Psalm 31:9-13 – “Yikes!”

As always, here’s my fairly literal translation of these verses:

⁹Be gracious to me, YHVH, because it has become distressed to me. My eye is wasted away in agitation, my soul and my belly [too], ¹⁰because my life is wrung out in grief and my years in groaning. My strength fails in my iniquity and my bones waste away. ¹¹From all of ones being my enemies I have become a scorn and to my neighbors especially and a terror to ones knowing me, ones seeing me, in outside they flee from me. ¹²I am forgotten like one dead, [gone] from the heart. I am like a perishing vessel, ¹³because I heard a slander of many: “Terror all around!” In their conspiring together against me, they plotted to take away my soul.

Yikes! What a catalog of misery!

I think one of the unfortunate misperceptions of Christianity is that if you’re a born again person, you won’t have to suffer – at least not much – that basically you’ll be “happy all the day” with maybe an occasional sort of difficulty from the Lord to help you grow. I remember one Christian young woman who got blasted with an unthinkable sorrow – she said to me, “I thought, if I served the Lord, things like this would never happen to me.”

What we all need to do is get our theology from the Bible – not from Christian songs or our litany of clichés. What would the Bible tell us? Look at the passage before us. This is David and look at the rest of the Psalm – this is a man who does trust God, who is sincerely living his faith. David was the “man after God’s own heart” and yet look how he suffered at the hands of Saul. Add to his story the suffering of Job – the “good and upright man.” Jeremiah wrote the book of Lamentations. We have Psalms like 6, 13, 22, 38, 88, and 102. Paul tells us he and his friends were “under great pressure, far beyond our ability to endure, so that we despaired even of life” (II Cor 1:8) and of course he had his “thorn in the flesh.” Beyond all of that, consider the sufferings of our Savior Himself, the “man of sorrows.”

The passage before us only reminds us what the rest of the Bible often warns us: “In this world you shall have trouble …”

I think I can say this and any thinking born-again person will agree, that actually this passage is all too familiar to my heart. Yes I have faith. Yes I love God. Yes I am thankful for so much blessing. But the fact is life is hard – and sometimes it is very hard – and there is a side of me even now that wants to chime in with David, “Be gracious to me, O Lord, for I am in trouble! My eyes grow weak with sorrow, my soul and body with grief.”

I could work my way down through David’s catalog of miseries but I think rather I’ll just make two observations. First, I notice that in these five short verses, David says “me” or “my” some twenty-one times. It is perfectly okay for him (or us) to do that as he is pouring out his heart to the Lord, but, that said, still, I’d like to suggest that when we turn our eyes inward, all we can really expect to find is our morass of sin and misery. It really should be no surprise when we’re stuck on “I, me, my” that all we find is gloom and despair. “I know that in me, that is in my flesh, dwells no good thing.”

But all of that leads to my second observation, that it simply is true that “our hope is in the Lord,” and that “the joy of the Lord is our strength.” Once again, there is never anything wrong with you or I pouring out our hearts full of misery to the Lord. He’s a big God. He can take it. “He knows our frame, that we are but dust.” But we will only find hope and strength as we turn our eyes to Him and do exactly what David will be doing in the very next verse, saying “But I trust in You, O Lord; I say, ‘You are my God.’”

What a blessing we have – that we can turn our eyes away from ourselves and our miseries and instead look to a heavenly Father. I rather suspect all human beings suffer one way or another pretty much continually. The difference for us believers is that we have a Rock, a “Shelter in the Time of Storm.” We can sing, “What a friend we have in Jesus, all our sins and griefs to bear; What a privilege to carry, everything to Him in prayer.”

Life is hard. Sometimes it is very hard.

I’m so thankful we have a God to trust!