- Read Psalm 143 from the ESV.
- Read my Psalm 143 poem from A New Song.
There are most likely times in everyone’s life when the night can’t seem to get any darker. The sun has long gone, the moon is eclipsed, and the stars are covered with a thick murky layer of clouds. Even the city lights have been extinguished by distance or fog and you find yourself standing in the darkest night you’ve ever experienced. You lift your hands to your face and can’t even see your fingers move in the thick night air. Sounds, which during that day would pass unnoticed, now scream terror in your ears. And new sounds, the low growls of wolves or coyotes seeking helpless prey, fill the air around you. Nothing about this experience provides any hint of the coming dawn of a new day. You are lost and frightened, yet in this state of fear and trembling, overcome by the surrounding darkness you find one thing which you can hold onto that will help you endure the night.
I’ve had a few times in life where I felt suffocated, isolated, and forgotten by everyone and everything I’ve ever held dear. God seems to have turned his back on me, preachers and religious books feel empty, even the few words of consolation my friends are able to offer never seem to reach me. Sometimes I’ve looked at other things for help such as positive self-help books, TEDs talks, and even distractions like movies, work, reading, or any other sort of diversion. But regardless of what I try, I’ve felt lost in a fog of despair wondering if it will ever lift. In that fog, I often hear sounds and voices which trouble me causing me to seek a safe hole in which to hide. And in my darkest of times it felt much like Narnia under the White Witch where it is always winter but never Christmas. I am lost and frightened in a seemingly endless night, yet in those times, if I listen carefully I can hear a small voice telling me that there is a way out of the darkness – there is something which can help me endure the night.
David writes Psalm 143 as a call to God during such a time of darkness. He longs for God to hear his prayer and to rescue him from the enemy which surrounds him. (1) The enemy has crushed him to the ground and left him for dead in the darkness. (3) David’s spirit, will, and soul grows faint within him and his heart is filled with dismay and despair. (4) His soul is suffocating under dark oppression and calls out to God – the very God who seems to have hidden his face from him. (7) David, blind with despair, reaches out in the darkness and is found by the only thing that can calm his soul and give him the strength to endure his present darkness. David is found by hope.
I say that David is found by hope because left on his own, he would never find hope; none of us would. Left alone in the darkness all we can do is scramble about, reaching and flailing, but we will never grasp anything solid. Not only does the darkness hide everything, but as it settles like a dense cloud everything becomes impossible to hold onto. I might even suggest that in the darkness, everything upon which we have held in the past is finally revealed to be what it truly is – a flimsy illusion unable to provide an anchor of strength. Hope, true hope, has to find us. For many of us, this means we have to be brought low in the darkness of sin, failure, or tragedy before we realize that our reach is never enough, and the objects onto which we have grasped in the past are merely shadows, disintegrating upon our first touch. Only when we finally give up placing our hope in such things will true hope descend upon us. In David’s darkest of time, he knows there is a morning that brings with it God’s unfailing love. (8) David’s true hope is in the coming of God’s light and so he, even while in the midst of darkness, praises God (see Psalm 134)
Psalm 143 records the final dark moment in the whole book of Psalms. And yet, in its darkness Psalm 143 shines out to us as a beacon of light. Read on its own, Psalm 143 tells us to place our hope in God while the world around us falls apart and seeks our destruction because it is in God that our only hope is found. And when Psalm 143 is read as one of the final scenes in the complete story of the book of Psalms it tells us that after we have tried everything and found ourselves in a dark place, walking with God is the only true option.
None of this means that we will never again have a dark day or time in our life after we give ourselves over to God’s loving reach of hope. In fact, during each new wave of darkness, we will have to make the choice anew to reach for him. We have to choose to let his hand of hope and unfailing love sustain us as we await his coming dawn which will dispel all darkness and eventually bring us out of trouble and into his light forever.
