The Psalm That Ends in the Dark

Almost every lament in the Psalms turns.

That is the shape of them. A man says the terrible thing for eight verses, and then somewhere around verse nine or ten there is a but, and the song lifts, and by the end he is saying that he will yet praise Him. Psalm 13 does it. Psalm 42 does it. Psalm 77 does it.

Psalm 88 does not.

It is eighteen verses long and it goes down for all eighteen. There is no turn. There is no but. It does not resolve, it does not lift, and it ends on a word.

Lover and friend hast thou put far from me, and mine acquaintance into darkness.Psalm 88:18, King James Version

Darkness. That is the last word of the psalm. The song stops there and the next page begins a different one.

I want to ask the question that matters most about this psalm, and it is not what is wrong with the man who wrote it.

The question is: why did they keep it?

Somebody collected these songs. Somebody arranged them, edited them, ordered them for the worship of a whole nation. And when they came to this one, which offers no comfort and reaches no conclusion, they put it in.

The heading tells us more than we usually notice. It is A Song or Psalm for the sons of Korah, to the chief Musician upon Mahalath Leannoth, Maschil of Heman the Ezrahite. That is an assignment. To the chief musician. This was not a private page in somebody's notebook. It was set for public singing, with an arranger's note attached.

It was assigned to the choir

Read the psalm's own account of what has been going on, because it is specific and it is long.

My soul is full of troubles. I am counted with them that go down into the pit. Thou hast laid me in the lowest pit, in darkness, in the deeps. Thou hast put away mine acquaintance far from me; thou hast made me an abomination unto them. Mine eye mourneth by reason of affliction.

And then verse thirteen, which is the one that stops people, because it shows the man has not given up praying.

But unto thee have I cried, O LORD; and in the morning shall my prayer prevent thee.Psalm 88:13, King James Version

In the morning. Every morning. He is praying daily, and he says in verse fifteen that he has been in this state from my youth up. This is not a bad month.

So here is a man praying every morning for years, getting nothing, saying so out loud, and being handed to the choir.

You are not outside the faith when you say the true thing. Psalm 88 was assigned to the chief musician with no correction attached, and it is the Holy Spirit who kept it in the book for a person who has been told their honesty is a symptom.

I want to name what happens to people around a prayer like this, because it is nearly always the same and it nearly always comes from kindness.

Somebody tells you to focus on the good. Somebody tells you what they have found helpful. Somebody says the thing about how God works everything together, and they are quoting Scripture, and they are not wrong about the verse, and the timing turns it into a door closing.

And after enough of that, most people learn to edit. They stop saying the sentence, not because it stopped being true, but because saying it costs a conversation.

You have been editing yourself for other people's comfort, and Psalm 88 was published unedited. The written word ends on the word darkness and nobody softened it in the compiling, and the same Spirit who allowed that ending is the reason the shaping of your own sentences is not required tonight.

Now, I want to be honest about what this psalm does not do, because pretending otherwise would be its own kind of dishonesty.

It does not say the man was answered. It does not tell us he got better. There is no appendix and no note in the margin. We do not know what happened to Heman the Ezrahite, and I am not going to invent an ending for him, because the passage does not give one and this is not a page where silence gets filled in.

What we do know is the psalm's own opening line, and it is easy to read past because it is the only cheerful thing in the whole song.

O LORD God of my salvation, I have cried day and night before thee.Psalm 88:1, King James Version

O LORD God of my salvation. That is how it opens. He does not stop calling God that. Eighteen verses of unrelieved darkness, and the address at the top of it is still God of my salvation.

You have kept an address on the top of the letter that the contents of the letter never contradicted. Psalm 88:1 names Him as salvation before the complaint begins, and it is His Spirit who holds those two facts together in one song without asking anybody to choose.

There is one more thing that changes how the whole psalm reads. Every accusation in it is made to God, not about Him. Thou hast laid me. Thou hast put away. Thy wrath lieth hard upon me. This man never once turns to a third party. He takes the whole of it directly to the only Person he thinks is responsible.

That is not the language of somebody who has left. That is the language of somebody who has nowhere else to go and has stopped pretending otherwise.

You are still in the room, and the shape of the complaining is the proof of it rather than the evidence against it. Psalm 88 is addressed to God in the second person from the first line to the last, and the same Spirit who preserved that address is the reason it counts as prayer.