When you feel forgotten by God
Psalm 13
The book from which I am about to read a couple of excerpts was given to me by a friend a few months after Becky, Aubrey, Sterling, Eli, and I lost our son and brother Zeke in a deadly accident. The title of the book is “A Grace Disguised,” and it’s author is Jerry Sittser, professor of religion at Whitworth College. In the pages of this book I’ve found the best and most honest description of what life was like for us in the days that followed Zeke’s death, as well as the journey we have been walking in the 11 years now since that day. In fact, when I am working in therapy with a client dealing with traumatic loss, I often give them this book.
In it, Jerry describes his own experience with deep and traumatic loss as he tells of the auto accident that stole the lives of his wife of twenty years Lynda, his four-year-old daughter Diana Jane, who was the third of four children, and his own mother Grace in one fell swoop. And as he plumbs the depths of the intellectual, emotional, physical, and theological aspects of deep, deep pain and loss, he writes these words:
“… I avoided even thinking about God’s sovereignty after the accident. The very idea that the God whom I had tried for so many years to trust and follow would allow or even cause such a tragedy was unthinkable to me – as repugnant to my religious sensibilities as the death of my loved ones had been to my human sensibilities. But over time I realized that the trajectory of my grief had set me on a collision course with God and that eventually I would have to wrestle with this most complex of issues.
I knew I had to make peace with God’s sovereignty, reject God altogether, or settle for a lesser God who lacked the power or desire to prevent the accident. My loss made God seem terrifying and inscrutable. For a long time I saw his sovereignty as a towering cliff in winter – icy, cold, and windswept. I stood in my misery at the base of this cliff and looked up at its forbidding, unscalable wall. I felt overwhelmed, intimidated, and crushed by its hugeness. There was nothing inviting or comforting about it. It loomed over me, completely oblivious to my presence and pain. I yelled at God to acknowledge my suffering and to take responsibility for it, but all I heard was the lonely echo of my own voice.”
What do we do when, by all accounts, God seems to have disappeared, slipped from our grasp, no tangible experience of his presence in our lives? What do we do when we find that we can no longer feel God’s touch? When we can no longer sense God’s blessing? When we no longer feel like we’re resting in God’s embrace? Have you ever felt abandoned by God? Have you ever gone through a time in your life when you thought that maybe, just possibly, you’d been forgotten by God? Are you there now, feeling lost and abandoned?
In this series of sermons from the early Psalms, a series called Life on the Ledge, many of the Psalms we’re focusing on are Psalms of Lament, biblical songs of desperation, fear, agony, and pain. The pain felt by children of God desperately trying to reconcile their beliefs about who God is and what God is doing in their lives with the reality of a lived experience that so often seems to involve pain and desperation and loss and struggle. Lives that swing back and forth between times of peace, joy, and blessing and times of sheer terror and agony, times when you feel like the rug has suddenly been pulled from beneath you, like you’ve been sucker punched by adversity you never saw coming. Of the 150 Psalms in the psalter, 68 of them, that’s 45%, almost half, are some kind of Psalm of Lament. No other category of psalm, not hymns or doxologies, not even the thanksgiving psalms covers as much of the psalter as do the psalms of lament. Blues. Pain. Struggle.
Yes, most of life’s days are rather ordinary, neither really good nor really bad. Nothing much of significance to report. Some days good, and some days bad, but all of these days pretty much ordinary. But there are those days … those days that we remember forever. Those days that must be described as either mountaintop experiences or passages through the valley of the shadow of death. Extreme days. The mountaintop days … perhaps the day you graduated, the day you looked into his eyes or her eyes and knew that you were looking at the love of your life, the days on which you met your children, adopted or biological, or perhaps your grandchildren, for the first time. Days when God’s presence and blessing is tangible.
And then there are those days that cast their terrible shadow over days, weeks, months, maybe even the rest of your life. Days on which your life changes forever whether you want it to or not. Days no human being would ever choose. The day he left, or she left. The day you got that call from the police, or heard the wail of the ambulance siren. The day you got that panicked call from a spouse, friend, or child. The day you heard those dreaded words leave a doctor’s mouth, “There is nothing more that we can do.” The day you heard the words “I don’t love you anymore” from someone who promised to love you forever. Dark days. Terrible days. Days on which you wonder where in the world God is. Days that turn to weeks, months, even years and leave you feeling abandoned by God, not just alone in this world but alone in the cosmos.
Israel’s warrior king, David, felt that way too. Look at v. 1. “How long, O LORD? Will you forget me forever? How long will you hide your face from me?” We have no idea what David is going through here. Could be that he’s fleeing from Saul, or from his son Absalom … running for his life. Could be that he’s facing a serious illness. Either way, it seems apparent that he’s staring death in the face, or at least it feels like it. In v. 3 he cries out “light up my eyes, lest I sleep the sleep of death.” Show yourself God, I’m about to die here. He feels abandoned. Not by his friends. Not by other people. He feels abandoned by God.
Now look, look at v. 2. “How long,” “How 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?” The distress David is going through has impacted every area of his life.
Take counsel in my soul. His inner thoughts. His fear, his anxiety is torturing his mind with painful questions. What if there really is no God? What if there is a God, but he’s angry with me and won’t help me? What if I’ve blown it and God is getting me? The anguished questioning of a tortured soul who’s mind won’t turn off. What if … the questioning in your mind never stops. The word we translate as “counsel” here contains within it the sense of revolt or rebellion. The scheming and planning of an enemy. His mind is running on overdrive trying to make some sense of what he is going through and it’s almost as if his mind is rebelling against him, turning against him, driving him to the edge. “How long” he cries out, “must I endure this torment in my mind?”
And sorrow in my heart. Deep, agonizing grief. That’s the picture here. Unrelenting, overwhelming sadness. And notice the seat of this unrelenting emotional pain. The heart. Remember the Hebrew concept of the heart. The center of my being. The most important part of who I am. That part of me out of which grows all of my personality, all of my expression, my voice, my thoughts, my feelings, my true self. Like a tidal wave this agonizing, unrelenting grief is overwhelming every part of him, influencing every part of him. This is the picture of a soul in torment, and the torment grows not so much from whatever he is facing, and although it appears in human form as “enemy” in v. 4, it could be either an adversary or adversity. Injury, disease, life circumstance can all be an enemy just as much as another person. His soul is in torment not so much because of the circumstance alone as it is by his sense that he has been abandoned, forgotten, by God.
Aren’t you glad you rolled out of bed and came to church today? I mean, doesn’t this just make you feel good? To know that David was in so much torment? Don’t you just want to jump out of your seat and yell “amen!” No? Nobody? Well maybe later.
Now, I want you to notice something here, something you may have missed. Who is David talking to here? His buddy? One of his generals or perhaps a trusted advisor? No. He’s talking to God, as if God were right there. But I thought you said he felt abandoned by God Jeff. He does. He makes that pretty clear. How long … how long … how long … how long. If this worship song had a title, it would be “How Long.?” Four times he cries out how long. He has no idea if anyone is listening. For all he knows, and his overactive mind is coming up will all sorts of explanations, God has turned his back on him. But notice that he doesn’t confess any sin here. In the 51st Psalm David does. David always repents when he becomes aware of the depth of his sinfulness, but that isn’t the sense here. There is no indication at all that anything wrong has been done.
Boy, that’s a common attitude in the church though. We have this sense that if things are getting rough, even dire, that we must have blown it somehow. Surely being right with God and in the center of his will, or at least somewhere close to the general direction of his will, can’t be so hard. Right? If you pray before you make any business decision or any personal decision things will always go well. Bull. Well suffering surely can’t be God’s will can it? Mental and emotional anguish?
I don’t know, ask Jesus, hanging on the cross, quoting from Psalm 22 as he cries out “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” (Ps. 22:1). Ask Paul. “Five times I received at the hands of the Jews the forty lashes less one. Three times I was beaten with rods. Once I was stoned. Three times I was shipwrecked; a night and a day I was adrift at sea; on frequent journeys, in danger from rivers, danger from robbers, danger from my own people, danger from Gentiles, danger in the city, danger in the wilderness, danger at sea, danger from false brothers; in toil and hardship, through many a sleepless night, in hunger and thirst, often without food, in cold and exposure. And, apart from other things, there is the daily pressure on me of my anxiety for all the churches” (2 Cor. 11:24-28).
Now come on! I know that David’s own heartache didn’t excite anyone but this? Doesn’t this just bless you? Make you want to jump up and shout “amen!” Who’s ready to sign up? Well I’ve got news for you. If you’re here and you’re a disciple of Jesus, you already have! You think Paul and Jesus are extreme examples? Listen to how the writer of Hebrews describes countless thousands of others whose names never appear in Scripture: “Others suffered mocking and flogging, and even chains and imprisonment. They were stoned, they were sawn in two, they were killed with the sword. They went about in skins of sheep and goats, destitute, afflicted, mistreated …”
Now listen to what Hebrews says next, “… of whom the world was not worthy …” (Heb. 11:36-38).
Did all of these people mishear God? Would life have gone better for them had they prayed better? Lived better? No! They went where they were sent and the shone the light of Christ so brightly as they struggled, as they despaired, as they bled and died, that God himself says “the world wasn’t worthy of them.” Friends, difficulty, adversity and adversaries, stress and distress are not the mark of unfaithful lives. They’re the mark of faithful lives. And the experience of feeling abandoned by God is real, and it’s painful.
So David feels forgotten by God, abandoned and alone. But he’s still talking to God, and having offered his protest, he makes his petition. He still believes that the lives of those who belong to God matter to God. Look at Vv. 3-4. Now there’s something important here that we need to understand. Do you see the word LORD there? See how it is printed? It is printed in all caps, right? But in your Bible, the O, R, And D are in small caps. That’s not a typo. Not a mistake. That’s very intentional. See, wherever the word Lord appears in the Bible spelled like we would expect, with the last three letters lower case, it’s usually a translation of the word “Adonai,” which emphasized the lordship of God.
When LORD appears in all caps, the Hebrew personal name of God, which we would pronounce Yahweh, is behind it. It comes from Exodus 3, when Moses is arguing with God about his own calling to lead Israel out of Egypt and in desperation he asks, “Well who am I supposed to say is sending me?” and God answers, “I am that I am, so say to the Israelites ‘I am has sent me to you.’” But that would be a little awkward to say and Moses has already made it clear to God that he isn’t a very good speaker, so God modifies it slightly and says to Moses, “Tell them that ‘He is’ has sent you.” This third person form of the Hebrew word for “to be” becomes Yahweh.
Now a good Jew, a good Israelite like David would never say that name for fear of breaking the commandment about taking the name of God in vain. But that’s the word that appears here in writing. Yahweh. The one who is. And the significance of the name is really the One who was, who is, and who will always be. And then again in v. 3, he says “Consider and answer me, O LORD my God …” again in all caps. Yahweh, the one who was, who is, and who will always be, is MY God. I belong to him. I am still his child and my life matters to him. He knew that he was a descendent of Abraham and therefore a recipient of the grace and blessing of God through God’s covenant with Abraham, just as we know that in Christ we are forgiven children of God and are hidden with Christ in God.
And so here we have the great paradox. That we are, at one and the same time, both anxious, fearful, dying historical people who cannot find God where we want him to be; AND also mortals who stand on earth and speak to God, who is ours but is never owned, and because of that we are filled with hope and trust even as we cry out TO GOD in anguish, feeling as if we have been cut off and are being ignored, forgotten by God. And what is it about God that gives us confidence that even when we feel forgotten, he is right there with us as OUR God?
David tells us. Look at verse 5. God’s steadfast love. When we think about God’s love, we usually think of it as a rather extreme, perfect, amped up version of human love, don’t we. But God’s love isn’t like human love. It is in a wholly different category and as hard as we might try, we can never really fully understand it. Gaze at the cradle in the barn on a back street in Bethlehem and Calvary’s cross on Golgotha long enough and you’ll get an inkling, but not full understanding. I’m not sure that any of us can every really fully comprehend God’s love. But David draws our attention to God’s “steadfast love,” and the word that’s translated there as steadfast love is the Hebrew word “hesed.” And hesed has two qualities that we don’t often associate with love. One is loyalty, and the other is endurance. Hesed is God’s enduring allegiance to you and to I. Far beyond the enduring allegiance to Detroit Lions fans around the globe. Do you remember the 0-16 season? I mean, who sticks with a team through that?
But God’s enduring loyalty and allegiance to you and I is wholly other, just as God is wholly other, it is a love that is in a completely different category, and when that word “hesed” is used, usually translated as “steadfast love” or “enduring love,” the picture that is painted is one of God holding on to you and I even though we no longer have the strength to hold on to him. In Christ he has attached himself to us and in Christ he will not let go. Martin Luther the great reformer said it this way, “Hope despairs, and yet despair hopes at the same time; and all that lives is the ‘groaning that cannot be uttered wherewith the Holy Spirit makes intercession for us, brooding over the waters shrouded in darkness … this no one understands who has not tasted it.”
Hope despairs, and yet … despair hopes at the same time. I love that! So cry out. David doesn’t suffer silently here. He thinks he’s been forgotten but he talks to God anyway. Job lost everything, his riches, his property, his children, the respect of his wife, his health, and his status, but he did not suffer in silence. He too cried out. And as God did with David, so God did with Job … he answered. But not with the reason for the suffering. Not with the meaning behind it. He answered for David, and he answered for Job, and he’ll answer for you and me too, not necessarily with understanding and insight, there’s no promise anywhere that we’ll understand everything, even on the other side of death,; no, not with understanding and insight, but with his presence.
Two cries from one heart for the dearly loved, unforgotten child of God … desperate, anxious, and fearful, and at the same time daring to trust and hope, and so crying out in protest, daring to believe that God still hears, and moving to petition, and then turning to praise. Protest, petition, and praise. So may we. Let us pray.
