Tim Clark’s Blog

Psalm 13—For the director of music: A Psalm of David

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 every day have sorrow in my heart? How long will my enemy triumph over me? Look on me, and answer, O LORD my God. Give light to my eyes, or I will sleep in death; my enemy will say, “I have overcome him,” and my foes will rejoice when I fall. But I trust in your unfailing love; my heart rejoices in your salvation. I will sing to the LORD, for he has been good to me.

2009 was a bit of a tough year for me personally; and no, it wasn’t because I turned 40 (I was OK with that, really). It was just one of those seasons when everything sort-of went sideways. Perhaps you’ve had one of those years before: Maybe someone that you deeply love gets pretty sick; a job in which you are invested comes to an abrupt end; a dream that is long-held gets crushed; a relationship with a person you love is destroyed; some doors that seem wide open are slammed right before you walk through them; people who used to express a high opinion of you stop returning your emails and calls so quickly, or at all. I’m not saying those all reflect my life (though some certainly do), but it was the kind of year where surprises—and not the fun kind—met me around every corner. 

So often when you have a year like that you are thrilled to leave it behind and jump into the next one. January 1 comes and you hope for redemption; you can just smell it just around the corner. But when you hit mid-February and everything keeps rolling along like the New Year never happened, and you start getting even more tough news, discouragement can set in. I think a person can put up with just about anything for a year, but when year 2 or 3 kicks in, so can despair.

In Psalm 13 we find David, experiencing these kinds of emotions. Nobody knows exactly where he was when he wrote this lament, but I imagine he was on the run from Saul, leading a motley group of warriors who were tired of living in the desert, and who were just itching to take matters into their own hands. This David who had a great assignment as a general in Israel’s army, family position by virtue of marriage to the king’s daughter, and a bright future as the secretly anointed monarch, was now persona-non-grata among anyone who mattered during that time.

I like the way the Message paraphrases David’s opening thoughts: “Long enough, God—You’ve ignored me long enough.” Have you ever felt this way? You are not quite ready to identify with Job, but you can cry out with David, “Long enough, O LORD, will you forget me forever?” It’s when your prayers aren’t much more than utterances of questions, confusion and pain that you can understand what David must have been feeling here.

But I love the way he ends his Psalm: There’s hope! This isn’t empty hope either, but a rock-solid-trust in who he knows the Lord is. Though his emotions and circumstances tell him he’s been abandoned by God (and everyone else), David knows better. His God is the God of unfailing love and salvation. The LORD has been good to David, and He’s been good to us, too. Worship, and yes, even rejoicing, is a great, and appropriate response to a world that’s been rocked, because only He knows how it’s all going to turn out in the end.