Day Thirteen
Movement V — The Honest Floor
Springs
Open the Psalms to the laments and you will find a pattern so regular you can set your watch by it. The psalmist describes the trouble, sometimes at length and without decorum, and then somewhere near the end the poem turns. But I have trusted in thy mercy. But thou, O LORD, art a shield for me. The complaint runs its course and then the light comes in.
Psalm 88 does not turn.
It is the one lament in the book that runs from the first verse to the last without the light coming in. There is no but, no resolution, no closing note of confidence. The final line leaves the writer in the dark, and the psalm simply stops there.
And it is in the Bible. Somebody could have left it out, and nobody did.
O LORD God of my salvation, I have cried day and night before thee. Psalm 88:1, KJV
That is the first verse. Read it again knowing there is no turn coming, and notice what he calls God anyway.
If today is a hard day, this page is the one that has you in mind. Take it slowly, and know that tomorrow’s page is where the comfort comes and it comes with a face.
Today’s morsel
“I have cried day and night before thee.”
Say it as Heman said it — addressed, out loud, to Someone.
Wells
The heading says Maschil of Heman the Ezrahite — a wisdom psalm, from one of the wise men of Israel. This is not the cry of a man who had thought too little about God. It is the cry of a man whose profession was thinking about God.
Everything Movement IV built stands. Paul’s proportion is real: as the sufferings abound, so the comfort abounds. But we noticed the qualifier — the sufferings of Christ — and Psalm 88 is why the qualifier matters.
If depth of suffering automatically produced fullness of comfort, this psalm could not exist. A man went all the way down and did not come back up inside the poem. Any doctrine that requires the turn has to explain Psalm 88 away, and a doctrine that has to explain away Scripture is not yet finished being built.
So here is the honest floor of this volume, stated once and plainly: there are nights that do not resolve, and the Bible has one of them written down. A dark night is not evidence that you have failed at faith. It is evidence that you are somewhere the hymnbook has already been.
But look at what the psalm never abandons, because this is the whole thing.
Heman never stops addressing God. Not once. Every complaint in the psalm is aimed at a Person — before thee, unto thee, I have called daily upon thee. He has lost the consolation. He has not lost the address.
And that is the thread back to Movement III. Remember what happened to David’s grammar when the light failed: he became thou. Psalm 88 is that same second person held for eighteen verses with nothing given back. Faith here is not the feeling of being comforted. Faith here is that he is still talking to Him.
Which means that on the night when nothing lifts and the morsel tastes like nothing at all, saying it out loud is not a failed exercise. It is the whole of what Psalm 88 did.
Aquifer
Where honest readers disagree: does it really have no turn? Some argue the turn is present but relocated — that verse 1’s address, O LORD God of my salvation, is the confession of trust that other laments place at the end, moved to the front so the whole psalm is spoken from inside it. On that reading the psalm is not faithless but front-loaded. Others hold that the absence of a closing turn is deliberate and should not be softened. Both readings agree the psalm is addressed to God throughout, which is the load-bearing observation either way.
The two Ezrahites. Psalm 88 is Heman the Ezrahite’s and Psalm 89 is Ethan the Ezrahite’s — the only two psalms attributed to them, and they sit side by side. Both men are named in 1 Kings 4:31 among the wise whom Solomon surpassed. Worth reading 89 immediately after 88: the next voice in the book takes up the covenant faithfulness of God at length. The canon does not answer 88, but it does not leave it alone either.
On the superscription. The heading includes upon Mahalath Leannoth, an obscure musical or liturgical direction. Proposals connect mahalath with sickness and leannoth with singing or with affliction, giving something like “concerning sickness, for singing.” No one knows. It is listed here because commentaries state it confidently in several conflicting ways, and you should know the confidence is not earned.