Some Nights Are Very Dark

You probably all heard the expression dark nights, times of trial, tribulation, suffering, emptiness, doubt that assails us for different reasons at different times.

Some dark nights are very dark indeed.

And one of those very dark, dark nights is described in really agonizing images in Psalm 88.

Lord, my God, I call for help by day.

I cry at night before you.

Let my prayer come into your presence.

Oh, turn your ear to my cry.

For my soul is filled with evils.

This is probably referring to tribulation in the soul.

Another translation, the RSV translation says, my soul is filled with troubles.

I'm troubled by what's happening in my life.

My soul is filled with them.

My life is on the brink of the grave.

I am reckoned as one in the tomb.

I have reached the end of my strength.

People are treating me like I'm dead already, that my life is finished, that I'm a cast off.

like one alone among the dead.

Loneliness, isolation, like those you remember no more.

Cut off from God.

Does God even know I exist? Is there a God? Cut off as they are from your hand.

You have laid me in the depths of the tomb, in places that are dark, in the depths of Your anger weighs down upon me.

I am drowned beneath your waves.

So there's an aspect here where the person who's suffering, the person who's writing this psalm, maybe King David, feels like they're being punished in some way, that this suffering has come from the Lord.

You have taken away my friends and made me hateful in their sight.

This is a reference to, for a long while, the understanding of what happens after death was very, very unclear amongst God's people.