In The Darkest Distress

Michael E. Wood

January 21, 2016

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 Sheol. 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 regions dark and deep. Your wrath lies heavy upon me, and you overwhelm me with all your waves. Selah Psalm 88:1-7

Spiritual depression is one of the most difficult realities for some to comprehend.  For believers who have never suffered in this manner, they are hard pressed to be of any use to those who suffer if they have never been brought to a place of understanding through personal experience or the pure revelation of God by His Spirit through the Psalmist as displayed in Psalm 88.  I would encourage you to read the Psalm in its entirety and consider the words of the “Prince of Preachers”, from his own personal experience.

 “…. God never placed a Joseph in a pit without drawing him up again to fill a throne: that He never caused a horror of great darkness to fall upon an Abraham without revealing His covenant to him; and never cast a Jonah into the deeps without preparing the means to land him safely on dry land.  Alas, when under deep depression the mind forgets all this, and is only conscious of its unutterable misery; the man sees the lion but not the honey in the carcass, he feels the thorns but he cannot smell the roses which adorn them. He who now feebly expounds these words knows within himself more than he would care or dare to tell of the abysses of inward anguish.  He has sailed round Cape of Storms, and has drifted along by the dreary headlands of despair. He has groaned out with one of old –“My bones are pierced in me in the night season; and my sinews take no rest I go mourning without sun.  Terrors are turned upon me; they pursue my soul as the wind.”  Those who know this bitterness by experience will sympathize, but from others it would be idle to expect pity, nor would their pity be worth the having if it could not be obtained.  It is an unspeakable consolation that our Lord Jesus knows this experience, right well, having, with the exception of sin of it, felt it all and more than all in Gethsemane when he was exceeding sorrowful even unto death.” 

C.H Spurgeon, The Treasury of David

No sensible sense of a comfort I feel

As my soul lies in torments by waves as they reel

Upward then plunging to depths never known

In the darkest distress of my spirit to groan.

Oh, when might I know Holy Father the gain

In the light of Your presence relief from this pain?

For when I look up I see only despair,

Then buried much deeper, I question Your care.

And yet I will call and will cry from my heart

While ignorance blinds me from knowing each part

You work with these trials as Your wisdom subdues

Every atom in place and the unseen reviews

Of soul searching time and again endless days

Awaiting the moment You break through the haze.

How long, with The Psalmist, Oh LORD, will I cry?

Yet to You I will to the day that I die!