Psalm 13

 

0 To the leader. A Psalm of David.

1 How long, O LORD?

Will you forget me forever?

How long will you hide your face from me?

2    How long must I bear pain in my soul,

and have sorrow in my heart all day long?

How long shall my enemy be exalted over me?  

3 Consider and answer me, O LORD my God!

Give light to my eyes,

or I will sleep the sleep of death,

4 and my enemy will say, “I have prevailed”;

my foes will rejoice because I am shaken.  

5 But I trusted in your steadfast love;

my heart shall rejoice in your salvation.

6 I will sing to the LORD,

because he has dealt bountifully with me.  

 

The first thing that I want us to look at is the Psalm’s title.

“To the leader.”

This word [נָצַח] comes from a Hebrew word that means “overseer” or “director”. It could be used for an overseer of the temple’s construction, but here most probably refers to the leader of the temple or tabernacle choir.

A Psalm of David.

This is more difficult, because the term itself [לְדָוִֽד] could mean:

  • “For David” (that is, written for him by someone else).
  • “To David” (that is, dedicated to him).
  • “Belonging to David”, either his possession, or being part of a book entitled “David”.
  • And, of course, it could mean written by David himself.

It could mean any of those things, and scholars debate over the exact meaning. However, the titles were included long after the psalms were written, and there is uncertainty as to exactly what they mean.

And, irrespective of who wrote it, or when they wrote it, I think that Psalm 13 is a Psalm that all of us can relate to at one time or other in our lives, for I am sure that we have all felt the same way this person did at one time or another. We have all had the feeling that God was doing nothing to help us in our problems.

  • Life is hard – so we pray – but there is no answer.
  • We are going through struggles, trials, persecutions – so we pray – and nothing changes.

And so we question God, “Why?” Or, as the Psalm writer puts it, “how long”?

So what does he say?

The first thing that he says is “How Long” [עַד־אָ֣נָה]. In fact, he uses this phrase four different times in the first two verses. This phrase literally means, “until where”. That is, until which point in the timeline of my life will this situation end”.

This phrase implies that something has been going on for a long time, and the writer is wondering when it will end.

Jeremiah 47:6       Ah, sword of the LORD!

               How long until you are quiet?

      Put yourself into your scabbard,

               rest and be still!

Habakkuk 1:2     O LORD, how long shall I cry for help,

               and you will not listen?

      Or cry to you “Violence!”

               and you will not save?

But notice to whom he addresses this question. It isn’t to his “enemies”, whoever they happen to be. It isn’t as if he is asking them how long they will abuse and persecute him, or how long they will make his life a misery.

He addresses this question to “The Lord”, that is, to God. In other words, he knows that God has the power to stop this. The power to give him victory and peace, and yet God has done nothing to help him.

As Habakkuk 1:2 said:

O LORD, how long shall I cry for help,

  and you will not listen?

Or cry to you “Violence!”

  and you will not save?

In other words, God is being called upon to act, but as far as Habakkuk is concerned, just like the author of Psalm 13 is concerned, God has neither heard or acted.

And from the way he says it, it is clear that Habakkuk has been calling out to God for a long time, and yet God has (in Habakkuk’s opinion), God has done nothing.

God hasn’t heard his cries

God hasn’t saved; he hasn’t delivered.

Now they both know that God is the only one who can act, the only one who can save, and so they cry out to God to act and save. But for all of their prayers, all of their petitions, all of their crying out to God day after day, nothing seems to be happening. For all appearances, God is ignoring him, and so he cries out “How Long! When will you finally do something about my situation?”

Has your prayer life ever seemed like that? You pray, you cry out, you weep, you “whatever”, and nothing seems to happen? God doesn’t seem to listen or answer?

And notice the terms that he uses to talk about God’s “non-answer”:

  • How long will you forget me?
  • How long will you hide your face from me?

From this cry of anguish, not only does it appear as if God isn’t there, God isn’t helping; it also appears as if God has totally forgotten about him. It appears as if God has turned his back on him. And as he prays, he is wondering just how long it will be until God remembers, until God turns, and until God acts.

And we need to be honest, this individual was suffering greatly.

  • He knew that if God didn’t step in, then he would die.
  • He knew that he was in great physical and emotional pain.
  • He knew that his enemies were “winning”, and that he was losing, in fact, he knew that he was at the point of being totally defeated.
  • He knew that if God didn’t step in, then his enemies, his foes, would claim that they had defeated him (and thereby defeated God). They would rejoice that he had gone, and was going through all of this trouble. And his enemies would rejoice that there had been no way out.

Of course, we don’t know exactly what the trouble may have been.

If this Psalm was written by David, then it could have been foreign kings conspiring against him. For that matter, the enemy may even have been his own son Absalom during this son’s rebellion, a time that David had to flee for his life from Jerusalem.

If this Psalm was written by someone else it could be any of a million things, and we can perhaps think of situations in our own lives where we could just as easily have prayed these words ourselves.

And so he comes and prays in verse three that God would “consider him”. This word, however [נָבַט], has the idea of “to look at someone”. To focus your attention on someone, to show regard to someone.

Now remember, he had already said that he felt that God had “hidden his face” from him, so now he asks God to stop hiding, and to look and see the misery that he is going through, so that when God sees his situation, he would take pity on him and help him.

After all, if God’s face is “hidden”, then God can’t see, and so he asks God to remove whatever has prevented God from seeing what he is going through, and to take notice of him.

He also asks God to “answer him”. He has cried out to God for a long time and heard nothing. He now asks God for his answer. He asks God to do something, to say something so that he would know that God has heard his cry, and was coming to his aid.

But verses five and six are really interesting. You would get the idea from the first four verses that this person was on the verge of losing his faith and turning his back on God. After all, he sort of felt that God had turned his back on him, was ignoring him, and rejecting him, so (humanly speaking), it would only be natural for this person to turn his back on God as well.

But what does he say?

5 But I trusted in your steadfast love;

my heart shall rejoice in your salvation.

6 I will sing to the LORD,

because he has dealt bountifully with me.  

And in this he does two things.

First, he looks back to his past life and sees two things.

He sees the fact that he has always trusted in God’s steadfast love, [חֶ֫סֶד]. In other words, in the past, now matter what had been going on, he had trusted God. Good times. Bad times. And in all those times in between, he had trusted God, and God had never once let him down. Therefore, in this bad, difficult, frightening, and uncertain time, he was going to keep on trusting God.

That is, his faith in God was going to sustain him in his difficulties until he sees the answer that God gives.

And, secondly, he looked back at his past life and realised just how God had looked after him, blessed him, provided for him, and delivered him in whatever situation he happened to be in in the past.

And these two things together, his previous life of faith, and God’s ongoing faithfulness, prompted his next response.

Sort of like the song, “Count your many blessings and see what God has done”.

And what was that response?

First, he was going to rejoice in God’s salvation. Now, of course, he hasn’t seen that salvation yet, but he knew that it was coming because he knew that God was always faithful, and God would enable him, and deliver him from his current struggles.

And, second, he was going to sing God’s praise. He was going to praise God, because – even though he has not yet seen what God was going to do, he knew that God was going to do something, and so right there, in the middle of it all, he was going to sing to God, and rejoice in God.

Do you remember in Acts 16 when Paul and Silas had been thrown in prison in Philippi? What did they do?

Acts 16:25 About midnight Paul and Silas were praying and singing hymns to God, and the prisoners were listening to them.

They were sitting in the prison, their feet in stocks, not knowing what was going to happen next – and they praised God.

But had God delivered them? Had God rescued them?

No. However, just like in Psalm 13, they may have looked at God’s faithfulness in the past, and they may have remembered how they had trusted God through thick and thin, and so they gave him praise.

They gave him praise not knowing what was going to happen next, for whatever happened next wasn’t really important, for what was important is their own on going faith in, and faithfulness to, the God who saves.

Which, of course, is the same challenge for us when things don’t seem to be going our way.

Life is hard.

It is challenging.

And life rarely goes the way that we want it to.

But what we do when life is hard, challenging, and not going our way is all important.

Will we continue to trust God, even when we can’t imagine what God is doing, or how God is going to respond to our struggles?

Will we trust God when times are hard and there appears to be no way out?

Will we trust God when it appears that God isn’t paying the least bit of attention to us?

And will we continue to praise God for who he is, and what he has done?

That is the conclusion that Habakkuk had to come to as well. What if God doesn’t answer? Or, more correctly for Habakkuk, what if God answers in a way that I don’t expect him to, or in a way that I don’t like? What will I do then?

And what did Habakkuk say?

Though the fig tree does not blossom,

               and no fruit is on the vines;

      though the produce of the olive fails

               and the fields yield no food;

      though the flock is cut off from the fold

               and there is no herd in the stalls,

yet I will rejoice in the LORD;

               I will exult in the God of my salvation.

GOD, the Lord, is my strength.[1]

 

[1] Habakkuk 3:17-19a