Well, please turn with me in your Bibles, if you have one with you, to the 88th Psalm. Psalm 88. Just allow me for a moment to say what a privilege I always counted to be invited to minister God's word here in Covenant. It's kind of you to again and again invite me back. It must be the accent. I'm told that a Scottish accent is worth in some places another $10,000 a year. So Peter, you need to cultivate a Scottish accent, and maybe the elders will increase your stipend. But it is a privilege to be here. We read in the 88 Psalm, but as we do, let me just set something of a context for you. Psalm 88 is about a man called Haman, the Ezraite. But it's ultimately about the man, Jesus Christ. This man, Haman, we know reasonably certainly from 1 Chronicles 6, was one of the temple singers, a man involved in, no doubt, composing and ministering to the people of God through the words of God. But we know from the words of our Lord Jesus that all the scriptures speak of him. He is the prototypical man of faith. He is the perfect prophet. He is the perfect priest. He is the perfect king. He is the one in whom all the lines of biblical truth find their ultimate eschatological fulfillment. So as we read this 88 Psalm, which is commonly considered to be the darkest psalm in the Psalter, but I don't particularly myself like that appellation. I want you to be thinking, this is my Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ. Psalm 88, a song, a psalm of Korah, the sons of Korah. to the choir master, according to Mahalath-Leanoth, a mascot of Haman, the Ezraite. O Lord, God of my salvation, I cry out day and night before you. Let my prayer come before you. Incline your ear to my cry. For my soul is full of troubles, and my life draws near to shed all. I am counted among those who go down to the pit. I am a man who has no strength, like one set loose among the dead, like the slain that lie in the grave, like those whom you remember no more, for they are cut off from your hand. You have put me in the depths of the pit, in the region's dark and deep. Your wrath lies heavy upon me and you overwhelm me with all your waves, Selah. You have caused my companions to shun me. You have made me a horror or an abomination to them. I am shut in so that I cannot escape. My eyes grow dim through sorrow. Every day I call upon you, O Lord. I spread out my hands to you. Do you work wonders for the dead? Do the departed rise up to praise you? Is your steadfast love declared in the grave or your faithfulness in Abaddon? Are your wonders known in the darkness or your righteousness in the land of forgetfulness? But I, O Lord, cry to you. In the morning, my prayer comes before you. O Lord, why do you cast my soul away? Why do you hide your face from me? Afflicted and close to death from my youth up, I suffer your terrors, I am helpless. Your wrath has swept over me. Your dreadful assaults destroy me. They surround me like a flood all day long. They close in on me together. You have caused my beloved and my friend to shun me. My companions have become darkness. So reads the true and living word of God. Let us pray. We come, Lord, that together we might sit under the ministry of your Word. We pray for the quickening ministry of the Holy Spirit. May he quicken the preaching of your Word. May he quicken the hearing of your Word. May it dwell richly within us. May it correct us, humble us, lift us high, and send us on our way rejoicing. And we ask it in our Savior Jesus Christ's name. Amen. Well, if you have a Bible with you, you'll find it helpful, I think, to follow with me as we reflect together on what must be one of the most remarkable portions of the Word of God. I wonder if, like me, you often find yourself deeply unsettled when you read the Bible. There is an unsettling honesty about the Word of God. not least as it seeks to delineate for us the outline and the character of the life of faith. Sometimes we find ourselves surprised. Sometimes we find ourselves perplexed. Sometimes we find ourselves rendered speechless. Maybe you are very different from me, but I find the Bible deeply unsettling. This 88th Psalm, as you will have seen, is very markedly a psalm of lament. It's striking that 59 of the 150 Psalms are songs of lament, and in a number of the other Psalms, elements of lament can be seen in them. And I wonder if that surprises you. If this was in measure, although I think only in measure, the songbook of the people of God in the Old Covenant, Why were so many of their songs laments? Why so many in the minor key? Now, of course, there are psalms that are exhilarating, that leave you just rejoicing, almost dancing with delight. But why so many laments? Why do you think? I think the answer is actually very obvious. The answer is because the life of faith is lived out in a fallen, anti-Christ world, opposed by the devil, and in constant tension with remaining or indwelling sin. How often have you said, as I have said, the good that I would, I do not. The evil that I would not, that's what I do. Oh, wretched man that I am. I actually heard of a selection of Psalms. There were many of them, but the 88th Psalm was conspicuous by its absence. But if we didn't have the songs of lament, and if we didn't have this 88th Psalm, what are miserable Christians to sing? What are Christians to sing for whom life is hard, unremittingly bleak and hard and forbidding? What are Christians to sing whose hope is in God, but for whom life is one succession of trials and troubles and difficulties and overwhelming providences. That's one reason why our Lord Jesus Christ was always calling would-be disciples to count the costs. He wanted would-be disciples to understand that belonging to Him would be very far from being a bed of roses belonging to Him, would introduce them to a life of conflict, to a life of trouble, to a life of trial. Unless you take up your cross daily and follow Me, you cannot be My disciple. Jesus never wearied of impressing on would-be disciples the costs, of authentic discipleship. Now granted, this 88th Psalm is an extreme song of lament. Look how it ends. My companions have become darkness. Almost all the other laments end with a ray of hope. There's almost always something there to buoy up your spirits, but not this Psalm. The last word, darkness. No upbeat ending, no spark of hope, just darkness. Now granted, this is one man's experience, but it belongs to the congregational songbook of the church. And we need to then ask ourselves, why? Why? We're told it was composed by this individual, Haman the Ezraite. 1 Chronicles 6, verse 33 tells us that he was one of the temple singers, a composer. We're not told in so many words the nature of the distress that has overwhelmed him. It's quite possible, although it's difficult and I think impossible to be absolutely sure, that when we read that it's according to Mahalath Le'anoth Amaskil of Haman the Ezraite, that Amaskil was something that you were to reflect on, that here is a reflection that is ministering instruction to the people of God in a time of overwhelming need. And there's a generality about it. We're not told the precise nature of the overwhelming calamity that has brought this man to the utter depths of near despair. And perhaps there's a good reason for that, because if, for example, we were told it was because it was leprosy, We might think, well, I don't have leprosy, so this doesn't really apply to me. Often in Scripture, there is a generality to God's revelation, so that we do not neatly place it to the side and say, well, that circumstance is not my circumstance. We don't know exactly, as I said, who this hayman was. We have nothing biographical of any substance to say about him. We don't know the nature of his mental, physical, spiritual suffering, because it was a concatenation of all of those. What we do know is this. He was a man in utter extremis. He had reached the end of his tether. But when you reach the end of your tether, you need ever by God's grace to remember this, there is someone at the other end of your tether. Samuel Rutherford once wrote, my life hangs by a thread, but blessed be God of his spinning, of his spinning. That's why the opening words of the psalm are so significant. Oh Lord, God of my salvation. And it's those words that cast something of even an illumination over the unremitting bleakness that will follow on, leading him at the end of the psalm simply to say, my companions have become darkness. So here is a man whose soul is in unrelieved turmoil. Verses 16 and 17, every moment of every day, he is bereft. Your wrath has swept over me. Your dreadful assaults destroy me. They surround me like a flood all day long. It's not that there are punctuations and seasons. All of his life is enshrouded with a sense of the heavy hand of God's wrath resting upon him. It reminds you of Psalm 42 and 43. All your waves and billows have swept over me or engulfed me, overwhelmed me. Here is a man And it seems to him that God has abandoned him. My only companion. His darkness. Everywhere he looks, it seems that his God, now notice this, the God of his salvation, not some deity far off, hidden in the heavens, but Yahweh. Yahweh, the God of his salvation. The God who with a mighty arm redeemed him. The God who, in fulfillment of His covenant promise, has embraced them in His love. But where is He? He is a broken man. Now, who does that remind you of? All your waves and breakers have swept over me. Darkness. as my only companion. Eloi, Eloi, lama sabachthani. My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? For our Lord Jesus Christ, all the lights have gone out. There wasn't a pinprick in the cosmos. There wasn't a pinprick in the cosmos. to comfort him, to support him, to help him. There was no voice from the heavens to say, this is my beloved son, with him I'm well pleased. Darkness was his only companion. He is the prototypical man of faith. And that leads me, before we look more carefully at the psalm, to ask two questions. Are we to read the psalm and come to the conclusion that this hayman is a depressed believer? Well, perhaps, but I don't think so myself. I think, actually, here we have a man, a faithful believer, who is experiencing the cost of his gospel faithfulness. I don't think he's a depressed believer. I think he's a believer who is saying, Not understanding, like the 44th Psalm, for your sake, we are being given over to death all the day long. And in the 44th Psalm, if we had time to look, you will know it well, I'm sure, the psalmist there is saying, Lord, where are you? You went out with our fathers in the past. You delivered them, but where are you today? Our enemies have overwhelmed us. You've abandoned us. You've given up on us. For your sake, we're being given over to death all the day long. And Paul picks that up in Romans 8. It's as if the psalmist couldn't see at the time. Yes, it is for God's sake, not because you have sinned, not because you've been rebellious, that these calamities have come upon you. You're experiencing union, prototypical union with Jesus Christ in your sufferings. You're anticipating. by the work of the Spirit, the union with Christ that will bring God's people into suffering. You see, our Lord Jesus Christ's darkness was not the result of him sinning. It wasn't depression. So I don't think we're to read this Psalm as if, well, here is a depressed believer and look how low and depressed believers can get. Well, that's true. Christians do get depressed. Don't misunderstand me. There can be chemical imbalances as well as spiritual depression of all kinds. Yes, but I don't think that's what's going on here. And a second related question to it is, well, are we to understand that it's because this man has sinned? that all this calamity has come upon him, that God has withdrawn his presence from him because he has sinned and grieved God. Well, nowhere in the psalm is this suggested. Look at the life of Job. Was Job's calamities because he had sinned? Maybe later he adopted attitudes that were grieving to God, but his calamities were not because he had sinned. Derek Kidner in his very fine, if at times not perfect, commentary on the Psalms, very, very fine. writes, unrelieved suffering can be a believer's lot in the world. Unrelieved suffering can be a believer's lot without any explanation. Life can be a conundrum, a puzzle. We can be a conundrum and a puzzle to ourselves, never mind life. And we have to wait ultimately till the revelation of Jesus Christ, because here we know in part, then we shall know even as also we are known. Life can be bewildering. We see through a glass darkly. You see, the believing life is lived, if you like, at the intersection of two realities. We're going to get to the 88th Psalm in a minute, but this comes into my mind. The believing life is lived at this tension reality of 2 Corinthians 2, verse 14, is that we are always being led in Christ's triumphal procession. Always, moment by moment. There isn't one moment that a believer is not being swept up in the cosmic triumph of his Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ, as He makes captivity captive. We are always being led in His triumphal procession. But then two chapters later, 2 Corinthians 4.10, Paul says, we are always bearing about in the body the dying of the Lord Jesus. And you think, well, How am I to make sense of this? Is this sequential? Are there seasons when I'm being swept along in the triumph of Christ, and then that season is replaced by a season of bearing about in my body the dying of the Lord Jesus? No, it's not sequential. They're synchronous. They belong to the same existential moment. It's not because this man is depressed. It's not because he had sinned. He is living out in a fallen world the cost of being a faithful man of God. Well, let's look a little more carefully with that as the general background. Notice, first of all, that in his darkness he prayed. Now, this is very obvious, isn't it? But I want to underline the obvious. If you're anything like me, I need the Lord every day to underline to me the obvious. When I went to Cambridge in 1999, I thought for a short time, well, I better up my ministry. This is a city of intellectual renown, premier university in the world. I need to preach profound sermons. And I quickly realized, Ian, don't be so stupid. You need to preach the same way you always preached in the little semi-depressed mill town in New Mills in southwest Scotland. You need simply to remind people of who God is and what God has done. And we need to remember these basic simple things that, what does this man do in his extremity, in his bewilderment with God? He cries out to God. He doesn't let God go. He refuses, and you could imagine the temptation of the evil one, saying, give up on God, as he did with Job, through his wife. Give up on God! If God cared for you, an iota, you wouldn't be going through such extremities, such darkness. His darkness did not drive him from God, it drove him to God. It's as if he is saying right at the opening of his psalm, Lord, to whom else can I go? You alone have the words of eternal life. And of course, we see that perfectly in our Lord Jesus Christ, The darkness began to engulf his human soul, and as the preternatural darkness of nature became sacramental and symbolic of the spiritual darkness that was engulfing his soul as he became the sin-bearer of the world, his darkness did not drive him from God. It drove him to cry out to God. To whom else can we go? And then secondly, notice that he prayed to God as a man of faith. Oh Lord, God of my salvation. It was Martin Luther who said, the Christian life is built on personal pronouns. The Son of God loved me and gave himself for me. And here he says, O God of my salvation, his faith is battered, his faith is broken, but brothers and sisters, it's functioning. It's functioning. He prays to the God of his salvation. You know, there are times in the life of faith when all the lights seem to go out. And that's when, by God's grace, we have to say, I will live by faith and not by sight. I will live trusting God for who he is, though he slay me, yet will I trust him." That's easy to say when it's still but theoretical to you. But that's what we find here In the psalm, this believer is not excused the whys and the wherefores of life in a fallen world. Notice what he says in the second half of verse 14, O Lord, why do you cast my soul away? Why do you hide your face from me? There will come a day in the glory when the Lord will explain all to him and the Ezraite that this was the condition of our Lord Jesus Christ. My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? He had only ever known from times eternal the unsullied, unbroken, face-to-face fellowship with his Father. and in His holy humanity He had seen the heavens part, and a voice from the glory on more than one occasion say, this is my beloved Son, with Him I'm well pleased, but now there is no rending of the heavens, there's no voice from the glory, there's silence and there's darkness. but he says, my God, my God. Thirdly, notice in verse one and in verse nine, implied in verse one and explicitly in verse nine, that he prays every day. Let my prayer come before you. Incline your ear to my cry. Verse 9. Every day I call upon you, O Lord. I spread out my hands to you every day. He will not let God go. He will give God no rest. Why? Because to whom else can he go? To whom else can he go? And so he is relentless in his praying every day. And I think the idea is not just, you know, for a few moments in that day, but as it were, almost through the whole course of the day, his whole life expressed vocally or silently was laying hold of God. I will not let you go, Lord, till you bless. He prayed every day. He kept on praying. He persisted in praying. He refused to give up on prayer. Now, God is not deaf to the cries of His children. He's not a heartless Heavenly Father. He doesn't callously delight in seeing His children so bereft. He causes His children not one needless tear, not one needless tear. And one day we will unitedly say, Lord, You did all things well. Blessed be Your name. I couldn't fathom it. I couldn't fathom it then, but now I see no longer through a glass darkly, but face to face. And so until that time, the Lord is saying, keep praying, not because I'm deaf to your hearing, but because in your praying, I am molding you and conforming you into the likeness of my son, who through great cries and many tears, offered himself up to God. You see, the Holy Spirit has a great new covenant ministry. As I touched on it this morning, He comes to take the holy template of Christ's humanity that the Holy Spirit first etched on the humanity of Christ. And He comes to take that perfect holy humanity and overlay it upon us idiosyncratically. But how did our Lord Jesus Christ become the man He became? He learned obedience through the things he suffered. He found himself in the crucible of affliction. The fourth thing to notice in the psalm, and this is very broad brush, he recognizes that the Lord is the one ultimately behind everything that is happening to him. The Lord is behind everything. Verse 14, oh Lord, why do you cast my soul away? Verse 16, your wrath has swept over me. Your dreadful assaults destroy me. Earlier in verse six, you have put me in the depths of the pit, in the regions dark and deep. Verse eight, you have caused my companions to shun me. You have made me a horror to them. Now, this is part of the bewilderment of Haman the Israelite. The Lord is the God of his salvation. He understands the evil is not autonomous. That Satan, powerful though he be, can do not one iota beyond the decreed will, purpose, and ordination of the Heavenly Father. He's a creature under God's sovereign rule. And this is part of the bewilderment, I think, of life oftentimes. We are delighted to declare our faith in the unabridged sovereignty of God. And I think at times almost the Lord says, well, you confess it. Let me put it to the test and see where your confession lies. This is the bewilderment because we know that God's sovereignty isn't a naked, bare, clinical, cold-hearted, callous sovereignty. We know it's the sovereignty of love and of grace. We know it's the sovereignty of goodness because God is good, He does good, says the psalmist. But we cannot often perceive it because His ways are higher than our ways. We cannot see round a corner, never mind down the avenue of life. Sometimes I think we underestimate the sheer wonder that by God's almighty grace we've lasted another day. And we have not abandoned the faith. But He has kept us and held us. I think we take, let me speak for myself, I think far too likely the perseverance of the saints, the preservation of the people of God. It's a wonder of wonders. that at the end of another day when all hell has been seeking to capture us and turn us aside and bring dishonor to Jesus Christ through us, that at the end of another day we can rest our head on our pillows and say, blessed be God, that you have kept me through another day bruised, battered, bewildered. But yet, able to say, oh Lord, God of my salvation. Our time's hurrying on. So what are we to take to heart from this cry of near despair? Well, let me just mention four things briefly as I close. Number one, the Psalm witnesses to the possibility of a true believer experiencing unrelieved suffering in this life. The Lord Jesus Christ was called a man of sorrows, familiar with suffering. The whole course of his life from womb to tomb, and we are given selections. We are told only two things between birth and 12, and then there's the silence. Do you think that Satan was passive? Do you think the Lord of glory in our humanity easily walked through the fallenness of this world, despised and rejected by men, ignored by the creatures whose every breath He gave? Do you think that cost Him nothing? You find people today, I suppose, that in the health, wealth, prosperity movement, they would say, well, the psalmist, he needs to believe God. He needs to rise to a new level of faith. The man of God whose faith was perfect, whose obedience was perfect, was a man of sorrows who was familiar with suffering. And then secondly, the psalmist's groaning, for that's what it is, it's a perpetual groaning lament, reminds us that here we have no continuing city, that the final goal of the believer is not suffering but glory. Here we live in a veil of tears, Psalm 84. Here we experience the sufferings of this present time. And all the while, the Lord is saying, here you have no continuing city. I don't know if you're like me, but one of the things that I lament most days in my life is how easily I live out my days comfortably in this world, thinking little to my shame of the glory, the eternal city of God, that the blood and righteousness of Jesus Christ is prepared for me. And sometimes the Lord will unsettle us in different ways, because here we groan inwardly as we wait eagerly for our adoption, because we're not yet home. I think sometimes, you know, when Christians feel just deeply unsettled and find it hard to just concentrate, and they say, what's wrong with me? And you say, there's nothing wrong with you. There's something very right with you. And thirdly, we can see that like Job, Haman refuses to give up on God. He will not let God go. Then fourthly, the Psalm's heading and the opening verse tell us that his sense of God's rejection was actually only apparent and not real. In other words, living by faith can be sweet, but sometimes living by faith can be very hard. Maybe you don't find it that way. I do, and I'm comforted in reading the Word of God that many of God's servants did as well. So what can we take from this psalm as we leave? Well, above all this, that Christian believers have a companion who knows what it is to be consumed by darkness. See how it ends, my companions have become darkness. Ah, ah. There is a companion who knows darkness intimately, and who for a time was shrouded in impenetrable darkness. He knows what it is to be consumed by darkness. He knows our frame. He remembers that we are dust. And that's why, as I mentioned this morning, He is able to help us because He can sympathize with us. He can sympathize with us because he knows darkness from the inside. He doesn't know it by observation. He doesn't know it by the perfection of divine omniscience. He knows it by the experience of broken humanity. Are you here tonight and you feel your faith is weak and frail and fragile, or even worse than that, it's just lying in ruins at your feet? You look at yourself and you just wonder, can I last another day? Brothers and sisters, there is a companion at hand. who knows your frame and who is saying, come to me, all you who are weary and burdened. I'll give you the rest that you need. I'll help you get through the day. I'll help you last the course. I'll help you reach your final destination. You may be bruised and bloodied and battered. that all the trumpets will sound for you on the other side. Blessed be God, we have the 88th Psalm in Holy Scripture, because it's a psalm for people like us. Maybe you're thinking, well, I'm not in such a bad place as the psalmist. Maybe that's true today. Who knows about tomorrow? Thanks be to God. We have the multifacetedness of divine revelation that encourages the hearts of the most broken, needy, bewildered, enshrouded with darkness believers and says, be like Haman the Israelite. Cry out to the God of your salvation. He will never fail you. He will never forsake you. He would un-God himself if he did. May God bless to us His Word. While we sing as we conclude our service of worship, Trinity Hymnal 128, God Moves in an Exterious Way is wondrous to perform. But who did on this day I swear his blood-red silver are? He blesses those that Breathe in unfathomable wonders of never-ending still. He treasures all his pride, his heart, and works his song in ill. Be fearful, Saint Trench, for it's him the clouds bestow. are filled with mercy and shall break in blessings on the dead. For it's not the Lord by feeble sense, but trust him for his praise. Beyond the crowning providence, Her blisses through prime and past Unfolding every hour. The bond they have a bitter taste, But sweet will be the flower. God is his own interpreter, and he will make it plain.