in it. It's okay to talk to God the way Psalm 88 does. Sometimes we think we can't talk to God like that, because he's too holy and you can't get mad at God, but it's right there in the text. If it was okay for the earliest Israelites to talk to Yahweh that way, maybe it's okay for us too. Psalm 88 is in the Bible so you don't have to fake being okay, and trust can grow organically. You don't have to force the next step.
There's no morning at the end of Psalm 88 and no "yet I will praise him," but there is permission to still be in the night, angry and frustrated and doubting, and to keep talking to God while you're there. If the worship team of ancient Israel was willing to sing a song that didn't end with a way out, I think it's okay for us to sit in that place long enough to really deal with it alongside God.
So what have you been rushing yourself through that God might actually be inviting you to sit in for a while?
