The Bible Study Hour

Guest (Male): How long, how long? Psalm 13 opens with David feeling abandoned by man and God, wondering when God will remember him, turn to him, and rescue him. Today, on The Bible Study Hour with Dr. James Boice, we'll continue our study of the Psalms, learning how David moves beyond his circumstances to a quiet trust in God.

Guest (Male): Welcome to The Bible Study Hour, a radio and internet broadcast with Dr. James Boice, preparing you to think and act biblically. In Psalm 13, David cries out to God for favor and rescue. Listen along with us today to hear how David moves beyond his feelings and circumstances, using prayer to turn from hopelessness to peaceful praise. If you have your Bible, turn to Psalm 13, verses 1 through 6.

Dr. James Boice: We’re studying the Psalms together, as you know, and we come today now to Psalm 13, one of the great psalms. Indeed, they’re all great, but these psalms all speak to our hearts in a powerful way, and certainly this one does. Maybe you've noticed from your own study of the psalms that as we move through them, you often discover an intensifying of feeling or emotion as we move from one to the other.

We've seen that before earlier in the psalter; we’ll see it again. And we see it in a connection here between Psalm 12 and Psalm 13. In Psalm 12, David feels abandoned by men and women. He has looked around himself, hunting for the faithful or the godly, and he senses that he’s all alone. It's a little bit like Elijah out in the wilderness where he said, "I, even I only, am left, and now they're seeking even my life to take it away."

There, he’s abandoned by man. But then you move on to the 13th psalm, and in the 13th psalm, you find that feeling of abandonment intensified because here David is sensing abandonment not merely by other human beings, but by God himself. Is there anything that could possibly be worse than that, to feel abandoned by God? I hardly think so.

When Jonah was trying to run away from God, he thought being abandoned by God was what he wanted. He was trying to get away from God. God wanted him to do something, and he wanted God to take his hands off and leave him alone. But when God seemed to do that, allowed him to get on the ship and sail away to Tarshish and say to the people on the deck of the ship in the midst of the storm, "Throw me overboard, I'd rather die than go back to Nineveh and preach," and he was thrown overboard and was swallowed by the fish, and really for the first time in the story did indeed sense himself to be abandoned by God, he found he didn't like it one little bit.

As a matter of fact, he compared it to hell, to Sheol, and he said, "I cried out to you for deliverance from the very sides of the pit." Now, that's what many of us feel. And so when we come to a psalm like this that is speaking of this feeling, the depression that comes from feeling God has abandoned us, we are touching on something that comes very close to many hearts.

Let me say a few things about this sense of abandonment before we move on. The first is this: I sense from the many years now of counseling in my ministry that this feeling is far more common than most people let on. We don't often talk about it, but it nevertheless is there. One of the psychiatrists at Tenth Presbyterian Church has confirmed this as we've talked about this feeling. She says that she has found that to be true often in her counseling.

It comes from a variety of reasons. Sometimes it will come from a family situation: a person who as a child felt abandoned, perhaps by parents, a father leaving home or a mother abandoning him or her, now later in life feels that if the parent has abandoned them, well, God must have abandoned them too. Sometimes it comes about in the view of this psychiatrist through an unhealthy kind of gospel that we have in our age.

We call it the health and wealth gospel, that because you're a Christian, you're entitled to a perfect life and an abundance of possessions, and then because life isn't like that and illness does come and sometimes we lose the things we cherish, we say, "Well, God's abandoned me. I don't have these things anymore." At any rate, whatever the cause, it produces what my friend calls a sense of a deep chasm between the individual and God. I'm convinced that's very, very common. And even if all of us are not in that all the time, there are undoubtedly periods in our lives when we feel exactly that way.

And here's the second observation. When I began to study that subject and look for books that talk about that feeling of abandonment, I discovered very, very little material to read. Even D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones' great book on *Spiritual Depression: Its Causes and Cure*, which treats a number of the causes leading to a feeling of depression or abandonment, does not address the subject of abandonment directly, at least not in any place in the book that I can find.

Why do you suppose that is? Why do you suppose we don't address that subject directly? I think the answer is that we have been taught that that is not the way that we're to feel. We're to live a Christian life; obviously, we're to live what? You've heard the term: an abundant life. We're to be following Jesus, and if we follow Jesus, we're to be victorious. Well, if you're following Jesus and you ought to be victorious and nevertheless you don't feel victorious, well, you're not going to talk about that very much, and so we clam up at what I believe is one of the great problems of the Christian life, at least learning how to live it.

I want to suggest that this psalm should be an encouragement to us in that respect because whatever David may sense about this feeling of abandonment, the one thing we discover is that he does not keep quiet about it. David feels it and so he says it. To use Howard Cosell's famous phrase, he tells it like it is. When David feels abandoned, he says he feels abandoned. "How long, O Lord, will you forget me? How long will you hide your face from me? How long must I wrestle with my thoughts and every day have sorrow in my heart? How long will my enemy triumph over me?"

David isn't afraid to say it, and if he's not afraid to say it, we shouldn't be afraid to say it either. And moreover, because he works through this and we find progress as we make our way through the psalm, we should by studying his emotions and experience learn to cope with our own. Now there’s a three-part outline here, and it’s good to keep this in mind as we begin because I want to talk most about the reasons for this particular kind of depression, but I want you to see from the beginning that there is progression here as I’ve said.

The three parts of the psalm are these: there’s a first stanza in which David expresses his sense of abandonment and dejection. It’s the stanza I've just read. Then there’s a second stanza consisting of the next two verses. First stanza: verses 1 and 2, and then the second stanza contains verses 3 and 4. Here we have a prayer. And then finally we come to the third stanza, the last two verses of this six-verse psalm, and here you have an expression of a quiet trust in God.

In other words, you have a movement from the turmoil of the opening stanza to the quiet peace that we find at the end. And here's the critical thing: right in the middle, the very center of the psalm, stands the prayer. In other words, the prayer is the turning point, and it’s good to see that from the beginning. I want to show you something else just a little bit technical, though it's not all that technical.

The first stanza has five lines. Second stanza has four lines. The third stanza actually has three lines, though in the New International Version that last line is divided into two just to make it look like a proper stanza. You know, we always sing with four lines in our hymns, so you have to have four lines, but it's actually five, four, and three. And what that does stylistically in the form of the psalm is exactly the same thing we find in the content or teaching of the psalm.

The first stanza is filled with turmoil, and the lines come tumbling out in abundance; there are five of them. Then there's the prayer; it’s settling down; there are four. It’s very nicely balanced. And finally, you come to the end; there are three lines, and the mood of the psalm has calmed down. Franz Delitzsch, one of the great 19th-century commentators on the Psalms, wrote: "This song, as it were, casts up a constantly lessening series of waves until it becomes as still as the sea when smooth as a mirror and the only motion discernible at last is that of the joyous ripple of calm repose."

Now we want to learn from this and we want to learn above all about this feeling of abandonment. And so we turn to stanza one. What's the most noticeable thing about that stanza? I think you'll agree that the most noticeable feature of the stanza is the repetition of the chief words "how long." You find them four times. "How long, O Lord, will you forget me forever? How long will you hide your face from me? How long must I wrestle with my thoughts and how long will my enemy triumph over me?"

I think that’s important because I think what it’s saying to us is that a prolonged struggle is one cause of this feeling of abandonment. We don't feel that if we go through a short-term trial, generally speaking. We sometimes pray and we don't get an answer, or we go through something that's difficult and it doesn't trouble us very much. We say, "Well, God has his reasons. He knows what he's doing. I'll wait. Probably things will be better tomorrow morning."

But you see, if they're not better tomorrow morning or the morning after that or the morning after that, or the week after that or the month after that, if we're going through the same thing day after day and sometimes even year after year, that sort of thing begins to grind us down. And when David begins the psalm by saying "how long, how long, how long, how long," I think what he's indicating by the repetition is that a prolonged struggle is one of the causes for these distressed feelings.

Certainly David went through prolonged struggles. You can't read the story of his life, especially in the years before he became king, without realizing that was true. He was a hunted man, hounded from pillar to post, as we would say, by Saul, who was the king. Saul was out to kill him. David at times triumphed gloriously. You know those wonderful stories when God put Saul in his power and he refused to lift up his hand against the Lord's anointed.

Those are tremendous stories. They portray David as a giant in the faith. And yet as he was hounded about the countryside year after year, at times finding that he had to go to the Moabites to survive and then to the Philistines to survive, and he hid in the cave Adullam for a while, and from place to place he found himself say, you can read about it in his story, "one day Saul my enemy is going to get me and take away my life."

You see how it operates. One commentator says on this, when Job experienced the calamities that struck him all of a sudden, great as they were, it didn't trouble his faith. He said, "Naked came I forth from my mother's womb, naked will I go to the next life; blessed be the name of the Lord." But when the struggles were prolonged and they went on week after week and maybe month after month, in that long, long series of dialogues he has with his comforters, he began to get ground down.

Now, maybe you've experienced that. I would be very surprised if you have not. There's a second thing I see here that was a cause of this sense of being abandoned by God, and that is what I would call a lack of any more apparent blessing. It's in that phrase "how long will you hide your face from me?" To have the face of God turned toward us means that God is showing his favor upon us, he's blessing us. It's the way the line is used.

So if the face of God is turned away, it doesn't only mean that God is hidden, we can't see him, or that he's not speaking, because David has already said that in line one. It means that God has ceased to bless us, or at least we don't see the blessing. And that is a cause of these feelings also. Haven't you experienced that? Let me suggest some of the areas that you may have found that to be true.

You find it in family relationships for one thing. Sometimes a couple will come to a period in their marriage when the earlier joy of those first days of marriage seems to be gone and they're finding it hard to settle down and work through the kind of adjustments you have to make between two personalities. Or when difficulties of some other nature arise up in the marriage, and because things are difficult and the joy and the enthusiasm of that earlier day seem to be gone, they find themselves saying, "Has God abandoned me? Doesn't he bless our marriage anymore?"

Or you find it with children. It's easy to raise children, often, when they're young. Those who are just raising young children think it's hard, but when you get older and you look back, you see it was easy compared to what comes later. And the time comes along in the family when sometimes the children make difficulty for you. You have one that is particularly rebellious and obstructive and causes all sorts of problems in the family so that everybody is always in a stew all the time.

And Christian parents say, "What did I do wrong? What am I doing wrong? Has God simply removed his blessing from me? Has he abandoned our home?" Sometimes you feel it in your work. In the early days of your work, you may make great progress. You were the bright young man or the bright young woman of the company; they said, "You're just what we need, you need to move along here," you get your promotions, you do real well.

But now you get to that middle stage of your career and all those early successes of the early years seem to be behind you and now for a long time it seems like nothing particularly spectacular is happening. It’s settled down, it's humdrum, you're bottled up by those who are above you, you’re pushed by those who are below, and you say, "Is God abandoned me in my work? There are no blessings there anymore."

It happens in church work. Sometimes churches will thrive. You have great times of the moving of the Spirit; people are getting converted all the time, the churches fill up. And then the church plateaus and there’s no more growth, or doesn't seem to be. And you enter into a period not of reaping, which you had earlier, but the difficult task of breaking up new soil and planting seed and caring while you await the harvest. And you say, because you don't see the blessing, "Has God withdrawn his hand from the work?"

I suppose there are all sorts of areas in which we see that. But perhaps the most devastating of all is in our own spiritual lives, our own spiritual growth. In the same way, there may have been a period early in your life where you grew quickly. You came to love the scriptures; you saw things that you had never seen before and you were beginning to forge a whole new life.

And then suddenly you've settled down into what seems to be very, very humdrum Christian activity. And in that feeling of lack of blessing, you may look at your heart and say, "Whatever am I doing wrong?" You may even, sometimes it happens, begin to dredge up past sins and say to yourself, "Maybe it's those things that are catching up with me. I know at the time that I confessed it, I had forgiveness from God, but now I don't seem to have any blessing. Maybe God is digging it up again. Maybe he's put me on hold because of something I did way back there." And you say, "God has turned his face away from me. God isn't blessing anymore."

Well, there's another reason why sometimes we feel abandoned; David suggests that too. "How long must I wrestle with my thoughts and every day have sorrow in my heart?" I would call that troubling thoughts and uncontrollable emotions. Sometimes they gang up on us. The emotions take over, our thoughts are troubled by them, and we find that the one thing we should do, the one course we actually have, that is to settle our thoughts and begin to reflect on past blessings and the nature of God, that's the very thing that's swept away because our thoughts are so troubled we can't bring ourselves to concentrate on the spiritual exercise. And so that comes crashing in as well, and we find ourselves crying out like David.

I think that we should acknowledge at this point that some people are more inclined to this than others. There are different kinds of temperaments, you know. Some temperaments are naturally joyous, some temperaments are naturally morose. For some reason they often marry one another, and one of the great plagues of life is to wake in the morning in a morose spirit and be greeted with somebody who is joyous. It makes you want to strangle such a person.

My wife and I are fairly safe in that because both of us are morose in the morning. But you may know what I mean. Some people are just inclined this way. Knowing that you incline this way doesn't overcome the feelings, but it does help you put it in perspective. If you're a particularly melancholy person, it's helpful to know it because you can at least compensate. You can say, "I'm feeling this way, but I know I just naturally normally feel this way and I have to come to terms with it."

It’s also the case that physical factors sometimes enter in: just mere illness, for example. Charles Haddon Spurgeon was one of the greatest preachers of all time and certainly the greatest preacher in England in the 19th century. He was phenomenally effective as an evangelist. Literally thousands upon thousands of people were converted through his ministry. But Spurgeon was subjected to severe bouts of depression. What was the reason?

Well, one reason is that he suffered from gout. We don't hear about gout much today; occasionally you do, but it's a very painful thing and it produces uric acid in the blood and all sorts of things, and eventually he died from that affliction. So Spurgeon was physically ill, and it got his spirits down and he entered into these periods of depression. Works in other ways: a mother who is up half the night trying to take care of a colicky baby who is crying and can't get to sleep can be excused if the next morning, physically exhausted, she doesn't feel particularly close to God.

And sometimes it's just that we have such a physical letdown from some struggle that it's hard to be buoyant. You know Elijah there out under the juniper tree, having just had that great victory on Mount Carmel over the priests of Baal, found himself so down and exhausted from the experience that he said he'd rather die than live. "It's no good for me to go on living," he said to God, "take my life away, I'm no better than my fathers." He wasn't, of course, but all he really was was tired. What he needed was food and rest, and that's exactly what God gave him. God fed him and he gave him a period of rest, and after he had recovered a little bit, he sent him back into the battle.

But you see that's the way it works. There's one more cause here; don't miss it, it’s in the very last phrase: "how long will my enemy triumph over me?" Sometimes we experience depression and a sense of being abandoned with God just because our enemies are there and because they're so very, very forceful. Most of us don't have many enemies, at least not enemies that can do us serious harm in a physical sense. David did, of course.

Most of us don't have that experience, but you know there is one enemy that we all have that is terribly destructive: that enemy that Peter in his first letter compared to a roaring lion going about seeking whom he may devour, and that is Satan. And not only is Satan a great enemy bent on our destruction, he is an enemy who is very, very subtle and wise, and he's able to use all of these other things and work them against us.

If we're tired, he'll use that. If we've gone through a period of life where God has not moved in any spectacular way in our experience, he'll compare that with another period where there seemed to be greater blessing and he'll use that, and so on with all the other things that I have mentioned. We read all of these things, and perhaps at the end of it, we're ready to say, "Yes, those are exactly the things that I've experienced, and I have had emotional reactions exactly like those of King David."

Well, we come to the end of this psalm and we find there's quite a different mood. Very end of the psalm, we find David saying, "I trust in your unfailing love." That's quite different from what went before. We find him saying, "My heart rejoices in your salvation." That is very different from what went before. And we even find at the end that David looks forward to the day when he'll be singing, singing once again. He says, "I'm going to be singing to the Lord because he's been good to me," and what he's suggesting here is that he's going to be good to me again.

What makes the difference? I've already suggested it. It's what comes earlier in verses 3 and 4; you find a great prayer. There's a little verse I came across which really shows how prayer is the turning point, and it goes like this: "When all things seem against us to drive us to despair, we know one gate is open, one ear will hear our prayer." Let me suggest that every Christian knows that.

No matter how depressed you may be, no matter how acute this sense of abandonment may be, you really do know that God is there. And let me prove it in this way: if you didn't believe that God is there, you wouldn't feel abandoned because in order to be abandoned, there has to be somebody to do the abandoning. If you didn't believe that God was there, your feeling wouldn't be one of abandonment, you would just say, as the existentialists do, the atheistic existentialist: life is meaningless.

You'd say the only meaningful question in life is to be or not to be, shall I go on living or commit suicide? That would be a logical extension. But Christians don't think that way. They feel abandoned because of the very fact that God is there. And let me suggest something else: not only do you know that God is there, you know he's the same God he has always been, and when you really get down to thinking about it, you know that whatever the reasons for his silence may be or your lack of sense that he's there, he nevertheless is there and he is the same, and he is loving and faithful and wise and all the other things that you have always known him to be.

Look how David prays. He has three petitions. Number one: look on me. Number two: answer. And number three: give light to my eyes. If you look at those in the context of what he says in verses 1 and 2, you'll find that he's praying in exact conjunction with the problems he expressed earlier. You see, he thought that God had turned his face away, so now he says to God, "Look on me."

In other words, "Turn around and look at me again." He thought that God was silent, God wasn't speaking; he had in the past, he wasn't now. He says to God, "Answer me." In other words, "Answer the questions I've been raising." He felt so afflicted that as many commentators say, he probably felt that he was close to death, perhaps because of the evil of his enemies who, if they succeeded, would certainly take away his life. So what he prays to God is this: "Give light to my eyes," that is, "Restore my health both physically, mentally, and spiritually, or I will sleep in death."

What you have as he comes to the end of this is such blessing, such quiet peace, that he climbs out of the depression to the peace in God I mentioned earlier. One of the commentators says: "Faith here has climbed out of the lowest depths of despair where it had well-nigh perished into the full sunlight of godly hope." And now David waits for the help to come.

Let me close by pointing you to two scenes that we find later on in the Bible. Very end of the Bible, in the Book of Revelation, you find in the sixth chapter that the saints who have been martyred are there beneath the altar, that is in the very presence of God, and they're speaking to God and asking a question. And the question they ask him is the question of our psalm. They're saying to God, "How long, O Lord, how long?"

It's a very interesting thought, isn't it, to recognize now that even in heaven, with all of the turmoil of this life gone, the saints, those who have been martyred for their faith, are close to God, enjoying the full favor of his blessing, whose face certainly in that heavenly bliss is shining upon them, nevertheless are asking the same question: "How long, O Lord, how long?" Even in heaven the saints have the question because the final judgment has not come, all things are not resolved, evil still flourishes. And the question is a real one even then and even for them.

That's the first scene. And then the second scene is this: you go to the very end of the Book of Revelation to the very last chapter. There the same question is in view. But here you find the Lord Jesus Christ speaking. And the Lord Jesus Christ is saying to those who are waiting for his coming when all things will be resolved, "Yes, I am coming soon." And those who are there and have asked their question and have heard the answer give this response: they say, "Amen. Come, Lord Jesus."

If you're feeling a sense of abandonment and the oppression goes with it, I can't tell you when that feeling of oppression will be lifted. Sometimes it continues for a very long time. But it will be lifted. And when it is lifted, that veil of oppression drawn back, you will find behind the veil the Lord Jesus Christ, who has always been close to you and who cares for you and never more than when you feel he is not there.

Let us pray. Our Father, thank you for the teaching of your word, for the assurance of your presence, and for the blessing of believing prayer. We confess it may be true of many in an acute way in this moment that there are times when we pray and we don't seem to have an answer; that's one of the problems. We say to ourselves, "Where is God? I pray and his face is turned from me."

But nevertheless we pray. And the reason we pray is because we're your children, and in spite of it all, in spite of all those dark feelings and troubled thoughts, we know that you are there and we know that you are good and that you do care. So, our Father, give comfort with those thoughts and blessing and hasten the day when the veil of darkness will be drawn aside and that even greater day when our Lord Jesus Christ will return and we will see him face to face and be with him forever in his Father's house. Amen and amen.

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